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?
In an article in the
When you have unlimited time with yourself, the danger is that you would tear yourself apart. Nietzsche said, “In a time of peace the warlike person attacks himself.” This happens also of course to communities; they go to war with themselves in the absence of enemies. This danger is, however, a permanent companionship of some lives. There are people this morning whose lives were never better. There is peace around them. Objectively, their conditions are very good, yet they are totally tormented. They have scraped away the last vestiges of shelter from their souls. There is nothing significantly wrong here. It is just that these demented people have designated their minds to become their tormentors. Their hostility is now focused on everything about themselves. They have become prisoner and torturer in one.
Forgiveness is one of the really difficult things in life. The logic of receiving hurt seems to run in the direction of never forgetting either the hurt or the hurter. When you forgive, some deeper, divine generosity takes you over. When you can forgive, then you are free. When you cannot forgive, you are a prisoner of the hurt done to you. If you are really disappointed in someone and you become embittered, you become incarcerated inside that feeling. Only the grace of forgiveness can break the straight logic of hurt and embitterment. It gives you a way out, because it places the conflict on a completely different level. In a strange way, it keeps the whole conflict human. You begin to see and understand the conditions, circumstances, or weakness that made the other person act as she did.
I remember once, during the former Communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia, reading an interview with a leading Czech dissident. The authorities often arrested and jailed him. He was asked in the interview how he kept his poise. He said he never allowed himself to forget during interrogation that his interrogators were human like himself. He said that were he to caricature them as monsters he would have lost his freedom and shelter in the situation. To keep it human helped him stay human, too.
