Threshold is our spiritual theme for this new month of May. Threshold.
We cross over thresholds all the time. Those of us here in person did to get into this building this morning. If we came in through the Main Street doors we stepped up and over. If we came in a wheelchair or used a walker or a scooter, the passage may well have been more complicated. Which door do I go through to get in? And the elevator? Seemed to take quite a long time.
Thresholds can be points of welcome as well as barriers to negotiate.
And for those of you online, there were, I expect thresholds for you as well. Getting to the right place to view or hear this service. And that’s assuming you have the equipment needed to do that. Or does it require getting yourself somewhere where you have that access? And maybe the threshold was more metaphorical, in a is-this-what-I-want-to-do-in-this-moment-vs.-something-else kind of way.
Yes, we each traverse thresholds every day in our lives, some more difficult than others. Much of the time, I expect, we don’t think much about them. They can quickly become routine. But even if we may not recognize it they do apparently have meaning.
I remember reading about a study some years ago that found when we go from one room to another—passing through a doorway or threshold—that we are more likely to forget what it was we were doing. If you are like me that happens all the time…. Setting out to do something only to forget what it was a set out to do mid journey. Well this study found that crossing over a threshold—from one space to another—that our minds do a kind of reset, as if to say, “OK crossed a boundary, that task is finished,” even if it isn’t.
Spiritually speaking, thresholds, of course, are a metaphor for change and transition. And change, we know, is perhaps the one thing we can count on in life. It was the Greek philosopher Heraclitus who said it was the one constant in life.
In the comings and goings of our lives it is easy to find ourselves going from one place to another and perhaps not paying all that much attention. Even sometimes with some of the big changes in life. But I think it is important that we take the time to notice.
We are conditioned, I think, to want to get from one place to another as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Literally and spiritually speaking. Now we have the capability with a map router to find the most efficient route to just about anywhere. And perhaps that can be the way we approach life as well.
But change may not always be so linear. With change can come fear—of the unknown, of how it is we will make it through. With change can come a disruption in our routines and our status quo. And that is not always easy. Maybe sometimes we need to take a little more time and have a little more space.
William Bridges, years ago, articulated his theory of how transition and change happens. He said we may first see it as being a new beginning. But in fact, he said, change first happens with an ending. A loss of something like a job or relationship, or maybe it is a loss of some ability we had, some change in circumstance. But before we find our way to what will come of that, the beginning, there is a period in between, when we have not quite left where we were and not quite yet arrived at some beginning. That is sometimes called the time in between or the middle time. And that can be the most difficult when we feel the most ungrounded, when we don’t quite feel settled in either the old or the new place. Bridges says that it more often than not it may not be the change we avoid as that time in between when we are figuring out what the beginning will be like.
But in that middle space, on that threshold, there is also opportunity. It may be in that space that we are asked to figuring out just where it is we are going and just what that new place might mean. It may not a place we have chosen but a place where we start to know more fully where we are and what is coming. And indeed, that may be what we need in a given moment. But what if we pondered seeing a threshold as a place to pause, as a place to take stock, as a place to ask how did I get here? Where am I going?
Perhaps one of the most important tasks in the spiritual life is to make meaning, to understand where it is we are in the scheme of things. To be able to metaphorically step back and to take stock. Even when it is a change we have chosen, it may be important to consider all the dimensions of any given change.
Let me offer an example. When I was new to the ministry and started officiating at weddings, I thought my job was mostly to guide the two partners through the ceremony and sign the legal documents. That was the important part of a wedding. So this was my first wedding and I was nervous about it. I met with the couple more than once. We talked in great detail about the ceremony. And yes the word spoken and the legal part were important.
But what it took me a while to figure out with several more weddings, was that yes, the details were important, but in some larger sense I came to see my role and making a space in some larger sense for this transition—in this case a marriage—to happen. Two individuals were making this journey into married life along with their families and friends. It was something that not only they were doing but to some extent everyone there was doing with them as well.
I recall after that ceremony that the father of the bride sought me out after the service and wanted to talk. He was processing what this meant for his relationship with his child, which was entering a different chapter. She was no longer going to be his little girl that she had always been until this point. He was wondering about whether he had been a good father, he wondered if he had done all the right things. Now I will confess here some years later that the first question in my head was to ask, so why are you talking to me about this…. But I came to understand that his questions and his searching was all part of some larger threshold he and his daughter and her spouse and their gathered community of loved ones were passing through. That they were all making the journey from this place to another place. And in this case, that ritual is part of what makes that possible.
With a little more experience through the years I’ve come to understand that everyone who is part of such a gathering brings what they bring. This person who is remembering their own wedding and the happiness that has followed. Or this person who is remembering the marriage that did not come to fulfill the hopes of that day. Or this person who never has had that day they dreamed about their whole lives. All of those emotions are somehow in the mix in that gathering. All of that is part of what present as two people find their way across that threshold.
We make our way through the passages of our lives individually and with others who accompany us. We make meaning and through it make our way from this place to another place. Now in that case of the wedding it is mostly about the new beginning but I have also learned that it is important to pay attention to the losses that may be present even in those times.
And, of course, not all changes are of our own choosing and making our way through those can be very hard. This happens too when we face an illness and maybe even to the end of our life. Those passages, too, are full of all kinds of emotions with all of those closest to us. This is all part of change. This is all part of how we find our way forward, whatever the circumstances, whether the change is something we’ve chosen or not.
Times like this call us into a kind of liminal space, where we are somewhere between where we’ve been and where we are going. And into that space we bring our histories, our stories, the blessings we have known and also the times when the circumstances felt like anything but blessings. How we have made our way, or not made our way. How an ending may have easily turned into a new beginning or how that journey may have been long and more difficult than we could have ever imagined. We bring our grief and our joy, our sorrows and regrets, our hopes for what some new beginning might hold. It is all part of that liminal time.
It might be helpful for a moment to say a word about how it is we understand time. The Greeks had two different words for time. The first, chronos, describes how we usually think of time. This is linear time, as if along a ruler, marking the minutes, the hours, the days, weeks, months, years. In our lives we mark year after year, and the events that fit along that continuum. One day comes after another day that comes after another day.
There is another kind of time and that is called kairos. That has been called sacred time, or time out of time. And this might better describe threshold moments and the way that time doesn’t always seem to be so linear. It is perhaps more circular. It is time when we are most aware of our connection to something larger. We all have those moments when we can remember something from a long, long time ago with great clarity, maybe for the rest of our lives. This is different from our inability to remember what we had for dinner a few days ago. That memory, it seems, will never be found again.
It is in that time that we are able to not only find ourselves in the present but able to hold all the times in our lives. Time becomes something much more fluid. We may find ourselves remembering back to a time long passed juxtaposed with a moment in the present time, all together and somehow part of a whole. That liminal time is allows us to make meaning, to understand where it is we are, where we have been and where it is we are going.
Words again of Barbara Crooker that Dana read earlier:
Each day, we must learn
again how to love, between morning’s quick coffee
and evening’s slow return. …. Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up
in love, running out of time.[1]
I think especially with the last years we have been in, it is important to mark the passage of sacred time in our lives. Covid has been a disruptor in so many ways in how it has scrambled things up. The losses of this time include the literal deaths around us and all around the world. But it has also been the loss of time with beloveds, time doing things that give life meaning. It has disrupted our very sense of safety and how it is we are able to move—or not to move—through the world.
But it has also, in that very disrupting, perhaps, also made a space for us to see things differently. Maybe some of those routines and rituals needed disrupting. Maybe they had lost meaning. Or maybe we have come to see just how meaningful some of those things were in our lives and this time has brought a recognition of what it is that really is most important.
We are all still coming to terms with this time and understanding what it all means. But sometimes it is in the midst of disruption that we find ourselves in those liminal moments, when we are between one place and another place. These may be the times when we find some moment of clarity about our lives, a moment of awareness about where we are and where we are headed. They may mark some significant changes. They are times when we are asked to pay attention.
I don’t know about you but it feels as if this moment in time holds something extraordinary. We have been through a lot and there are signs of us having come through it. But there are other signs that the meaning, the learning is still be to revealed completely. In that is the need to mark the losses of this time, the literal loss of life, but also our own sense of safety in the world, our own sense of freedom to move about in the world, our own needs to be around the people we love and want to be with. Our own sense of agency and what is possible.
These times call us to be awake. To note what we may have not been seeing amid the busyness, amid the routines, amid the demands of our lives. Maybe we didn’t need so much of that. Maybe what we really needed was some space to recognize it. Some space to notice what might be emerging for us. Some space to imagine changes we want to make. Some space to imagine how life maybe different, and maybe even richer and fuller.
It may be that these times offer an invitation to get out of those habits that keep us in places where we really no longer want to be. It may be such moments allow us to get past the fear of what’s new and into a place of possibility and new beginnings.
It won’t be long before we witness the spring rites of passage like proms and graduations and rituals for our young people. Maybe it is marking one grade to the next. This church will witness the transition from one senior minister to the next with the upcoming candidating week for Rev. Alison Miller and beginning the process of covenanting with her. It will say goodbye to Rev. Bill Sinkford and marking his ministry and the relationships that have flowed out of this time in the life of our community. It will be a time of beginnings and of endings. We are all very much in sacred time together.
Words of poet Ross Gay:
If you find yourself half naked
And barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,
Again, the earth’s great, sonorous moan that says
You are the air of the now and one, that says
All you love will turn to dust,
And will meet you there, do not
Raise your fist. Do not raise
Your small voice against it. And do not
Take cover. Instead, curl your toes
Into the grass watch the cloud
Ascending from your lips. Walk
Through the garden’s dormant splendor.
Say only, thank you.
Thank you.[2]
May we see the times we are in –this threshold time we are crossing over—as an invitation, as an opportunity. May we find a space to mark what has been and also to mark what might be emerging. To hold all of it together. To see all of it as sacred.
The thresholds we pass through happen on a daily basis, many of them, forgotten as quickly as we may pass from one space to another space. But sometimes they offer an invitation to pause and to ask, how did we get here? Where are we going? What is it we need to take from this moment? What is it that we need to leave behind? How is it that we are being asked to live?
In these times of peril and of possibility, may we find our way to where it is we need to be. May that journey have its share of gratitude and may we make space for the holy to emerge—all as we make our way through the thresholds of our lives. So be it. Amen.
Prayer
Spirit of life, and of love, be with us this day and through all the days—all the thresholds—of our lives. May the through line of those passages be an awareness of our connection to each other and the earth. May the through line of those passages be an awareness of the many ways we are blessed. May the through line be that not matter what change may bring through it all we are held in love. Amen.
Benediction
In all the thresholds of your life, know that you are held in love and in care. Go from this place now in love and in hope. Amen.
[1] https://gratefulness.org/resource/in-the-middle/
[2] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/92120/thank-you-587653381d670
Topics: Threshold