A Reflection for Holy Saturday
Rome is a holy city, and it is a noisy and dirty one, too. If you are not shoulder to shoulder with other tourists and pilgrims and tour buses, you are often navigating the most beautiful alleyway you’ve ever seen, an alleyway also covered in Italian graffiti and littered with cigarette butts. Or you are taking in the Sistine Chapel and a guard screams at the gathered crowd, “NO PHOTO!” The town contains multitudes: saints and sinners, popes and emperors, sacred and profane. “Go thou to Rome,” Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in his elegy to John Keats, “At once the Paradise, The grave, the city and the wilderness.”
Among the wilderness, there are places for contemplation, if one knows where to look: park benches, lonely taverne, C-list baroque churches bereft of any Carravaggios or Berninis. In search of a place, Shelley wrote,
the spirit of the spot shall lead
Thy footsteps to a slope of green access
Where, like an infant’s smile, over the dead
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread;
He is describing what is today called the Non-Catholic Cemetery for Foreigners in Testaccio, Rome. I fell in love with it while studying Keats in college. Both Keats and Shelley are there laid to rest, along with some other notable artists, communists, diplomats and others who were not allowed to be buried in consecrated ground. Oscar Wilde, after visiting the grave of Keats, called it “the holiest place in Rome.”
If it is not the holiest place, it might be the loveliest. Once you pass through its surrounding walls, you are met with a sea of stone and green and silence. Most contemporary cemeteries are plotted out neatly and landscaped only with zero-turn mowers and weed wackers. Flowers, if they adorn any graves, are usually severed from their roots and brought by families of the deceased. But the Non-Catholic Cemetery much more resembles a well-kept garden that happens to host a score of tombs.
They buried Jesus in a garden. There are no Mass readings for Holy Saturday. The church waits in stillness and silence until the fires of the Easter Vigil are lit later tonight. The great commotion and anguish and trauma of the previous day has come to a close. Mary Magdalene famously found the tomb empty on the third day, mistaking Jesus for a gardener, but I like to imagine that she visited the day in between Jesus’ death and resurrection as well. In the midst of our preparations for Easter, it is worth spending some time with her there.
If we cannot visit a garden or cemetery today, perhaps we can pray with the image of one.
It is morning. It is early in Spring. The grass and daffodils (for they are the only thing to bloom) are still wet from the dewfall; and the walking paths among the grave markers wind like a labyrinth; and there is a new tomb, hewn from rock or dug from soil (your choice). The buds from bushes and flowers are beginning to break and bloom is coming. But not yet. We stop to pray and wait. There is death and new life all around and our grief is a lump in our throat but in our heart there is a faint hope, a longing: This is not the end.
