by Rev. Thomas Disrud

I haven’t been in school for quite a while, but this time of year still brings thoughts of a new year beginning, summer ending, time to get back into the fall routine of things.

Of course at church we prepare for a new year—we get ready for the return of Sunday school, we go from one service to two, complete with choirs. But as Labor Day gets closer, a new season is at hand.

This is what we might call a threshold time. It may be simply that a new season is beginning. But the sense of transition is something that happens no matter what age we are.

It may be that we are heading into a new grade, that our kids are heading off to college or community college or that first job. This is a time when the relationship between parent and child is changing in ways that we aren’t quite sure of. It may be that our threshold is turning a certain age. Maybe we find ourselves a little surprised that we are there. It may be that our threshold is moving to a new home or community and getting settled in or maybe it is our parents who are getting settled into a new living situation. It may be we aren’t quite sure what our threshold might be but we know that something is stirring.

All of these are what can be called liminal times—when we are between once place and another. Think of the image of an escalator or maybe an elevator. You get on and you are between one floor and another. You step on and you step off and you are in a different place. Sometimes you find yourself in the basement when you expected to go up. Sometimes that transition is a short one but sometimes it can take years. Sometimes it takes a while before we know.

A couple weeks ago I received the invitation to my 25^th high school reunion next month. I hadn’t thought much about this and it was a little surprising to receive it. The letter made me think about a whole series of thresholds from that time.

When I graduated from high school in my small Midwestern town, I remember saying goodbye to friends and teachers and family. I remember the bigness of leaving this place where I had spent my whole life to go to a college in a city where I would be exposed to all kinds of new ideas, to all kinds of new people.

I remember those first days in the city. I remember the noise. I remember the sight of people eating out of garbage cans for the first time. I remember meeting classmates from whole different worlds than my own. I would be open to worlds of thinking that I had not been exposed to before. When I think back to that time I could not have possibly imagined where my life might lead. But I know I can look at my life today and see doors that were opened back then that led to other doors that led me to places where I find myself today.

And I look back on it now and see what I threshold that time was.

Not every threshold might be that big of a threshold. But what we learn in life is that we are always crossing thresholds. We learn that as we walk through one door another one might close, but that another one, and maybe two or three then suddenly open. Sometimes the world seems to throw us for a loop and all we can try to do is remain standing up.

As the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina comes next week, we are reminded of all the stories of people displaced, people who have lost everything, people still far away from home. The stories, all this time later, still seem a little overwhelming. Stories of families separated, stories of getting used to new places. Stories of great injustices that most of all affected those on the margins. It is still hard to comprehend.

Something like Katrina is a reminder of the many ways that we are not in control of our lives. And sometimes it is the impetus for change that couldn’t have been imagined.

Take the story of Mark Folse. If you met him today in New Orleans, it would be easy to assume that he was one of the people who managed to stay in the city after the hurricane. He is out there running to and from neighborhood association meetings and talking nonstop on his blog about how the city should be rebuilt.

But Folse didn’t lose his family or home to last year’s hurricanes. He moved to New Orleans from Fargo, N.D., after the storms—uprooting his family but determined to make a difference in reviving New Orleans.

Folse is originally from New Orleans, but until a few months ago Folse and his wife, Rebecca, were raising their two children near her family in Fargo.

But when Hurricane Katina hit New Orleans and the levees in the city broke down, Folse became more and more upset. He spent all hours of the day on his blog, the Wet Bank Guide (http://wetbankguide.blogspot.com), which he started the day of the hurricane.

“He was just beside himself,” his wife said. “He did relief work fundraising and that did help. But then one day he says, ‘I got to move home.’”

This didn’t seem like a particularly logical thing at the time. But to his surprise, his wife agreed to the move. “I said, ‘OK, how do we do it?’ And I think he was in shock.” Their children would be entering junior high school and high school respectively the following fall, so the couple figured this would be the best time for the transition.

Within a few weeks, she was hired as a human resources manager. She moved first, then Mark and their children. The time has not been easy. They moved into a home in a neighborhood damaged by flooding but not destroyed by it. Large parts of neighborhoods are still deserted, finding reputable contractors to do work on a house is not easy, and just about everything is more expensive.

But even after an especially bad day of haggling with contractors, fighting city bureaucrats on the phone or worrying about the conditions of their children’s school, they don’t regret the move.

“We are just giving something to this community,” Rebecca says. “So maybe we are not the same economically… but on the other hand, look at the people here,” she says. “There’s people who still don’t have jobs. People who don’t have homes, people who don’t have a couch, people who have absolutely nothing. We are all in this together.”

We don’t, of course, always have the option to say yes or no to that place we find ourselves in.

Sometimes in life we are asked to move when the spirit says move. Sometimes we don’t know we are on a threshold until we are walking through that door. Sometimes there is not logic in doing something but nonetheless we are moved to go in that direction. It is as if the universe picks us up by the scruff of the neck and says, “Now you are going to be over here.”

And sometimes the way might not be so clear, but it comes to us nonetheless. Writer Thomas Moore tells about a dream that a woman described to him. She is in a garden, holding a child’s hand and moving toward a break in a hedge, when a butterfly lands on her nose and covers her face. The break in the hedge opens to a central area where the sun was shining brilliantly.

Sometimes we have to be paying attention to see where those gaps in the hedge present themselves. If we are not open we may miss them all together.

It is our job to look for those openings in the hedge. It may not be very obvious but it is there. That is the opening that invites us in and asks us to enter.

Yes, these are times when we have to pay attention. They are times when we have to have courage. They are times when we have to trust in what we can’t know. They are times when the soul is open in a way that it might not be at other times and when it’s possible to move to a new place, to grow in that way. And we can’t always know when we will be ready to do that. Sometimes it may be our job to get out of the way and let the spirit do its work.

The writer Pema Chodron writes about a man who wanted to change a lot of things about himself. He was determined to get rid of anger and lust, his laziness and pride. But mostly he wanted to get rid of fear. His meditation teacher told him to stop struggling, but that didn’t work either. He took that as just another way of explaining how to overcome his obstacles. The man was stuck

So finally the teacher sent him off to meditate in a tiny hut in the foothills. He shut the door and settled down to practice, and when it got dark he lit three small candles. Around midnight he heard a noise in the corner of the room, and in the darkness he saw a very large snake. It looked to him like a king cobra. It was right in front of him, swaying. All night he stayed totally alert, keeping his eyes on the snake. He was so afraid that he couldn’t move. In that time there was just the snake and himself and his fear.

Just before dawn the last candle went out, and the man found himself crying. He cried not in despair but from tenderness. As he sat through that liminal time, he felt, suddenly, the longing of other living things. He came to accept—really accept—that he was angry and jealous, that he resisted and struggled, and that he was afraid. And at the same moment came to accept his struggles, he also came to accept how he was precious beyond measure, how he was wise and foolish, all at the same time. In that moment he was filled with gratitude, he stood up in the total darkness, walked toward the snake, and bowed to it. He then fell asleep on the floor. When he awoke, the snake was gone. He never knew if it was his imagination or if it had really been there, but in the end it really didn’t seem to matter. When the man had that much intimacy with fear, it caused his dramas to collapse.

Chodron quotes a student as saying: “Buddha nature, cleverly disguised as fear, kicks out (butts) into being receptive.”

As we reflect on threshold times, I want to mention our church. As we embark on a new church year it seems that we, as a community, are crossing a kind of threshold. Seeing the big hole being dug for our new education and community building, the Buchan Building, has been amazing to watch. It, along with the work being done on our existing spaces, has been a great joy this summer. The project is actually happening. And as I have looked at the progress of the construction, I know that we as a community are entering a kind of in-between space. The building is a symbol of the future, but just what will that future look like? More space, more people, the possibility of a larger voice for justice in our community? We don’t know just what all this will look like, but we are walking over this threshold, together.

We look back on the turning points of our lives and we can see, perhaps more clearly what any giving event, any given threshold has meant. That is the gift of time and perspective. We can see with more clarity those liminal moments when possibility was present. They are neither beginning nor ending, life nor death, but that liminal space in between. They are the spaces for dreaming, for intuition, for memory.  They are also the places where fear is likely to be present. But we still find ourselves standing in those places.

Poet Czeslaw Milosz writes:

All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
Where everything is just the opposite and the word is
Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately,
Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh
And knows that if there is no other shore
We will walk that aerial bridge all the same. 

In this new season, in this new time, may we have the courage to be wherever we are. May we have the courage to look through the door that might tell us where we are going. And as we go from one place to the next, through it all may we be grounded in faith and always ready to say yes. Amen. 

Prayer

Spirit of life, be with us this day. No matter where we find ourselves in the changing fortunes of the world, be with us this day. Open us that we might beware of what we are being called to do. We pray for our lives, for our church community. We pray for our world. Amen.

Benediction

No matter what threshold you find yourself on, ground yourself in faith and in love. May all your days be full of surprises.