Broken Rock

At the last third of the Camino Frances, there is an iron cross mounted on a simple wooden pole - about the thickness of a telephone pole. At the base is a hill of stones. Before approaching the last leg of the Camino, having carried them over the Meseta - some carrying them over the Pyrenees, people place rocks at the base of the cross - a symbol of "letting go" of the excess weight or burden carried. Some place rocks letting go of past sons, some place rocks as a fair well to past pain, suffering or illness, some place rocks in remembrance if loved ones who have died. I even saw what looked like a hiking boot, tiny as perhaps for an infant booty, in the pile of rocks (I can only imagine the story behind that). For as many rocks in that huge mound, there are as many reasons for placing those rocks.

I can't remember exactly when I spotted this rock lying on the road. I will never  know what could have broken it into three pieces. a walking pilgrim certainly could not have done this- maybe a car or one of the local farmer's tractors. I knew that this was the rock to be placed by the cross (La Cruz de Ferro). A symbol of the brokenness of the world appropriately placed by a cross. I placed it with all three pieces fitted carefully together, but I know that by the myriad of people climbing that mound it will separate into its three pieces.

There is a difference between the brokenness of this world and the hurt that we experience in life, although they seem  to be intwined. 

There is this tree, a tree that I pass every day walking from home to work. Many years back I noticed that there was a cut - clean, as inflicted by an electric circular saw - in the large root jutting above the sidewalk. Perhaps this was a cut delivered while the root was used to support a two- by-four that needed a clean cut. However the cut was done, it was about three inches deep and reached the entire width of the root. After many years as the tree grew the cut filled in and the root is now without this gaping wound. I think that the hurt we receive - physical, spiritual, emotional - heals like a tree. The wound heals as we grow. We heal like trees.

The brokenness of the world is more like the rock, something to be left behind when we finish the journey of life and (hopefully) find our eternal rest in God. The signs of our hurts and suffering might still be with us - even Jesus still bore the wounds of his suffering as Thimas can testify. But like the rocks left at the cross, the brokenness of the world can be left behind. This is our hope - a reasonable expectation of the new life we will experience as an outcome of our present life.