Holy Saturday People: We Stayed Anyway
On Holy Saturday, suffering, and staying with a God I cannot explain
I love Lent and Easter.
For years, I mocked it. Sent the zombie memes, made the jokes, exiled on the outside, looking in. But then, in 2022, something shifted. I felt this burning desire to read the Bible.
Isn’t that strange? I have two advanced degrees in religion and philosophy. I’ve read every major religious text from every religion in the world. Upanishads? I can quote it. Bhagavad Gita? What do you want to know? Tibetan Book of the Dead? Let me tell you about the passage that made me quit my job and move back home to Phoenix. Tao te Ching? I can spend hours talking about the Way. But do you know that I’ve not read the Bible, in its entirety, since I graduated from Mormon Seminary in 1995?
I mean, I’ve read excerpts. It should be no surprise that I love Job and Ecclesiastes. From time to time, I’d crack open Psalms to chase down a fragment of one I remembered. I avoided the New Testament with everything in me. For some reason, I could talk about the God of the Old Testament, but the God of the New Testament seemed inaccessible to me.
“I don’t give a good g-damn about the Bible,” I’d say, wave my hand, posturing, confident in my certainty.
Listen, if someone says they don’t care about something enough times, it probably means they do. Intervene if you can.
I did the only thing I knew to do. I went to the Mormon church’s website, and I ordered a Quad. (If you don’t know what that is, you can check it out here.) It’s what I had as a kid, gifted to me on my eighth birthday and baptism day. When I was excommunicated, I threw it in a fire pit, rage, humiliation, and rejection raw. If God rejected me, fine, didn’t need him, I would burn his words.
When my new Quad arrived, I sat it in my lap, hand on it, and cried. I had this sense that whatever was happening was not something I could stop. I had not known how much the loss had devastated me.
Unfortunately, the font was too small for me to read and the book was too heavy for me to hold. I had not factored in middle age and RA.
I downloaded The Bible Project app and made the font gigantic and read it on my iPad mini. (GenX survival font. Give me God, but with wifi and a tablet.)
I started in Genesis, as one should, and read every word through 2022–2023. Then, I started over in 2024 and finished again in October 2025.
When I first read through it, I thought, is this the Bible or Game of Thrones? Listen, it’s pretty brutal there. There were passages that punctured my chest. (Have you read Judges 19? It’s ancient Epstein files evil.) I’d have to set it down, walk away, outside, see the sun, remember the light. It wasn’t until my second trip through that I understood the deeper layer and how it translated to my modern life.
I can summarize it for you, because it’s been my primary complaint about God for years.
The fundamental problem with Earth is that things have to die for others to live. It is not enough that good sometimes balances evil, because evil should not exist at all. Some lives matter more than others, and they should not. Being caught between the living and the dead, as conscious creatures, aware of our mortality, is cruel, unforgiving, and made worse by our worst traits, like greed, envy, and lust. Some days, I think there may actually be a war between darkness and light, and the entire story of human civilization is proof of it.
From the macro to the micro, Earth is fallen. It’s a consistent theme in world origin myths. In Hopi tradition, the Coyote, the trickster, bursts into the Spider Woman’s hogan where they are weaving the rug of creation. He grabs the corners and shakes it, sending everything into chaos and confusion. In Greek myth, Pandora’s box is opened and toil, disease, suffering, and death are unleashed. In Norse myth, creation is built on a corpse because creation itself is violent consumption. In Rig Veda, the cosmic being Purusha is sacrificed, and the world is formed by breaking something whole. In Buddhism, the problem is just built in. To exist is to suffer.
Genesis’ curse, the bitten apple. Paul called it creation groaning. I didn’t know I agreed with them.
Within the sprawling, magnificent, hyperlinked Bible are warnings and solace spoken by saints and prophets who saw the madness and cried out, trying to get anyone to listen.
“It should not be like this. This is wrong. But it is what it is, so let me console you, or warn you, or try to hold you accountable.”
If Ezekiel had an X account, he’d post 150 times a day and no one would engage him. Isaiah would get shadow banned, people would mock his poetry, and then he’d be arrested for public nudity. Ruth would get on TikTok live to tell her amazing love story and be dragged for using her mother-in-law and taking advantage of Boaz. Paul would have a podcast that offended the right and the left.
As the teacher says in Ecclesiastes 1:9:
“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
And Genesis, where it all began, tells us the score plainly, but like most things, we miss it.
When humans were exiled from the Garden of Eden, God didn’t say, “Get out because you’re evil.” God said, “You have to leave now because you possess the divine attribute of moral consciousness without immortality. It’s going to suck. I tried to tell you. You crossed a boundary and now there are consequences. Here, let me give you some clothes before I bolt the door behind you. Don’t mind the angels with the flaming swords.”
“By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you will return.” (Genesis 3:19 NIV)
Brings us right back to the beginning of Lent, doesn’t it?
And with it, the quiet recognition that something is wrong. Every road with me leads back to Simone Weil (Gravity & Grace):
Our life is impossibility, absurdity. Everything we want contradicts the conditions or the consequences attached to it, every affirmation we put forward involves a contradictory affirmation, all our feelings are mixed up with the opposites. It is because we are a contradiction, being creatures, being God and infinitely other than God. Human life is impossible. But it is only affliction which makes us feel this.
But this is what I was missing, all those years. In Christianity, God descends into this darkness and lets it kill him, which is either the most absurd theological claim ever made or the only one that doesn’t feel like gaslighting. It’s so bizarre, honestly, it breaks the frame we thought we were living in.
This drops us into Holy Week, coming up soon. Where Jesus fulfills the prophecies of my favorite iconoclast Isaiah, enters Jerusalem through the east gate, with the other sacrificial lambs, tips over tables, rebukes authoritarian religious leaders, hosts the Last Supper, gives the final commandment, “You should love one another as I have loved you,” allows himself to be crucified, and then returns.
Easter morning sunrise has its own feel. The sun rising after the dark, new life in spring, promise of summer.
I can’t always get there theologically, but I’m trusting the journey. My faith tends to be rooted in Holy Saturday, where Jesus has died, darkness has fallen, and he has not returned yet.
Mary Magdalene, my favorite disciple, sits, eyes on the tomb, waiting. I can only imagine she had no idea what to expect. Her teacher and friend has been brutally murdered by the state. The other disciples have fled. She doesn’t know how the story ends. It’s just that staying is more honest than leaving, and so fearlessly, she waits in the void, between affliction and hope.
In 2009, I was doing hospice volunteer work, and met Peg, a patient with terminal brain cancer. Her story stuck with me, and I didn’t realize she was living in Holy Saturday at the time.
Her mind fluttered from a memory about working in a jam factory in Ireland at the age of sixteen, to moving to America and marrying her husband the night she met him in 1946, to the death of her son. She told me these three stories, again and again.
Laughing, she told me her boss at the jam factory loved women and was loved by women — but not by her. Her job was to taste the jam as it cooked, and if it didn’t taste right, tell them to throw it out. She loved this power over her boss — she had the ability to throw out huge barrels of jam if it didn’t meet her taste bud’s satisfaction.
She told the story about her husband, the night she met him while on a date with another man, and how, at the age of nineteen, she left her family, her country, and moved to America, the wife of an American soldier. They would have two children — a boy and a girl.
The final story was of her son’s death. He had “gotten AIDS in the 1980’s, before anyone really knew what it was.” Her husband, she said, didn’t want him near either of them. But he was so sick, and she had insisted and defied her husband, moving him into their house. She hadn’t cared that he was gay, only that he was her son. She told me this with defiance. She cared for him and nursed him, and one day she came home to find him dead in his bed.
It was here that she paused, the same way, each time, and said:
God always knows what God is doing, but this is the only thing I had a hard time with. I’ve always had a hard time with this. Nothing else in my life made me wonder what God was doing, but when I saw my son lying in bed… I just couldn’t understand what God was doing.
She’d stare forward, her eyes unblinking, and rub her hands together. She’d look back at me and say:
“This is the only thing I have a hard time with, in my whole life. But God has to know what God is doing. God has to know.”
Peg, in the last days of her life, was haunted by her son’s death. When she spoke of him, her posture changed. Her eyes cast downward. Her shoulders tensed. She wrestled with these thoughts for years. This was not a loss she could reconcile. This loss pulverized her soul. It was not just grief reflected in her face. Her eyes revealed a soul who had lost not only her son, but since that loss, struggled not to lose her faith. Peg felt affliction. She could not reconcile God — and refused to let go anyway.
She died in early August 2009.
She still didn’t know what God was doing — and neither do I. But we both stayed as long as we could anyway.
He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. (Isaiah 53:3–4 NIV)