Roll Away the Stone

"Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance."
John 20:1





As I mentioned in my previous post (Open Up the Gates) - I am constantly amazed and fascinated by the power of the sub-conscious mind; the urges that we follow that on the surface appear to be mundane actions but turn out to be fraught with significance.

A few months ago, the week of Easter and Passover, to be exact, I was installing metal posts for my garden fence. I was within a couple of hammer blows of finishing the project when I heard and felt the distinct clinking sound of metal on stone. I've dealt with many a garden stone in my day, and though I was annoyed by the interruption, I figured it would be an easy task to dig the stone out and finish my project for the day. How wrong I was. I ended up having to dig a hole approximately 2' in diameter and at least as deep, and spending a very long time wrestling what turned out to be a massive hunk of granite out of what seemed like the bowels of the earth. And I do mean wrestle. This thing was very heavy, and to make matters worse, it was round, so there was no easy way to grab onto the thing; a slippery thing, it was. I managed to leverage it upwards a bit with the shovel, and after a lot of maneuvering and grunting and swearing, and at one point becoming aware that my fingers were precariously close to the working edge of a shovel that contained a very heavy stone - I did get the boulder up to the surface. As difficult a task as it was, there was also a fantastic feeling of accomplishment when it was done.

I took the above photo with my phone to document my victory, and to show to my friend Ben who had also, coincidentally, done some stone-wrestling the day before. If you compare the size of the stone to the shovel, you'll have an idea of its size.

As I also mentioned in my previous post, I often later discover deeper meanings in what initially appear to be ordinary photographs. It's as though my photos are self-portraits; expositions of my interior world.

When I looked at the photo a few days later, I immediately thought, "Oh, it's a stone at the mouth of a grave," which reminded me of the story about the stone that had been rolled away at Jesus' tomb on Easter morning. Then I realized that it was Good Friday when I was actually thinking these things. I had not been consciously aware, however, that it was Good Friday because, you see, at that time I was Jewish, and the Christian calendar was not on my radar - consciously, anyway. It's like that with me, for some reason. A lot.

And here's the amazing thing: two months later, after living and studying and working in the Jewish world as a fairly observant Jewish person for twelve years, I returned home to the Catholic Church.

So, the photograph turns out to be true in ways that I didn't even know about at the time. On a purely physical level, I did roll away the stone - a huge, heavy stone from deep within the earth, a task that took every bit of cleverness, strength, and sheer stubbornness I've ever had to muster - and yes, I am quite strong and stubborn as it turns out. But the photograph also reveals a profound spiritual truth: on that spring morning during Holy Week 2012, unbeknownst to me at the time, I was wrestling with and rolling away the stone from the tomb where Jesus had been buried inside me for twelve years; unbeknownst to myself, I was in the process of returning to Christianity.

I suppose this could also be filed under "There are no coincidences or accidents." I do know that the subconscious is a fascinating place - is this where God lives? - and I also believe that we each already contain, within ourselves, most of what we need to know about ourselves and that on that April morning I was doing exactly what I needed to do - in a gestalt kind of way - in order to tell myself something I did not yet have words for. I just have one question: how did I know the rock was there?



The stone, in its present location, in my mother and brother, John's, rock garden, created approximately thirty years ago in the backyard of my childhood home in Edgartown where I recently returned to live.