The Welcome of the Door: A Sermon on Thresholds
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- Created on Sunday, 31 October 2010 01:00
- Written by Jenny M. Rankin
{player 2010-10-31-9am-sermon.mp3}
I first went to Ireland on a hunch
The summer I was 20
For some reason I’d decided to write my senior thesis
On W. B. Yeats, the Irish poet
I applied for a travel grant from my university, bought a red North face backpack, and a plane ticket, and was on my way.
I remember sitting in the library at Trinity College in Dublin
My fingers touching the creamy yellow pages of the letters that Yeats had written to Maude Gonne the beautiful woman he loved
I remember hitchhiking around the green countryside--
Climbing the heathery hills, rain and wind on my face,
Waves crashing at the farthest end of Dingle peninsula.
It felt like the end of the world.
It felt like a country where I belonged.
Tonight is All Hallows’ Eve. Samhain it was called by the ancient Celts, the peoples of Scotland and Ireland
They believed that the world of the living and the world of the dead existed side by side, right next to each other, with only a thin veil separating them.
And how on one night in all the year, on All Hallows Eve, the veil is lifted. We can suddenly “see” that we are standing right at the edge, right at that place where two worlds meet. And on that night, souls can cross over, go back and forth.
In Ireland, the family sets the table: they lay an extra place, brush up the hearth, put out a bowl of clean water. All is ready. To welcome the souls home that night.
Today we come here and weave our own Unitarian Universalist version of All Souls Day.
We sweep up our hearth, speak the names, light the candles. Perhaps when we get home we’ll do what Pam did with the kids today: clear a place on the kitchen counter or a window sill to put a photograph, light a candle.
This is the time of year, we welcome souls, too. Welcome them at least in the hearth of our hearts if nowhere else. We do something together that so often we do on our own.
It feels good to be together as we listen to the names roll out
We know for some of us that this is complicated, that relationships in our lives can be difficult, hat there are people who have died who have hurt us, sometimes terribly.
It is not an easy thing we do
But it is important
As a community we turn ourselves towards our dead
We stop
We pay attention
We remember
We give thanks
We light a candle
* * * *
To the ancient Celts, All Hallows’ Eve was one night in all the year when the veil was lifted and you realized that you stood right there at the edge between the two worlds. Right there at the threshold.
So now I’m thinking of other thresholds.
The place on the horizon where the sky meets the land. Where the ocean meets the shore. Where daylight meets the dark of night.
“My father loved first light,” writes the poet
He would sit alone
At the yellow Formica table
In the kitchen with his coffee cup
And sip and look out….”
Now, she loves this early morning time.
“First bird call. Wings
In silhouette. How the steeples of the evergreens make a selvage for the gaunt emerging sky.”
“My father picks up his cup….he knows something there in the half light he can’t know any other way.” The dawn is a threshold place.
Ancient peoples believed there was great spiritual power in these threshold places. Spiritual power: that meant danger as well as possibility.
In Ireland, writes folklorist Mara Freeman, “The earthen floor just inside the threshold of old Irish cottages in the south and west was known as ‘the welcome of the door.’ Upon entering a visitor would stand here and say a blessing for the household. . . . . . An in-between place, it was sacred because it marked the boundary between the life of the human family within and the wide world without.
It was neither “here” nor “there” and so it allowed a crack to open between the worlds where power could seep in.”
That power was unpredictable, it could be dangerous, and so they took special measures to protect themselves: they hung symbols at the doorway, sprigs of rowan wood, St. Brighid’s cross1.
There are thresholds in our lives as well
Some are predictable of course:
We stand on the threshold of adolescence, of adulthood, of marriage or parenting.
Others come at us out of the blue and we find ourselves facing a change that we had never anticipated.
In this year of ministerial transition, this community stands on a threshold. As do I.
What we are told by the ancient myths, stories, religions, is that thresholds matter. They are places of mystery and power where fear may be heightened AND the possibility of creativity is greater.
Thomas Moore writes “there are places in this world that are neither here nor there, neither up nor down . . . . These are the in-between places, difficult to find and even more challenging to sustain. Yet they are the most fruitful places of all.”
It is here, Moore says, that we learn things that can’t be discovered any other way.
It is here, Moore says, where deep souls prosper.
It can be a place of tremendous fear. Discomfort. Unease. And the true home of creativity.
We are tempted to get out, to rush on, and Moore tells us “It takes considerable courage to stay as long as needed in a place between.”2
* * * * *
Thresholds.
I remember getting a phone call from a woman I knew, I’ll call her Sarah. She had lived with cancer for 12 years, been through all kinds of treatments and called to say she had entered hospice care.
Could I come, she asked?
Of course I could come. Did I feel prepared or ready. In twenty years of ministry there have been other families, other deaths. I‘ve read books, taken classes, gone to workshops.
Do I ever feel prepared or ready? Is my heart always in my throat as I get in the car, make the drive, ring the doorbell.
By happenstance that week I’d picked up a magazine that had been kicking around the house and read a Native American tale, a story about a woman guide who walked with people on the boundary lands, that place where the world of the living and the world of the dead came together.
I didn’t feel prepared as I got in my car, but now I had an image. Death was a doorway and we were approaching the threshold. I drove to the house.
I remembered one more thing I had read “Acknowledging our poverty seems to be the one needful thing in crossing a threshold. To utter a prayer or receive a blessing—to place trust in a reality larger than our compass—often marks a rite of passage.”3
Acknowledge my poverty and say a prayer. Well I could do that. I talked to myself out loud in the car. As silly as it sounds, it helped. I said I was nervous. I didn’t know what I had to offer.
If prayer is giving voice to what lies inside of us, well I could do that as I drove.
Over the next few weeks, I went to the house. I never knew what I would find. Family members came and went. Nurses came and went. There were conversations, conflict, decisions to make, working things through, fatigue, tears, laughter.
Sarah listened to bird song at the beginning of the day, ate food when she felt like it, and spent time with the people she loved best in all the world.
Things were different every day. Things were not orderly or clear or under control. They were what they were and that was OK. We were walking the boundary together, all of us, inhabiting that threshold time and place.
There was discomfort and power and mystery and fear and possibility
It was all there. It wasn’t tidy.
It could be wearing and uncomfortable and breathtaking all at the same time.
And what mattered most of all was that we were not alone. We had one another for company as we walked that boundary together.
It was early one morning in June, just at first light, just at dawn, when Sarah crossed over the threshold. It was a Celtic kind of a day, misty and soft and grey. There were birds singing outside her window, singing her on, singing her over.
* * * *
My people come from Scotland and Ireland and so did Sarah’s and I’ll leave you with an image from that part of the world.
Imagine we are standing just outside a cottage on a hill on the western shore of Ireland. Perhaps you know that land.
The wind blows strong around the walls. The ocean rolls below, waves pounding up onto black rocks, the spray flying high.
The air is salty and grey. We have walked for miles over the hills, you and I, and now we are tired. It is time to go inside.
Perhaps this doorway reminds of us another in our life. A place where we need to make a decision, take an action, set a course.
Maybe this doorway is one we have longed to walk across or one we have dreaded. A place we have lingered. Not knowing. Unsure. Stuck.
And then, all of a sudden, it’s almost as if something beyond us and also inside us has reached out and lifted us across the lintel of that doorway.
We step inside.
We are standing on that bit of earthen floor that our ancestors named as sacred ground. That little place just inside the threshold that they called “the welcome of the door.”
Almost without knowing it, we have moved. We have crossed. We are there. In that new place.
You bring us, Great Spirit, to the edges and boundaries, the thresholds and the doorways of our lives.
May we find the strength to stand with one another in those places
To stay, in the face of uncertainty, possibility, even fear
To stand together and when the time comes, to step through to the other side.
The ancestors whisper their assurance
“The welcome of the door” they say, “the welcome of the door to you.”
Footnotes
1. Mara Freeman, “The Flaming Door, Parabola, February 2000.
2. Thomas Moore, “Neither Here nor There,” Parabola, February 2000.
3. Ibid.