2024 Wesley Community Lenten Devotional
Let Love Lead the Way
Holy Saturday
Rick Elgendy & Elizabeth Pruchnicki
Community ConnectionsRick: WTS Martha Ashby Carr Associate Professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology
Liz: WTS MTS 2020, Assistant Director of Admissions and Financial Aid
Love ConnectionJust Married!Love LanguageRick: Pinball Advice
Liz: Creative Dungeons and Dragons Character Voices
Favorite Love QuotationsThere were two readings at our wedding."True union, or love proper, exists only between living beings who are alike in power and thus in one another's eyes living beings from every point of view; in no respect is either dead for the other. This genuine love excludes all oppositions. It is not the understanding, whose relations always leave the manifold of related terms as a manifold and whose unity is always a unity of opposites. It is not reason either, because reason sharply opposes its determining power to what is determined. Love neither restricts or is restricted; it is not finite at all. It is a feeling, yet not a single feeling. A single feeling is only a part and not the whole of life; the life present in a single feeling dissolves its barriers and drives on till it disperses itself in the manifold of feelings with a view to finding itself in the entirety of the manifold." -- G.W.F. Hegel, Fragment on "Love"“A day or two after my love pronouncement, now feral with vulnerability, I sent you the passage from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes in which Barthes describes how the subject who utters the phrase ‘I love you’ is like ‘the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.’ Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase ‘I love you,’ its meaning must be renewed by each use, as ‘the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.’” -- Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
Undying Life, Unceasing Change
~ Matthew 27:57–66
H
oly Saturday seems like the final victory of the powers of the world: death has won, the stone has been rolled in front of the tomb. The threat posed to the existing order by the one who claimed a deeper, fiercer reign of love extinguished, and thus the world as it is made “secure.”
But Holy Saturday also has death’s undoing written into itself. As dusk settles and the light fades, Christians around the world celebrate Easter Vigils, the whisper of grace that will soon dawn. What death means to still nevertheless, by the grace of God, will stir. Where death seeks the security of repetition - endless days without this one, the one who would have us live and love differently - life risks rising again.
We chose the two readings above for our wedding because they help us articulate our own hope to foster a living connection, which welcomes changes. We have been and will be many things to each other, bearing many names for the other: some we have left behind, some we have yet to discover. But for us, the heart of love holds the curiosity that allows the one you think you know best to be someone new, to have new life spoken through a version of them you haven’t met before. Or maybe better: that attention is the systole of love’s grace, and who the ever-new beloved invites you to be, its diastole.
But love and life must change, must be transformed. Even death, in its many faces, cannot be bare repetition: in seeking “security,” in rolling stones in front of tombs, it offers only decay. The Resurrection that overcomes it drives us on amid life’s changes, through the many names we find for each other, in ultimate hope of standing before the Name beyond all names.
Praying Through The Seasons With Wesley
Journey with Wesley Theological Seminary (WTS) through the seasons of the liturgical and academic year. Connect through prayer with the Wesley Community, on campus and in ministry around the world.
Please return here each season to rekindle a rhythm of prayer that unites the Wesley Family, no matter where we are.