Silent Saturday

The Body Keeps The Score.

Surgery behind me. Chemo ahead.

This is my Saturday. Not death, but not yet new life either.

Years ago, I wrote about a book entitled, Listening for God: A Minister’s Journey through Silence and Doubt—about the waxing and waning of faith, about listening for God even when God seems silent. Today, I understand that listening differently.

Listening In A Woman’s Body

What did I know then of this kind of quiet—juggling marriage and raising a child, teaching at a seminary, an intense speaking schedule, assisting at my local church,

Photo by Shakib Uzzaman on Unsplash

always stretched, never enough time to pray the way I thought prayer was supposed to look? That was the listening I knew. Listening in a woman’s body: snatched, on the run, in between obligations, in between hot flashes and perimenopause, the stress of deadlines, the demand to perform at maximum level for every assignment. Even then, it was the body that set the terms.

The body keeps the score. It remembers what has been done to it, what it has endured, what it cannot yet make sense of.

Silent Saturday is not empty. It is full of questions, full of waiting, full of a body that has been through something and a future that has not yet declared itself. We are so eager to get to resurrection that we skip over the silence. But Silent Saturday is sacred too. It is the day that teaches us not to rush healing, not to force meaning, not to pretend we already know how this story ends.

Sacred does not mean holy. I will not call this suffering holy. I will call it what it is: a body passing through something it did not choose

What We Have Forgotten About the Body and Death

Silent Saturday brings us back to the body—not doctrine, not triumph, but a body: broken, stilled, beginning to yield to time. Many years ago I read Sherwin B. Nuland’s How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter, and it has never left me. What made it singular was his refusal to let death be prettified. He was a surgeon, and he wrote about death the way someone writes who has held it in their hands—the clotting, the systems failing, the body’s terrible and ordinary work of shutting down. He wanted to give people back the truth that had been taken from them by a medical culture that turned dying into a managed, mystified process somewhere behind closed doors.

We have been robbed of death as a human experience. Our great-grandparents knew what death looked like because they had to tend to the dying and the dead at home—the smells, the mess, the body’s slow surrender—before hospitals and modern medicine moved it out of sight. We don’t. Accepting death as part of life, that is the easier philosophical move. The Stoics managed it. Most religious traditions make room for it. But the way we die, the indignity of it sometimes, the loss of control, the body that no longer cooperates.

Jesus is not yet risen. He is a body laid somewhere—cooling, quiet, acquainted with sorrow and now with stillness. And still, there is something here. Not meaning. Not yet. But presence.

It’s the gap between the self we have inhabited, scholar, reverend doctor, author, teacher, and what illness does to a body. That gap is where the real wrestling happens. Chemo will not be pretty . It is the body being asked to endure something brutal in the hope of something better.

Saturday does not resolve death. It sits with it. It lets the body be a body.

Photo by Vero Manrique on Unsplash

“This is my body,” Jesus said and I am only now beginning to hear the resistance in it. Not an invitation to glorify suffering, but a refusal to let empire—or theology—tell us what our pain, suffering, and trauma mean.

And perhaps this, too, is a kind of Saturday. The body held in the long silence between what has been done to it and what it is being asked to endure.

Surgery behind me. Chemo ahead. This is my Saturday—