How Can We Mark Palm Sunday When it Feels Like Holy Saturday? by John Zmirak

We’re still living through what feels to us like the longest Lent in history. The worst kinds of fasting and abstinence have been forced upon all of us, as the price of saving lives: We’re cut off from friends and family. We cannot visit our neighbors, unless we’re masked like surgeons.

The law has shuttered restaurants and bars, except for the forlorn take-out windows where desperate business-owners try to salvage their livelihoods. (I hope you’re supporting your favorite places this way, if you can. I’m ordering five nights a week and tipping 33%.) There might be a place where “everybody knows your name,” like TV’s Cheers, but you can’t go in there. You’ll have to subsist on emails, phone calls, Skype sessions, and Zoom sessions with colleagues.

Our churches are dark and silent, as they are on Holy Saturday morning, when Jesus lay like Lazarus in the grave, the apostles despairing and scattered. That was the blackest Sabbath in the history of the world. Even for John and Mary, whose consciences were clean. They’d stayed with Him to the end at the foot of the cross. But they surely must have wondered when and how Jesus’ promises would be fulfilled. ….

Read more here:  stream.org/how-can-we-mark-palm-sunday-when-it-feels-like-holy-saturday/