Alan E. Lewis on the prayers of Holy Saturday

“Is not all prayer designed for Easter Saturday, the product of confusion, emptiness, and grief? Prayer is desperation translated into daring — the risk of letting go of confidence, eloquence, and that ‘spirituality,’ so fashionable now but so seductive. To pray is to confess not the abundance but the exhaustion of one’s verbal, intellectual, and spiritual resources. It is surrender to one who prays for it is when we have no prayers left and can only do so when we acknowledge our own bankruptcy of spirit. The One who truly prays is the Spirit of the Father, whose unutterable cries, by their very nature, begin when we have ceased to speak; and the Spirit also of the Son, whose high-priestly intercessions depend upon our abject willingness to approach the Father not in our own proud name but exclusively in his. Prayer then, the sound of silence upon Easter Saturday and every day which reenacts it, is the last breath of our self-relinquishment, the freedom we give God at last to be God, gracious, holy, and creative, precisely in those crises where our bodies, intellects, and souls cry out in tears of anger and bewilderment that God is dead.

However, because God lives, in and beyond God’s death, present in the absence, praying and responding in the silence, the Easter Saturday story which leaves us mute is also our empowerment for utterance and prayer. The extraordinary mystery of faith, that it is God who lies buried in the grave, may drive us to despair; but at the same time it frees us for doxology, since buried there in death is love incarnate, with power to conquer death and summon forth what is, out of what is not. Again, what is there left to do but pray if the story of God’s death and burial be true? How else can we respond to the actuality of such impossibilities as life beyond annihilation and the justifying of the godless? Prayer is astonishment translated into adoration — the risk of letting go of caution, inhibition, doubt, for the spontaneity of thankfulness and awe before God’s ontological surplus and surprise.”