“Ours is the long day’s journey of the Saturday,” George Steiner wrote in Real Presences. “Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand and the dream of liberation, of rebirth on the other.”
Saturday is where we live. It’s the space between death and resurrection, destruction and reconstruction, fear and love, grief and joy, the already and the not yet.
Saturday is the waiting room.
COVID-19 has put all of us in an especially traumatic waiting room. Perhaps the hardest part of the “stay at home” quarantine is how open-ended it is. Will it be weeks before we can go out in public again? Months? No one knows. And the limbo is painful.
When will we be able to go to eat samples at Trader Joes and Costco again? Plan vacations again? Go back to our churches? To weddings, funerals, birthday parties, or dinner parties again?
When will the empty playgrounds be full of laughter again, the empty baseball stadiums full of fans, the empty highways full of traffic, and the empty toilet paper shelves at Target fully stocked again?
When will the great freeze of 2020 thaw? When will “canceled” give way to “rescheduled”? When will the curve flatten and then, at last, decline? When can we be closer than six feet away from each other again?
We wait.
It’s excruciating, especially because the end is not yet in sight. But we believe there is rebirth on the other side of this long Saturday. A great reopening, rebuilding, reunion, resurrection. When will it come?
No one knows. But it will be worth the wait.