By Sister Jane Cayer, SSND
“I alternate between thinking of the planet as home—dear and familiar stone hearth and garden—and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.” Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk.
In these later years I have been looking forward to Lent, probably because it signals the sure coming of Spring. Even though Winter has retained its hold on the thermostat, there is something new in the air, so that gardeners have begun thinking of digging into rain-soaked earth to encourage new life!
Digging into dirt, we are likely to find stones.
In her book The Stones of the Last Week: Impediments to Easter, Bonnie Thurston examines the symbolic and paradoxical meanings of stones in the Gospel of Luke.
Stones, as anyone who has turned an ankle on one knows, can be impediments to achieving our goals. Metaphorically, Thurston says, they can represent external or internal obstacles to our spiritual growth, to our full experience of Easter life.
Lent can be a time for clearing out the stones that weigh us down or lie in our path — the obstacles that we create within ourselves or the impediments imposed on us by forces beyond our control.
Stones can also signify strength.
As Jesus enters Jerusalem on his way to crucifixion, the Pharisees object to the crowd’s Hosannas, and Jesus replies, “If my disciples are silent, the very stones will cry out.”
After the Resurrection, Jesus is “the stone rejected by the builders [that becomes] the cornerstone” — the foundation that joins two sides, that connects death and new life.
I have learned that stones can provide air for the plants in a garden, and that the rocks formed in mountains are kernels of energy.
When Jesus’ body is laid in a rock-hewn tomb, a great stone seals the entrance, yet when the women come on the morning after the Sabbath, the stone has been rolled away, and new life is released.
This Lent, the earth seems hard and stoney on the path to fullness of life for so many people.
Can we walk with them? Can we let go of whatever keeps us from reaching out to Jesus in our suffering sisters and brothers?
