Threshold...

People are odd creatures: We are at the same time very good and very sinful. These qualities do not cancel each other out. Faith is to live and to hold onto that paradox. Those with room for those two seemingly contradictory truths to coexist are the ones who can recognize the Kingdom of God.

The absurdity of human reality will not shock them: They've already faced it inside themselves. The enemy is not out there, the enemy is us. And when they see the paradox, they stop fighting the world. They stop hating and avoiding the world. They're free to live that threshold existence that we call the Kingdom.

Why call it threshold? Because the threshold is between the house and the outside. We live on the boundary, on the narrow house and the outside. We live on the boundary, on the narrow road that leads to life (Matthew 7:13–14), in between two undeniable truths. Can you live in that in-between? To care, yet not care at all? Those who can will be free to welcome the Kingdom. They are free to pass through because they don't have any turf - whether possessions, identity, reputation or self-image - to protect or maintain. The threshold experience is always getting slammed in the face - with paradox.

(from Preparing for Christmas with Richard Rohr)

 

I find this whole idea of thresholds, thin places, places between, somehow incredibly moving. The thin place, where the "door between the world / And the next is cracked open for a moment" (Sharlande Sledge) is a kind of heartland for me, the only place where I begin to truly feel myself. They are not common, and yet they are as ordinary as dogs and daylight. I sometimes think that when we finally reach Heaven, we'll recognise it as the home we've always known, and never found.