Perhaps the most overlooked day in the Christian calendar is Holy Saturday. It is the lull between the intense focus on the end of Jesus’ ministry on Maundy Thursday, his death on Good Friday, and the celebration of his resurrection on Easter Sunday.

What transpired in that dark, sealed tomb between Good Friday and Easter? Was it something like how a caterpillar transforms and emerges as a butterfly? How did it take place so quickly? What does resurrection involve? Some early church fathers suggest that on Holy Saturday Jesus “descended into hell” (Apostles’ Creed) in order to release all those who populated it. But who really knows? Whatever happened, it transformed a corpse into a source of Light and Life that is still radiating, centuries later.

Art creation: From death to life
The passage from death to new life is always a mysterious one, and the process of rebirth and renewal unfolds differently for different people. One great source of rebirth for many people is art. By art, I mean both the completed work and the act of making it. A moving theatrical production, a stirring dance, or a beautiful bit of folded paper may turn around an entire life for the person who is touched by it. And sometimes it is not the beauty of a work, but the grim reality of a photograph of a dead soldier or the raw torment of twisted metal eyes on a carved mask that call us to a new direction, a new way of thinking. Art isn’t always beautiful. It may not always be comprehensible. But it very well may be a tangible sign of an inexplicable rebirth.

Hurricane Katrina and rebirth through images
After the devastation of the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, thousands of disaster relief and human service workers rushed to help. Urgent needs such as housing, food, medical assistance, and safety had to be addressed immediately. But the trauma of the hurricane and its aftereffects was not over by the time the emergency workers and recovery groups pulled out. The labor pains of rebirth continue even now, all along the Gulf Coast, as well as among those who evacuated to other places and continue to suffer. John’s Gospel assures us that “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1:5), but for many who lived through Hurricane Katrina or other disasters, it’s still pretty dark. How long does Holy Saturday last before Easter morning finally arrives? How do you tell time in a tomb?

Though everyone in New Orleans seems to be dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), long-term effects of the storm are particularly noticeable among children. Among the many other light-bearers in the darkness of post-Katrina New Orleans were art therapists. A team of these healers and other volunteers and teachers worked in a FEMA trailer park called Renaissance Village. The art therapists noticed a common theme in the drawings of displaced children: a profusion of triangles.

Among the most fundamental figures in most children’s art is a house, a symbol of security and stability. These children did not draw houses. Whether or not their own homes had been destroyed, many of the displaced children began replacing the common triangle-plus-square image of a house with only a triangular roof. Other recurring images in children’s art included alligators, dead bodies, rolling water, and black skies covering everything. One child who had drawn a swimming pool filled with black squiggly lines was asked, “Who is in the pool?” She answered, “Snakes” ("Using Crayons to Exorcise Katrina" by Shaila Dewan in The New York Times, September 17, 2007).

Drawing the sun again
How does anyone so wounded recover from the sense that death is everywhere? What possible light can shine in such darkness? When pain is so deep that it is inexpressible in words, how can new life take root and grow?

Art therapists who work with children encourage them to physically capture and put their fears outside of themselves — on paper, in clay, in building blocks and other materials. That way the children can manipulate, control, change, and overpower their fear. They can begin to imagine that there is, perhaps, a life raft in the swimming pool, as well as the snakes. Also beyond the tumultuous flood waters, there might also be a bridge or a road to safety. Slowly, children who are cared for and supported in this way begin to include the sun in their pictures.

Adult survivors, too, incorporate humor and hope into the remnants of their lives through art. As with many aspects of New Orleans life, survival and rebirth comes out in bright colors and spicy audacity. Months after the storm, New Orleans hosted its traditional Mardi Gras festival, a testimony to joy and fun and playfulness even in the rubble.

Language of symbols
One of the less obvious but still powerful symbols of resurrection in New Orleans is the emblem embossed on the city’s old manhole covers. The Sewerage & Water Board’s logo of a crescent moon and stars appears on everything from welcome mats to jewelry. During the storm, as the sewers began to overflow, these heavy manhole covers floated down the middle of the streets. People grabbed them to keep as souvenirs. I asked a resident why anyone would keep a symbol of their city’s failed infrastructure, and she told me that holding onto a piece of the city streets showed that she had survived when the very ground under her crumbled.

Must we survive a flood or a storm to find resurrection? Must the ground slip out from under us? What about all the other sorts of loss and grief that kill our spirits and break our hearts? Is there light in the darkness for this kind of suffering, too? Can art heal a shattered economy, a victim of domestic violence, the death of a dream? Can we be cured of a wound that no one else knows is there?

Oh, yes. Resurrection happens regularly through art all over the world. As surely as little green sprouts come up out of once-frozen fields in Iowa, life can begin again. For me, the belief that art can be an instrument of rebirth is a reason to keep returning to a little place in the Cascade Mountains called the Grunewald Guild.

The Grunewald Guild: A place of light and life
Since 1980, a community of aspiring and accomplished artists has gathered in Leavenworth, Wash., to explore the relationships between faith and art. Though classes and retreats are offered year round, the busiest time is the summer, when more than 30 different classes in a wide variety of media take place. Classes are a week long and conclude at worship on Sunday, when everyone shares the fruit of their labors.

Sunday morning worship services at the Grunewald Guild are nothing like worship anywhere else. The longest part of the service each week is the highly anticipated offering. It is different every week, because the congregation is different every week. Sometimes the altar area is piled with paintings, mosaics, vessels made from clay. But just as often, the gifts placed on or near the altar are fragments of broken or ruined projects — a shard of glass, a tangle of thread, an ink-stained piece of paper. This is because the point of taking a class at the Guild is not the finished object. The point is to encounter the spark of the Divine in us that yearns to create as we have been created. Sometimes a work of art explodes in a kiln, or snarls up on a loom. But God is in those moments too. God calls to us through the textures and colors and smells and sounds of making something.

Sometimes the new life doesn’t come to an individual working on a project, but to a group. In the weeks after the events of September 11, 2001, and the bombing of Afghanistan, the Guild opened its doors to the community. It became a place to grieve together, to wonder together. The gathering of heavy hearts diminished the darkness with shared sorrow and connection. People came with their knitting, their wood-carving tools, their crayons. Together, they made art. What for? Because the opposite of destruction is creation. Instinctively we cling to the possibility that the opposite of the nonsense of war is the nonsense of beauty. Christians believe that Good Friday is always followed by Easter Sunday. But sometimes Holy Saturday goes on awhile in between. During that time, it is good to be together, expecting light while still in the darkness.

Faith Project
Sometimes a group can even roll away the stone from the tomb and actively participate in the change from death to life. When I began seminary in California, the congregation I worshiped with gathered each Sunday in a rented hall. They had moved out of their old building, which had been condemned, and were awaiting the completion of their new facility. The congregation and its pastor had been intentional about the new building, and it was worth waiting for. It was designed to reflect God as our Beautiful Savior, using environmentally responsible building materials and practices, and employing skilled artists in the architectural plans, liturgical elements, and décor. Richard Caemmerer, a founder of the Grunewald Guild, and Joe Hester, a master stained glass artist, designed the stained glass windows.

The design was abstract, but elements of the Northern California landscape, such as its golden hills and the waters of Walnut Creek, were evident in the shapes and shades of the pieces. Instead of building the windows in their workshop in Washington and sending them down to California, Joe and Richard came to Cali-fornia with all their materials and helped the congregation make its own windows. Young and old, skilled and unskilled, the members of Peace Lutheran Church  labored together to birth a new home, a new setting, a new way of seeing, a new life.

Cuts and curses were common in the workrooms in those days, but eventually, the windows were finished and installed. I can still point out the section I worked on. I feel a sense of ownership in that congregation that I’ve never felt anywhere else. The art of making art is that it knits together all the hearts, minds, and souls of its creators. Years later, when I was ready to be ordained, I chose to have the service in that church building, in part because some part of me was always going to be there. I was shaped as a pastor not just by the bodies and souls who lived and breathed the gospel there, but by the testimony of glass and stone.

The mystery and glory of Holy Saturday is that something life-giving and mysterious happens when God takes the dry bones of our lives and breathes life into us again. We may not know it is happening or how or when it will end. But God is at work in the darkness behind that rolled-away stone, of that we can be sure. And when all is said and done, we know that sunlight will come streaming through the bright windows made of broken glass. That is simply how God works.

The Rev. Susan Schneider presently serves as the interim pastor of United in Faith Lutheran Church in Chicago, Ill. She is an appreciator and sometimes creator of art and believes absolutely that God has resurrected her through art more than once.

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