Thresholds

Life is full of transition moments.  Sometimes we can see them coming, but sometimes they surprise us.  More recently after having read a good deal about Celtic spirituality, I have started calling transition moments by a different name.  In Celtic spirituality these moments are called thresholds.  What caused me to embrace the Celtic word is the image it creates.  Every time we walk into a room, a church or a home, we step through a threshold.  It allows movement from one place, or one time, to another. 

 

While the moment of death may seem like the biggest threshold of all, we are constantly stepping into such moments in our spiritual journey.  Most assuredly our baptism is a threshold moment.  Many of our mountain top spiritual experiences also fit the definition as they always take us from one point to another in our spiritual life.  Sometimes people walk into our lives and speak such a word that we know that heeding their word is going to mean walking in a different way which is still another threshold moment. 

 

However, the most common and ordinary threshold moment is found in the space between the immediacy of the present and the immediacy of what comes in what is about to become the present moment.  When we consider how God goes with us, we usually think of Him out there ahead of us making the way forward for us.  Actually, God is not experienced today in the future, but in the moment into which we are walking.  He is as close as the next step, the next moment, the next place.  God is always revealing Himself in the here and now moments of our life, but we often do not have eyes that have learned to see.