Thresholds
Courage to Live at the Limit of Us
I've been thinking about thresholds, specifically the thresholds we experience as humans. We all have thresholds. I've resigned myself to the fact that I may never make it to six feet tall. That's a height threshold. We have other physical and bodily thresholds, as well. Eventually we all start gasping for breath on a run. Even marathon runners' legs give out and refuse to function. But we also have emotional thresholds--there's only so much joy or pain or fear or hope we can harbor before they stretch us. Many of us test the threshold of our daily or life stress pretty constantly. We have thresholds for the number of relationships we can maintain. We have thresholds for the number of people we can stand to be around at one time or another. We have thresholds for patience and forgiveness. We live at these thresholds sometimes until we feel like poor old Bilbo at the beginning of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: we feel stretched, "like butter scraped over too much bread."
Living at these thresholds is usually not a good thing. But sometimes we seek out thresholds to live into so that we can grow, not stretched thing, but stretched into something new and unfamiliar.
People who travel far and wide, whether they are on pilgrimage or not, often do so in order to "see more of the world," which also usually means "experiencing more of humanity." When the places one travels to are non-English speaking places, then the sense of dislocation and disorientation is even greater. But it is good that we should so travel if we are able, if only so that we don't make the mistake of thinking that the way we see the world is the way the world is.
In our welcoming prayer at St. Mary's we pray for "everyone who crosses our threshold." On the one hand we mean whoever comes into our building. On the other, I think we also mean anyone who is willing to risk opening themselves to this community or to God in this community. We mean to pray for everyone who has taken a step to be with us on that day. We mean to pray for everyone who has taken a step to be with God on that day.
According to St. Paul, "love is patient, love is kind...it does not insist on its own way...it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." Love, in other words, is found at the limit. When Paul talks about his unutterable experience of God in 2 Corinthians 12, he says he was given a thorn in the flesh to keep him from -becoming too elated, too full of himself. Instead, Christ says to him "my grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Cor. 12: 7-9). Paul was constantly living up against of what he found familiar, comfortable, and conventional. Paul was constantly living in one sort of discomfort or another. Because Paul was driven by the love of Christ to the edges, to the thresholds.
Sometimes its just when we feel we've reached a threshold--the threshold of what we supposed to be right, the threshold of all that we grew up believing, the threshold of all that we cherish but feel we must reject or leave behind, the threshold of our understanding, our sense of the world, our own selves--sometimes, its just at those thresholds that we find God has been waiting for us.
Not all disorientation is bad, especially when it comes to God. Because if we feel no dissonance between our images of God and the living God, we've probably stopped paying attention. God is always on the threshold, but never comes under our roof. Rather, it is we who must step over our thresholds to come under the shelter of the Most High. Its we who must dare to love--to seek the good--of those whom we would rather not. Its we who must step over our pride to ask for forgiveness of our spouse, our coworker, our friends, our child. Its we who must step over our self-importance to forgive. Its we who must step over our ignorance to find the truth.
I wonder. What are the thresholds you guard? What are the limits you are unwilling to approach? And do you hear God calling you from just beyond that threshold? What are the thresholds that excite you, which are the ones that make you afraid?
Whether you are discovering your thresholds, or whether you are straining at the edge of them, how might God be looking for you there?
Let me invite you to identify one of your thresholds that needs to be crossed, and to take a step toward it.
The poet Christian Wiman published a book thirteen years ago, My Bright Abyss. It is about many things, but most of all how he found himself enfolded by God at the limit of his health and life. The title of the book comes from an unfinished poem Wiman wrote. I wonder what it might feel like for this to be your prayer, too:
My God my bright abyss
into which all my longing will not go
once more I come to the edge of all I know
and believing nothing believe in this:
And I wonder, how would you finish that last line? Can you? Will you? Will I? Ah, there's another threshold....
