Anam Cara

To Roll the Stone off the Heart

The Christian story is about the subversive transformation of all barriers that confine or imprison. Jesus never advocated a life that confined itself within safe, complacent walls. He always called people into the beyond: “I have come that you may have life and have it more abundantly.” The Resurrection is frightening because it is a call to live a life without the walls of crippling definition or false protection. The huge stone over Christ’s tomb was rolled away. The cave of dying was ventilated and freed. It is a powerful image of smashing open the inner prison. The confined, the exiled, the neglected are visited by the healing and luminosity of a great liberation.

On a farm, the season of greatest change is springtime. Everything is in the flourish of growth. You often notice where a large flat rock has fallen onto the grass. All around the rock is growth. Beneath the rock, the grass has turned yellow and sour. In every life, there are some places where we have allowed great slabs of burden to remain fallen on our heart. These slabs have turned much of our inner world sour and killed many of the possibilities which once called us: the possibilities of play, of making holidays, of seeing something new and unexpected in our lives, of going to new places within and without, of living life to the full. When these slabs are pulled off our hearts, we can move freely again and breathe and feel alive. Wouldn’t it bring such calmness and freedom to your life, if your thoughts about yourself, your feelings, and your prayer could become a window which would look inward on the presence of the Divine?