A year or so ago an issue of the quarterly magazine Parabola was devoted to the topic of thresholds. This might seem at first blush an odd or obscure direction of inquiry. We don't use the word 'threshold' very often, and we don't give much thought to the transition from outside to inside that thresholds were once meant to guide. A lot of us live in homes without any space we could dignify as a 'threshold'. Entry into our houses might involve climbing stairs to a porch or crossing through a mudroom, pausing to hang up coats in a hallway or taking off our shoes in an entryway, but rarely if ever do we think of any of these spaces as thresholds. Even here in this religious home of ours, where one might expect some sort of conscious transition from the outer toward the inner world, there is no physical 'threshold'. We walk straight up a short stone pathway and into our small foyer, the tiny hub from which we direct ourselves into the kitchen or meeting room, the offices or RE classrooms, the bathrooms or the coat room. It's the staging area for our chronic traffic jam, not our threshold!

But in other eras, in virtually every culture, a great deal of attention was given to the threshold of any building, even the humblest home, because the threshold was a kind of barrier between the dangers and chaos and strangers of the outside, and the comfort, safety and connections on the inside. There were ritual practices of cleansing, of attention, that one practiced at the threshold, in order to recognize, on every entry or departure, what you were doing. Even more importance was placed on the thresholds of temples or other worship spaces. In these buildings the entryways were built to form a physical, literal transition from ordinary space and activity into sacred space and ritual; they were a way to mark the movement from the place of humans into the place of the gods.

I think that our physical lack of a threshold in this building was probably not accidental and probably not merely the consequence of a tight budget when this building was planned (although accidents and tight budgets have always been with us…). Our practical, down-to-earth faith doesn't speak to us of separate spaces for humans and for the gods, of places we designate as holy, separated from other places merely of the earth. In fact our guiding ethos is in some ways quite the opposite. When we speak of our confidence that we are part of the web of life, the intricate bindings of this fragile planet, we mean the whole thing, all of it: death as well as life, suffering as well as beauty, hard work along with Sabbath rest. So there is a way in which it makes sense to have as little barrier as possible, as little threshold as might be managed, separating who we are in this religious space of ours from who we are and what we do out there.

I like this ethos, this explanation; and yet I find that I wish we had some kind of transition space, some way of marking a shift, however subtle, into this brief time we share together. In my experience within Buddhist retreat centers, for instance, I find the transition space between entrance and meditation hall to be absolutely essential: the pause to remove shoes and prepare for silence, the deep breath taken to slow and calm the mind, the bow of respect, the conscious turning toward inner things. Being incorrigibly two-fisted in nearly all of what I do, I want it both ways. I want to feel that between our practice of religion and the living of our lives, all barriers are permeable, ephemeral. And I want to feel that we notice, that we know, that what we shape within ourselves here and what we shape with one another is something other, something different, from what we find in our solitude, or at work

In one of the articles in Parabola, author Mara Freeman writes of the importance of thresholds within Celtic culture: "The earthen floor just inside the threshold of old Irish cottages …was known as the 'welcome of the door'. Upon entering, a visitor would stand there and say a blessing for the household. This was holy ground…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."

I love that notion of having a 'welcome of the door'! Even without a physical threshold, a visible way to mark the transition as we enter our holy space to be together, it seems to me that one of the things marking this as our holy space is the kind of 'welcome of the door' we offer one another. We are not steeped in the practices or the beliefs of the ancient Celts, and we don't have the habit of speaking a blessing on one another as we pass through the doorway. And yet it seems to me that in our gathering, week by week and year by year we are, in fact, blessing one another.

Rebecca Parker is the President of Starr King School for Ministry, but she was originally ordained a Methodist and in her early years of ministry she served Methodist churches. In a recent sermon Rebecca recalled the very first day of her very first ministry. She had been assigned to a shrinking city congregation within an immense, impressive stone building that had doors so massive and heavy that it took all of her five-foot-two-inch frame to swing them open. The literal threshold of this church building was distinct; it was also forbidding, and felt to Rebecca like an almost insurmountable barrier as she approached on that first Sunday, because it had already been made brutally clear to her that a large majority of the congregation did not approve of women ministers, and were dead set against her before she'd even begun.

Rebecca writes, of that first Sunday, "By the time I was half-way up the steps I saw that the massive doors had been pushed open from within. A big, bosomy woman stepped across the threshold: Mildred Hewson. She was waiting for me. Later I would come to know Mildred well. I would learn that her life had been changed by the year she spent at the bedside of her critically ill, 20-year-old daughter as that daughter slowly died of cancer.

"People respond differently to the heart-wrenching tragedy of losing a child. Mildred responded by forming a resolve that no person would pass within her sphere of influence without finding out that they were loved. She would personally see to it. …There was no way she was going to let me cross the threshold into that sanctuary…without my first being hugged [and] encompassed in a love so strong, so sure, that I could not miss it and would never forget it….It matters what happens to us at the thresholds…"

As much as I sometimes long for a physical transition place here that we might think of as a threshold, this story lets me think about it a little differently. There's a way in which our entire space here is a threshold, a place where the outer and the inner touch. I have always believed that the heart of what we do together here, both in our sanctuary and in our classrooms, is to struggle toward a deepening of that merging point, that place where our actions in the world and our spiritual formation within are most intricately linked. And, as Rebecca Parker said, 'it matters what happens to us at the thresholds'. It matters that at least some of the time, most of us can feel the calling Mildred Hewson put into action: that no person pass within our sphere of influence without finding out that they are loved.