Thresholds

We are called to be larger than who we can imagine being in this moment.
{Sr. Joan Brown}

A threshold is a demarcation between the known and the unknown, an entry point to a new frontier.

It’s not an easy place at which to stand as it represents a break from our familiar or ordered understanding of things. One more step, and we are in the unfamiliar, a disordered version of our experience.

These threshold moments exist in each of our lives, some large and some small, some by our choosing and some purely by chance. Each one is an opportunity for development depending on our choice to step across that demarcation line or retreat from it.

And the reason it is so hard to take that next step, and why we so often retreat from that threshold, is that we feel utterly alone.

But we are not alone.

Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact. We are more connected than we realize, more connected than we allow ourselves to admit. Perhaps that’s because we’ve bought into the myth of “going it alone,” and perhaps because being connected makes us feel exposed and vulnerable. To be seen by another for who and what we are, especially as we stand at the threshold of our own becoming? I admit that is a scary thought.

And (and this is such an important “and”) it is precisely that vulnerability that leads to our connection and that connection is what leads us to our greatest strength: the ability to rely upon one another to see us not just as we are but as we may yet be. To hold an imaginative sense of one another’s larger self at the moment when we alone are least able to hold it is a gift both precious and powerful.

To stand at a threshold, then, is to stand in a place of complete connection, summoning courage from one another to cross over and into the frontier of our largest possible self.

I don’t know if the world can be saved but if it can be, this is how we will do it.