Hope in Holy Saturday

Earlier, I stood with Valentin’s family in the ICU as Father Greg Boyle anointed him (see Part I). Machines kept Valentin’s chest rising and falling after a self-inflicted gunshot wound, while his mother held his leg and his girlfriend pressed close to his side. I had seen hope in their eyes that day—the kind that refuses to let go, even when the odds are against you.

Both women told me they were waiting for a miracle. They had heard of others who had beaten the odds—people who had returned from the brink, restored to health against all expectation. And I could not deny it. These miracles exist. The Church herself affirms them in the canonization of saints, when inexplicable healings are recognized as signs of divine intercession. Miracles can happen. Miracles do happen.

And yet the truth in this room was harsh: the damage to Valentin’s central nervous system was profound, beyond what medicine could mend. Every indicator pointed to a body that would never again function on its own.

Here lies the struggle. As chaplains, we are tempted to anchor families in “reality,” to caution them against false hope, to warn them not to lean on what looks like wishful thinking. We may even name it superstition. But when we do, we risk something worse—we risk compounding their pain, stripping away the one fragile thread of hope that allows them to keep watch.

Valentin’s girlfriend told me that another chaplain had visited earlier in the week and, with just a few words, had shaken her faith. I do not believe the chaplain meant harm. Perhaps they thought they were protecting her from disappointment. But is it too much to ask that, in such sacred hours, we let families live inside their hope-filled reality, however improbable, rather than trying to pull them back into ours?

Hope in chaplaincy is not about promising outcomes; it is about honoring the space where love refuses to let go. When a mother clings to her son’s leg or a girlfriend clutches his hand, that is hope embodied. It does not matter whether the machines will ever be silenced or if a miracle will reorder the nervous system. What matters is that their love testifies to the God who never abandons. Christian hope is not the guarantee that bodies will always be healed, but the conviction that no one suffers alone. Even when death closes in, hope insists that the story is not over.

To declare a person brain dead requires two separate confirmations by two different physicians. Each must run a battery of tests, each test expected to come to the same conclusion. Valentin had already been through this once, and the results had been clear: brain death. A second round had been run the day before, but one test—the blood gas level of carbon dioxide—had not reached the marker intentionally set high. It was a delay, a pause in the final pronouncement. Today would be the third time the test would be run.

The medical team entered gently, the physician explaining each step with clinical clarity. The nurse drew blood, and the vials were marked and carried away. Then the team filed out, leaving us again in the room’s fragile stillness. Just four of us remained: Valentin, his mother, his girlfriend, and me. Machines hummed, monitors blinked, but between us stretched a silence louder than any sound.

When the team first entered, we stepped back to give them space. Now, after they left, we returned to our places at the bedside, as though pulled by gravity. His mother and I resumed our quiet watch, not as close as before but close enough to feel tethered to him. Only his girlfriend stayed pressed close, refusing to yield her place.

She leaned toward Valentin’s ear and began to whisper. Her words were gentle, urgent: that he was strong, that he had already beaten the odds once, and that he could hold on still. Her voice was calm and steady, weaving encouragement into the air like a prayer. Around her, the room fell into reverent silence, each of us letting her love speak for all of ours. It was, in its own way, a Holy Saturday moment: the waiting, the watching, and the refusal to let go even as the world leaned toward loss.

Her whisper reminded me of the women at the tomb, those first witnesses who refused to abandon love even when hope seemed gone. In the Gospel, they come with spices and oils, acts of care that make little sense if death has truly won. Yet they come anyway, because love does not calculate outcomes. So too this young woman, bending close to Valentin’s ear, spoke words that sounded both impossible and necessary: that he was strong, that he had endured before, that he might endure again.

Her words rose like prayer, defiant against despair, carrying a faith that miracles sometimes require—not faith that dictates results, but faith that keeps vigil when the stone has not yet been rolled away.

Holy Saturday is the day the Church does not know what to say. The liturgy falls silent, the tabernacle stands empty, and the world feels abandoned between crucifixion and resurrection. The hospital room became its own kind of garden tomb, not empty but heavy with waiting. We inhabited the silence between death and whatever might come next. The medical team had left, the tests were running somewhere beyond the walls, but for us, time collapsed into vigil. We were living the Church’s waiting day, when faith means sitting with absence, when love means refusing to walk away, when hope is not certainty but presence.

The tradition teaches that on Holy Saturday Christ descended into hell, into the silence of the grave, into the place where God’s presence is least expected. He did not bypass death; he entered it fully. That mystery hovered in Valentin’s room. Machines kept his chest rising and falling, but beneath it all lay the truth that he had already traveled to a place beyond our reach. His mother’s touch, his girlfriend’s whispered words, my own quiet presence—all of it felt like reaching into that hiddenness, daring to believe he was not alone there.

If Christ descended into hell, then no place—no ICU, no brain death, no self-inflicted wound—was outside the reach of divine companionship. Holy Saturday teaches us that God is present even when unseen, even when silent, even when everything looks lost.