I was walking along one of the country paths recently, between Menorca’s ubiquitous dry-stone walls, when I came across a snake. It promptly slid away into a narrow space between two stones at the bottom of the wall.

It wasn’t the first time I had seen something disappear into one of those seemingly solid structures. Lizards, small birds, mice, rats, hedgehogs and even small tortoises have all, at various times, vanished into gaps in the walls. To human eyes, the walls can appear almost completely impervious. To the creatures that live alongside them, however, they are full of possibilities.

And that led me to wonder.  Walls are, after all, meant to be barriers. They delineate boundaries, separate one place from another and, sometimes, keep things in or out. We build walls for practical reasons, but we also build them metaphorically. There are boundaries and barriers in our relationships, our ambitions, our fears and our understanding of ourselves. Sometimes they are imposed upon us by circumstances. Sometimes, perhaps, we construct them ourselves.

What looks like an insuperable obstacle to one creature may be little more than a doorway to another.

I was reminded of an encounter Kate and I once had with a goat on the Camí de Cavalls, near Binimel·là. The goat had decided to follow us, either in the hope that we might provide it with something interesting to eat, or because it just enjoyed having company.  We eventually came to a gate in the wall. We went through it and, with some satisfaction, closed it carefully behind us.  We had solved a problem, or so we thought.

The goat promptly jumped onto the wall, scrambled over the top and followed us. It remained with us for several kilometres before eventually discovering some other people who looked more likely to provide whatever it was seeking.  So much for animal containment.

There was something both amusing and instructive about the whole affair. We had seen the wall and the gate as a barrier. The goat saw the wall rather differently. It wasn’t necessarily an obstacle; it was simply something that required a different approach.

Perhaps we sometimes do the same thing with the barriers in our own lives. We make ourselves too big to get through them.

I remember a story from childhood about a boy who reached into a jar of sweets and grabbed as many as he could. When he tried to withdraw his hand, his fist was too large to pass through the neck of the jar. He wailed because he was stuck.  The solution was obvious: let go of some of the sweets.

Perhaps there is a lesson there for us. Do we sometimes hold on so tightly to our expectations, our ambitions, our sense of entitlement or our preferred way of doing things that we make it impossible to move forward?  Perhaps the barrier is real, but could it be that we have also made ourselves unnecessarily large on the other side of it? 

We can inflate our expectations to such an extent that disappointment becomes almost inevitable. We can become so attached to the way we think life ought to be that anything different feels like failure. We can convince ourselves that a particular door must open, a particular opportunity must appear, a particular plan must succeed, and then find ourselves trapped when it doesn’t.

Sometimes the way through is not to become stronger, cleverer or more determined, but to let go of something we are carrying.

I experienced something like this more than thirty years ago when I was contemplating the possibility of becoming a priest. I had recently acquired a wife and two children, and the practical requirement to support this newly formed family seemed, at first, to threaten the whole possibility of studying for ordination. How could I work full-time, provide for my family and study at seminary?  It looked like a barrier.

In the end, however, things fell into place. I was able to study while working, and what initially appeared to be an obstacle became one of the great enrichments of my life. Having a family did not get in the way of my ministry; it helped to shape it.  It taught me things about love, patience, responsibility, vulnerability and forgiveness that no seminary classroom could have taught me in quite the same way.  The barrier became a gateway.

Perhaps that is sometimes how God works. We look at the wall and see only the thing that prevents us from getting where we thought we were going. God may see something rather different: a gap, an opening, another route, a possibility we had not considered.

The Christian story is full of people discovering that the boundaries they thought were fixed were not quite as fixed as they imagined. Jesus repeatedly crossed boundaries: between Jew and Gentile, respectable and disreputable, healthy and sick, insider and outsider. The resurrection itself is, in a sense, the ultimate declaration that the walls we imagine to be final are not necessarily final at all.

That doesn’t mean every obstacle will simply disappear. Some walls are genuinely difficult, and some barriers are painfully real. But perhaps we can learn from the snake, the goat and the boy with his fist in the sweet jar.  The snake found a gap.  The goat found another way over.  The boy discovered that he needed to let go.

And perhaps we need to ask ourselves, when we encounter the walls of our own lives: Is there a gap here that I haven’t noticed? Is there another way around? And, perhaps most importantly, what am I holding on to that I could afford to release?

There may be times when the answer is to climb higher, push harder or keep going. But there may also be times when the wiser, more faithful response is to become a little less burdened by ourselves.

Because sometimes the wall isn’t telling us that we cannot go any further.  It might be inviting us to find a different way through.