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But there came a point at which I was convinced that it was critically important to pay more attention to what God does than what I do; to find daily, weekly, yearly rhythms that would get that awareness into my bones. Holy Saturday for a start. And then, times to visit people in despair, and learn their names, and wait for resurrection.

Embedded in my memory now is this most poignant irony: those seven or eight Indians, with the Thunderbird empties lying around, drunk in the alley behind the Pastime Baron Saturday afternoon, while we Scandinavian Christians worked diligently late into the night, oblivious to the holiness of the day. The Indians were in despair, religious despair, something very much like the Holy Saturday despair narrated in the Gospels. Their way of life had come to nothing, the only buffalo left to them engraved on nickels, a couple of which one of their squaws had paid out that morning for four bony ham hocks. The early sacredness of their lives was a wasteland; and they, godforsaken as they supposed, drugged their despair with Thunderbird and buried their dead visions and dreams in the alley behind the Pastime, ignorant of the God at work beneath their emptiness.

This article originally appeared in the March 17, 1989 issue of Christianity Today.

Eugene H. Peterson is former pastor of Christ Our King United Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland, and the author of Leap Over a Wall: Earthy Spirituality for Everyday Christians (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997)

Read our other articles in The Great Reversal:

Maundy Thursday | By Walter Wangerin, Jr.

Good Friday | By Virginia Stem Owens

Easter Sunday | By Philip Yancey

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

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April (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44