pat loughery

“To Pause at the Threshold: Reflections on Living on the Border” (Esther De Waal)

There is a traditional saying of ancient wisdom: “A threshold is a sacred thing.” (p. 1)

We have thresholds, transition points, throughout our lives. In our culture, we tend to rush through them, or not even notice that we’re blasting through thresholds. However, if we pay attention to those thresholds and turn our attention to God, these can be helpful transitions for us.

All our lives are inevitably made of a succession of borders and thresholds, which open up into the new and promise excitement or fear. (p. 5)

de Waal writes from a home on the physical border between Wales and England, whose location provides depth to her understanding of thresholds.

I can only learn from this border countryside landscape when I let its presence reveal itself to me gently, so that I begin to sense its patterns – those hill rhythms and water rhythms… (p. 8)

We should approach thresholds by paying attention to what they’re trying to show us.

Am I willing to cross the threshold of new understanding by being open and receptive, not closed in and defensive? [..] The most profound threshold, however, remains that between the inner and the outer, between going deeper into the interior self and emerging to meet the world beyond the self without protective defenses, as friend not as foe.” (p. 9-10)

In the next section of the book, de Waal writes about the Benedictine practice of hospitality, especially in the form of the porter described in chapter 62 of the Rule of Benedict. The role of the porter is to live on the threshold of the monastery and to offer warmth, hospitality and welcome to those outside the threshold.

In my own thinking and praying I have extended the image of the man on the margin to include the greeting of new circumstances, new situations, and new demands, so that even when they appear unexpectedly and I feel unready and ill equipped, I am yet prepared to welcome them. This image of being simultaneously rooted yet open, planted on either side of the threshold of the interior and the exterior, is one that I now want to apply elsewhere in my own personal experience. (p. 26-27)

Places give us a sense of seasons changing, of sunrise and sunset. If we’re in places where these things more easily impact us, we can get a rhythm from them. For those of us in busier, more urban environments, we’re distracted from these rhythms.

For many of us, time has become yet one more commodity of the consumer world, a commodity at the mercy of the dictates of deadlines and contracts, valued in terms of achievement and productivity. It is not easy to regain a sense of the changes of time and season when the night sky with all its gentle and subtle changes is blotted out by the sullen orange glow of the sodium light, denying us what should rightly be the timeless heritage of the movement of moon and stars. When the imported luxuries of the world stare us in the face on every visit to the supermarket, we are denied any sense of the coming and going of successive seasons of the year, with the expectation and delight that each will bring its own particular gift. If the kiwi fruits and the tomatoes and the strawberries are endlessly available, there is no longer that waiting on the threshold for each new season to bring its appropriate contribution of fruitfulness.

Yet living here I cannot fail to be aware of the movement, the movement of water, of light and dark, of the coming and going of each season in turn, and with it the underlying theme of ebb and flow, of death and life, the dying down of nature and the new seed of creation and recreation, experienced again and again, year in year out, just as it will be repeated again throughout our lives. (p.30-31)

de Waal has connected these rhythms to the Celtic sense of seasons.

In recent years I have begun quite consciously to live the pattern of time in the Celtic way and it has given me much joy because now I value change as I never did before. What I most appreciate is that four times in each year there is a pause, a festival, a named day, marking the transitional moment between one season and the next. (p. 39-40)

The year began at Samhaine on November 1. Spring arrives with Imbolc on February 1 (also the feast of St. Brigid). Beltaine, the feast of summer, is on May 1, and Lammas on August 1 marks the feast of harvests.

Thresholds also can be marked at birth, death, coming-of-age, marriage, and other change points.

So we create rhythms and still spaces within us, to help us to process these thresholds.

There are so many ways of describing this still center: the cave of the heart, the hidden poustinia, the innermost cloister. Each one of us has our own picture. Essentially it is that deep place where God finds us and we find him. We enter into silence and hear God’s conversation and take our proper part in it – and if we heed ancient wisdom, that means trying not to say too much ourselves.(p. 69)

(to be continued)