At the Still Point of the Turning World: Living Holy Saturday With Our Lady

Michie · Mar 30, 2024

COMMENTARY: From Mary we can learn to calmly place ourselves beside the tomb, praying in trust of God and waiting for the Resurrection. She teaches us how to embrace God’s will for us again and again in the stillness of our hearts.

I climb alone into the car and start the engine. I am standing in the line at the grocery store — alone among strangers. Those five minutes of being early — nothing to do and no one to talk to. Standing before the stove. Weeding the garden. Vacuuming the rugs. Washing the dishes. Beside the child doing homework. Waiting for the meeting to start. Going for a run. Taking a walk. Waiting on hold; waiting for a text; waiting for an email; waiting for a ride.

“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement” (Burnt Norton, II., 62-64).

T.S. Eliot’s words from the Four Quartets can be applied to all of our daily mundane moments: Our lives are “the dance” and the still point is those present moments. No matter how busy we are, there is the still point — that quiet that hits us — and we shrink from the “growing terror of nothing to think about” (East Coker, III.,121). We try to fill those moments: with noise, talk, to-do lists, anxieties. The truth is we are not sure what to do with the quiet within ourselves.

The quiet that we so avoid is the same quiet as Holy Saturday: of waiting for Jesus to come back, to make all things well. For all of us, this life is like an extended Holy Saturday — and it is often a long, hard struggle. We avoid the dullness perhaps because it is hard to face the truth that we are the reason that Holy Saturday happened in the first place.

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