The Lord will watch your going
out and your coming in… (Psalm 121:8)
Do you sometimes have guests who
don’t know how to leave? They say,
“Well, we really should be on our way…” They
say, “Good heavens, look at the time!” They
may even stand up. But they don’t
go. They linger. They talk.
In the worst case scenario they sit down again… When you do get them outside, they hang around
the car and chatter. In the days of Jane
Austen there was the aunt or cousin who came for a week and stayed for a month. My point is that knowing when and how to
leave, simply and without fuss, is a virtue.
Arriving also is something to consider. I am thinking of the person who comes in the
door and yells up the stairs, “It’s me…!”
Rather like Bertie Wooster who would not marry Madeline Bassett (or was
it Honoria Glossop?) because she would come up behind him at the breakfast
table, put her hands over his eyes and say, “Guess who…?” I imagine we can all think of the person who invariably
enters a room talking loudly, making an entrance, coming at you like a
blitzkrieg. Whatever is already
happening in the room, it may all be summarily interrupted.
Esther de Waal, years ago, moved
into the ancient mansion at Canterbury Cathedral where her husband had been
appointed Dean. The Deanery was where
the Benedictine monks had once lived. Esther
began to cope with this place by finding out all she could about local
Benedictine history and what it taught.
She became a wonderful teacher of both Benedictine and Celtic
spirituality. In later years she moved
to live on the Welsh Borders, and it is there that she wrote a little book
called “To Pause At the Threshold”.[1] It is lovely study of Benedictine
sensitivity, how to enter a new situation, in her case going to live on the
border… to pause at the threshold, with an open heart and an open mind, a quiet
heart and mind.
A threshold is a special place, a
transition space from one place to another.
Any threshold is a place to pause… at any rate interiorly. Jewish homes have a small device on their
doorpost, called a mezuzah – a little cylinder usually containing some
words from the Torah, the Law. You pause
and touch the mezuzah as you enter.
Another threshold is surely the transition from life to death, or from
unmarried to married (these days, perhaps the reverse), child to adult…. Or the
doorway of baptism. The transition for
instance to caring for a loved one disappearing into senility… someone called
it the long goodbye… is a threshold to be reckoned with. Many transitions may seem trivial, and yet…
it’s as well to pause. The hour before
dawn is a threshold. Any threshold is a
place of ambiguity – there is a lot we don’t know at that moment, that kairos. It is a place to watch and listen. Every time of meditation, of contemplative
prayer, is a threshold – we are at the edge of what we know and understand, we
are waiting (one of the Psalmist’s favourite words) for whatever is to come in
life, and therefore we are being still in faith and love. As the Psalmist says: The Lord will guard you from evil, will
guard your soul. The Lord will watch your
going out and your coming in, now and for ever.
[1] An
expanded version of this theme by Esther de Waal is published as Living On
The Border (2014).
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