It is Saturday
Between Friday and Sunday,
between crucifixion and rising,
in this dangerous, trembling middle—
this Saturday of cosmic desperation—
a voice—quiet, marrow-deep—
persists: I am here.

I am folded into the torn flesh of God,
cruciform in a world unraveling,
where tanks grind cities to dust,
where faith becomes an impossible hope,

Where believers mud-caked,
recite half-remembered psalms
in Kyiv's frozen trenches,
words cracking
like the ground
that receives them.

Where a Sudanese mother's empty breast
knows more of God than my theology.
Where refugee children sketch shelters
with colours bright as the blood they've seen.

Where we make battlefields of dinner tables,
families divided by algorithms on their phones
each word a border wall, each search
a weapon.

The gospel fractured into tribal shards
we clutch until our palms bleed with righteousness.
Here too in our manicured gardens of rage,
our sanctuaries of certainty—
where we crucify Christ again
with the nails of our knowing.
The same torn flesh,
the same Saturday silence
stretching between us
like a wound that won't close.

My throat thickens with salt as I write these words,
not because I understand—I do not—
but because for one brief, shimmering moment I glimpse:
the Spirit hovers still over our chaos,
as over ancient waters—
not above, but within this fracturing world,
within the Godhead's own dark Saturday,
the bond of love, the breath,
that holds Father and forsaken Son together
in this desolation, this waiting,
the love that holds all being
a voice—quiet, marrow-deep—
persists: I am here.

This love won't respect our borders,
our certainties, our desperation to know.
It persists in the silence between heartbeats,
in the pause between bombs.

For only in unraveling
do we find
what remains
when everything else
is gone.

I find you
there—in Saturday's
blank stare

——

We are stretched thin—across what, exactly? The abyss of our age, but also the taut, trembling Saturday between what was crucified and what might, impossibly, be resurrected. It is not Friday’s clean, surgical grief, nor Sunday’s fuzzy hope, but that raw, marrow-deep middle where bone grinds bone, and the world holds its breath, waiting for a voice that may never come.

Between Friday and Sunday,
between crucifixion and rising,
in this dangerous, trembling middle—
this Saturday of cosmic desperation—
a voice—quiet, marrow-deep—
persists: I am here.

The new occupant of the White House—his policies erratic, his rhetoric a kind of fever—amplifies the world’s tremor. Each utterance, each reversal, a stone dropped into the already-rippling pool of global anxiety. We are left in a state of precarious suspension, as if the air itself had become a wire, and we the tightrope walkers, arms outstretched, unsure if there is ground beneath the fog.

But it is not only America’s unpredictable pulse that frays the fabric of the present. In Beijing, Xi Jinping faces a year that threatens to expose the hollowness beneath the empire’s careful choreography. Economic stagnation, a shrinking populace, a crisis of confidence—he turns inward, doubling down on discipline, silencing dissent, and, when that fails, turns outward: chaos as currency, distraction as doctrine.

And in Moscow, Vladimir Putin dreams his old imperial dream. For him, Ukraine is not a place but a principle: the first act in a drama meant to unmake the world that rose from Cold War ashes. He seeks to roll back NATO, to divide continent from continent, to join with China and other uneasy partners in a “multipolar” world where American primacy is blunted and Russia, battered and unbowed, stands restored. His campaign is not only waged with tanks and missiles, but with the slow poison of disinformation, the invocation of “traditional values,” the careful cultivation of alliances in the restless Global South.

So the world remains suspended, a dangerous, trembling middle.

The ambitions and anxieties of Xi and Putin, entwined with the unpredictable fever of American leadership, have transformed the global stage into a landscape of brinkmanship, fragile alliances, unresolved crises. Here, in the raw middle—where the old order is neither fully crucified nor yet resurrected—the politics of the godforsaken middle grind on: bone against bone, hope against fear, and faith, if it exists at all, flickering at the edge of vision, a coal beneath the ice, a silence that is not quite empty.

Holy Saturday is not a metaphor, but a lived reality—the trembling of the disciples as Roman seals hardened on the tomb, the way South Korea's parliament now bars its doors against presidential stormtroopers. Liminality has become our common language. In Chad, eighteen civilians bleed out in the dust while generals declare "foiled attacks". We've perfected the art of suspension: 12 million Sudanese displaced, 45,000 Ukrainians dead, families estranged over dinner-table debates of ideology. In South Africa, the Government of National Unity teeters on the brink of collapse. Malema sings "kill the farmer, kill the boer," not calling for violence against Afrikaners, "yet," he says. Some Afrikaners, unwilling to wait and see, have already lined up at the American embassy.

I am folded into the torn flesh of God,
cruciform in a world unraveling,
where tanks grind cities to dust,
where faith becomes an impossible hope.

Where believers mud-caked,
recite half-remembered psalms
in Kyiv's frozen trenches,
words cracking like the ground that receives them.

In Mariupol’s cellars in the Ukraine, believers last year chanted Psalms through concrete dust. Now Kyiv’s soldiers mutter half-remembered verses between artillery barrages. Psalm 88 claws at the dark—“darkness my closest friend”—but the poem insists “a voice—quiet, marrow-deep—persists: I am here.” Marrow-deep. Not in spite of the dark, but within it.

Where a Sudanese mother's empty breast
knows more of God than my theology.
Where refugee children sketch shelters
with colours bright as the blood they've seen.

And I literally mean my theology. Famine tightens its grip on Darfur, leaving infants to suckle at the dust. Meanwhile, Trump threatens to “take Gaza” while Netanyahu’s tanks churn children into statistics. We theologise over lattes as mothers barter dignity for powdered milk.

The thinness of our stretched existence bleeds into the marrow of daily life—nowhere more visceral than in the home.

Dinner tables, once sites of communion, become battlefields where generational divides metastasise into ideological trenches. A son’s TikTok feed, algorithmically steeped in far-right conspiracies, clashes with his sister’s climate-activist Reels. Parents scroll through polarised news ecosystems—one leaning into Tucker Carlson’s doomscape, the other Rachel Maddow’s urgency—until shared language frays into mutually unintelligible dialects.

Where we make battlefields of dinner tables,
families divided by algorithms on their phones
each word a border wall, each search
a weapon.

Algorithms, are the silent arbiters of modern consciousness, amplify division with every click. They carve familial bonds into tribal shards, feeding each member a curated reality so airtight it feels like truth. A father’s Google search for “vaccine safety” cascades into anti-vax rabbit holes; his daughter’s queries about “police reform” harden into Antifa fervour. What begins as curiosity becomes identity, and identity becomes weaponised. The dinner-table debate over Gaza or pronouns or election integrity isn’t discourse—it’s artillery fire across no-man’s-land, each sentence a border wall, each hyperlink a mortar.

It’s in the marrow. Bone grinds bone.

The gospel fractured into tribal shards
we clutch until our palms bleed with righteousness.
Here too in our manicured gardens of rage,
our sanctuaries of certainty—
where we crucify Christ again
with the nails of our knowing.
The same torn flesh,
the same Saturday silence
stretching between us
like a wound that won't close.

Here lies the deepest fracture—our spirituality itself weaponised into tribal certainties. The gospel, meant to bind wounds, instead becomes shattered glass we grip until blood runs between our fingers, each denomination, each political theology, each interpretation a badge of righteous wounding. Progressive Christians denounce evangelicals as fascist enablers; conservatives condemn liberals as godless relativists. The communion table becomes another checkpoint, another border to police.

Our "manicured gardens of rage" bloom across Facebook prayer groups and megachurch parking lots alike—carefully tended resentments watered by cable news, fertilised by sermon illustrations about the "other side." We construct theological bunkers—sanctuaries of certainty where doubt is heresy and questions are weakness. The irony cuts bone-deep: in our desperate clutching at doctrinal purity, we reenact the crucifixion, hammering fresh nails through the very flesh we claim to worship. The nails of our knowing—our smug biblical proof-texts, our dismissal of theological opponents, our comfortable judgment of those unlike us—pierce the body of Christ more effectively than Roman spears.

This spiritual tribalism mirrors the geopolitical. American Christians invoke scripture to justify border walls while Russian Orthodox priests bless missiles bound for Ukraine. Chinese state churches preach compliance while underground churches risk everything for freedom. The torn flesh of Christ becomes the torn flesh of humanity—Gaza's children, Russia's conscripts, America's alienated poor, all casualties of certainty.

Between us stretches the Saturday silence—God seemingly absent, hope deferred, answers withheld. Our theological trenches run parallel but never touch, like wounds that refuse healing because we've grown attached to our particular pain, our specific indignation. What remains is an Easter that never quite arrives, a resurrection endlessly deferred by our refusal to surrender our knowing for the sake of love.

Yet, I dare to hope.

My throat thickens with salt as I write these words,
not because I understand—I do not—
but because for one brief, shimmering moment I glimpse:
the Spirit hovers still over our chaos,
as over ancient waters—
not above, but within this fracturing world,
within the Godhead's own dark Saturday,
the bond of love, the breath,
that holds Father and forsaken Son together
in this desolation, this waiting,
the love that holds all being
a voice—quiet, marrow-deep—
persists: I am here.

After the cross, Joseph of Arimathea—a clandestine believer—emerges to anoint Christ’s corpse. Precisely when power seems absolute, compassion subverts. In Bangladesh, Rohingya refugees share rice rations halved by geopolitical whims.

To be the bond of love in a world that is unraveling, means embracing the tension between rupture and repair. Ukraine’s 1,200 km frontline becomes a via dolorosa where faith persists in foxholes. This cruciform way of of being in the middle, rejects triumphalist politics. No leader—not Trump, not Zelenskyy, not the UN—holds Sunday’s keys.

Only the Spirt, the Bond of love will raise the dead. As Hegel once observed: “The life of the Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it.”

This love won't respect our borders,
our certainties, our desperation to know.
It persists in the silence between heartbeats,
in the pause between bombs.

For only in unraveling
do we find
what remains
when everything else
is gone.

I find you
there—in Saturday's
blank stare

We won’t be saved by policy papers or peace accords. But it comes in the Ukrainian nurse who holds the hand of a dying Russian soldiers, it the soldier refusing to shoot, the grandson who texts his QAnon grandpa: “I miss you.”

This is Saturday’s stubborn hope: that love outlives ideology. As the poem whispers, only in our unraveling do we find God, who remains when everything else is gone. Trump, Xi, Putin, you, and me, What remains?

God’s Breath. Shared. Sacred.

Sources
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De Kock, W. J. On Being in the Middle: Doing Theology in the Face of Uncertainty. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2024, chapter 9.

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GotQuestions.org. "Who was Joseph of Arimathea?" Accessed April 19, 2025. https://www.gotquestions.org/Joseph-of-Arimathea.html.

Hegel, G. W. F.The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Terry Pinkard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, §32.

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Moltmann, Jürgen. The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. Translated by R. A. Wilson and John Bowden. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.

___________ The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993, 7.

"Psalm 88." King James Version. Bible Gateway. Accessed April 19, 2025. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+88&version=KJV.

Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Snyder.

Stratheia. "China’s Soft Power and Public Diplomacy." February 10, 2024. https://stratheia.com/chinas-soft-power-and-public-diplomacy/.

Von Balthasar, Hans Urs. Theo-Drama: Theo-Drama Last Act, vol. 5, translated by Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1988), 261-26

__________. Mysterium Paschale, translated by Aidan Nichols, 2nd corrected ed. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1990; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 151.

Waltke, Bruce. "Bruce Waltke on Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament." Hesed we'emet, October 29, 2009. https://hesedweemet.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/bruce-waltke-on-brueggemanns-theology-of-the-old-testament/.

World Food Programme. "WFP increases food rations again for Rohingya in Cox’s Bazar – will reach full ration by August." May 31, 2024. https://www.wfp.org/news/wfp-increases-food-rations-again-rohingya-coxs-bazar-will-reach-full-ration-august.

BBC News. "Is South Africa's coalition government about to fall apart?" April 3, 2025. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy70d2504r3o.