pat loughery

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

The final chapter of this book is the one I enjoyed and appreciated the most.

Titled The Time Between The Times, it looks at how we live with those twilight moments when something is dawning or is in its dusk phase (whether that “something” is the sunshine or something less tangible.

de Waal writes about Holy Saturday, that day of tension between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, which we usually gloss over in a haze of party planning and church decorations and cooking for the potluck. However, that day can best be experienced in the wonder and the mystery of this day. It’s hard for us to allow ourselves to remain uncomfortable in this tension, though. We want to resolve our tension and move into comfort.

The reality of God as Trinity helps us here. The Trinity is unity in diversity; diversity in unity. A person in interdependent relationship.

The first step in listening, learning, and changing is to see that different is not dangerous; the second is to be happy and willing to live with uncertainty; the third is to rejoice in ambiguity and to embrace it. It all means giving up the comfort of certainty and realizing that uncertainty can be good. As soon as I realize this, I find that I must ask myself: what is my first task in approaching another people?

I have here set out my response as a meditation that is simultaneously as a form of prayer. It is inspired by something I saw pinned up in a Roman Catholic convent in Harare on a recent trip to Zimbabwe:

My first task in approaching another people

another culture

another religion

Is to take off my shoes.

For the place that I am approaching is holy.

Otherwise I may find myself

treading on another’s dreams,

their memories, their stories,

More serious still – I might forget

that God was there … (p. 86-87)

One of the most powerful thresholds we’re allowed to encounter is the uniqueness of another person – a different person, someone with a different history and story and experience.

Perhaps there is something prophetic about living on the border. I want a Christianity that brings me comfort, but also dis-comfort… Listening to other voices asks me not only to be attentive to the place where I stand and to ask questions of myself, but also to be open and willing to recognize where the other might bring a corrective, a deepening or strengthening. (p. 92)

Who do you listen to? Whose voices which are unlike yours are you discomforted by? Who do you allow to correct, deepen or strengthen you?