Holy Saturday is no one’s favorite religious holiday. It lacks the darkness and the drama of a dying Savior. Nor is it bathed in light to celebrate a risen Lord. Its color is a liminal gray. But it’s where we are, all of us. It’s the season that we are in.

Holy Saturday is a very quiet day. When I was a boy, I was always outraged that so much could be going on in the world while Jesus was resting in his tomb. Today is different. Today, it’s as if the whole world—my world, at least—is observing a regimen of silence in honor of the Lord’s burial. In Wuhan and San Francisco and Atlanta and St. Louis the streets are empty, or at least less traveled. In the rural buffer where I live (a liminal space between a university and surrounding farmland), our road is quieter than usual. No one misses street noise, but it is spring, and I miss the music blasting through our campus, the sounds of laughter and the murmur of learned conversations from tables along the sidewalks.

A sparrow flutters through the window into a banquet hall filled with light, music, and feasting. Then, just as quickly, the bird flies away again into the darkness. The flight of the bird is our life—brief, dramatic, and framed by two immense darknesses. Where has it come from? From what primordial past? Where is it going? Into what unknowable future?

Among Christians, marking with ashes first occurred in the early Middle Ages as a sign of sorrow and repentance. Perhaps if we had lived then, with the Visigoths and the bubonic plague bearing down on us, when the slogan of the day was memento mori (“remember, you will die”) and a woman’s average life expectancy was 32 years, we too would have thought it was a splendid idea to show up at church once a year in sackcloth and ashes.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison comes under the category of “Books to Be Read on an Annual Basis”—like Augustine’s Confessions, King Lear, or anything by Flannery O’Connor. In general, we read too many books and return to too few. The critic John Ciardi coined the phrases “horizontal audience” and “vertical audience” to describe the reach of a novelist or a poet. It’s a big mistake to return again and again to a book that doesn’t probe the heart or expand the reader’s vision.

Thirty years ago I was browsing a secondhand book sale in the basement of the divinity school where I teach. There was a folding table covered with worn-out books, arranged in no order and at giveaway prices. I was drawn to a devotional book by the British author and preacher Leslie Weatherhead, whose books on faith and psychology had achieved enormous popularity in the decades after World War II. The book was called A Private House of Prayer, and it had a gold cross embossed on the cracked leather cover. The book is a liberal Protestant’s version of Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle. It is divided into seven rooms of devotion, each signifying a distinctive mode of prayer. It begins with affirming the presence of God in room 1 and ends with meditation in room 7 at the top of the house.

Undressing another person, or another person's body, is a slow and exquisite work. Whether it's a feeble parent who can't manage the buttons, a child for its bath or an expectant lover, undressing can be an act of love. When a Jew dies, a small group known as chevra kadisha prepares the body for burial. First the body is reverently undressed, and any wounds on it are carefully cleansed. Rings, bracelets and all jewelry are removed. The body is bathed and purified by water, then wrapped in a white sheet and perhaps a prayer cloth and tied with a sash secured by a sacred symbol. Now it is ready to meet the living God.

Preachers are like comedians. They are always looking for new material. If the recent spate of articles on preachers plagiarizing in their sermons is any indication, the production of the weekly sermon in the face of limited time and a challenged imagination has become the overriding issue for busy ministers.

According to new findings in the Pulpit & Pew National Clergy Survey, a solid majority of clergy is deeply satisfied with the pastoral ministry. Seven out of ten of those surveyed report they have never considered abandoning their vocation. In other words, most pastors claim to have found happiness in the ministry.

Forty years ago on a sweltering August day in Washington, the Baptist preacher and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the defining speech of his generation and the most famous oration of the 20th century. Writing in the New York Times the next day, James Reston promptly recognized King’s achievement and predicted, “It will be a long time before [Washington] forgets the melodious and melancholy voice of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. crying out his dreams to the multitude.”

The first week in my new parish brought a tumble of pastoral duties. Although I had yet to preach my first sermon or celebrate my first public Eucharist, I brought communion to one of my parishioners in the hospital. His name was Alfred Semanns and he was dying of complications resulting from admission to the dingiest American hospital I had ever seen, Prairieview General. Its only ward reminded me of a dorm I had slept in as a boy at summer camp. There were 12 beds, one nurse, and no private or semiprivate rooms.

Why is it so difficult to sit down at a computer and write a piece about the resurrection of Jesus from the dead? Is it because belief in the resurrection and dependence on technology are incompatible? In his famous essay "New Testament and Mythology," Rudolf Bultmann asked how modern people could possibly believe in miracles in the age of the "wireless." Which calls to mind Northrop Frye's comment that whenever an argument is prefaced by the word "modern," as in "modern psychology" or "modern science tells us," we can be sure that what follows will be about 100 years out-of-date.

"You can't be born again," I said, "you're a Lutheran. You are the chairman of the board of trustees." He was brimming with joy, but I was sulking. Why? Because spiritual renewal is wonderful as long as it occurs within acceptable, usually mainline, channels and does not threaten my understanding of God.

One of the disadvantages of being both a Lutheran and an academician is that you hear so few good conversion stories. The weight of my tradition identifies regeneration with the work of God in baptism. Those who tell their conversion stories with great gusto or whose spiritual c.v. runs on for pages (or hours) are automatically suspect in my denomination.

In 1932 my father met my mother by means of one of the great pick-up lines of the era. After a “young people’s” social at their Lutheran church, he followed her along the park on the near north side of St. Louis to the streetcar stop. When he caught up to her, he said with the savoir-faire of a Lutheran Cary Grant, “Say, do you go to movies during Lent?”