Doorways

Dave Brisbin 5.3.20 The best part of being a pastor is being trusted enough to be invited into people’s lives. To see and be a part of their vulnerabilities and fears as well as joys and celebrations. And during this lockdown, many people I’m talking to have multiple losses and difficult circumstances layered over the quarantine crisis. And each one, whether a death, illness, unemployment, homelessness, a hospitalization, represents a loss of the relationships and routines, the way of life that we call our world and our lives. That experience of being thrust into a doorway between the world we knew and whatever world is coming next is sometimes called liminal space from the Latin word for threshold or limit. To be in the doorway is uncertain, full of unknowns, and is experienced with enough fear and disturbance that we will try to flop back down to one world or another and reset normal as quickly as we can. But Jesus spent his entire public life in the doorways of liminal space. He understood that the purpose of our lives—to see with the Father’s eyes and live accordingly—can only happen in the doorways between the things we think we already know. That only in the doorways are we free enough from our illusions of control and security that we can see past all the distinctions and judgments we create to the unseen connection that is the real truth of things. To accept the disturbance of the doorways, to remain in that breathless state of between-ness is the first step toward the compassion, understanding, and love that always comes from seeing with the Father’s eyes.