Sermon given by Rev. Frank Clarkson, November 27, 2022.
This day feels like a threshold to me, a transition from one season to another. It’s the end of Thanksgiving weekend, and the first Sunday in Advent, and so I find myself feeling a bit betwixt and between. Do you know what I mean?
Apparently the Christmas shopping season officially started on Friday, so there’s that. December is a month that many of us experience as a particularly busy time, with extra pressures and more things to do. At the same time, the season of Advent, these four weeks that lead up to Christmas, are meant to be quiet and spacious, a time of waiting and emptying even, making room in our hearts, so we’re ready for Christmas, when it does come.
That’s one reason we offer our Vespers for Advent on the next four Wednesdays, to provide a space for quiet and beauty and a some peace in the middle of the week. If you could use some of that, we’ll be here these Wednesdays at 5:30 pm.
Today I want to reflect with you on this idea of the threshold as an in-between place, a place or time of transition, which can be an uncomfortable place and also a place of possibility. Haven’t we had experiences of this over the past couple of years? How often have you made plans and had to cancel or postpone them? Even now, as things have gotten better, aren’t we still in an uncertain time? We don’t know what lies ahead. This has been one of the trying things about the pandemic, all this uncertainty, but is it possible that this has also been good for us? That it’s made us live more in the moment, and has made us more aware that the future is never certain?
There’s a classic book about this, called Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes, by William Bridges. Bridges says every transition starts with an ending, when something comes to an end. And this ending makes room, eventually, for a new beginning. But, he says, there’s an important step between an ending and a new beginning, which he calls the The Neutral Zone.
People often want to hurry through the neutral zone, because it’s an uncertain and uncomfortable place to be. I still remember what it felt like when I graduated college, and my parents’ friends kept asking, “What are you going to do now?” They were just curious, but I felt a certain amount of pressure to have an answer, so I went and found one!
William Bridges says the neutral zone is a place of possibility, and that if you can hang out with the uncertainty of waiting and not knowing for a while, if you can be open to that, then something wonderful and creative can happen, something you never could have imagined or expected has room in which to unfold and appear.
The French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin wrote a lovely prayer that begins with these lines:
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
This is the invitation of Advent: to wait and watch in these darkening days, to be open to wonder and mystery in our midst, to trust it this season’s slow unfolding. To be, as Van Morrison sang, “a dweller on the threshold.” To try and simply be, at least some of the time, present to this moment.
This is a counter-cultural posture; to trust that good things are unfolding in our midst, that we don’t have to do anything to make them happen, except to wait, in hope and expectation. These days, when things around us seem to be speeding up, this is a good time to make some space and time for quiet, for reflection; some time to rest from the cares of your life and the world.
Many of you know that I’m passionate about fly fishing. On the river, people always ask, “Having any luck? Did you catch anything?” But at its best, the kind of fishing I love is not as much about catching as it is about wading into that fluid and flowing world, waving a stick around with as much grace as possible, and waiting to see what happens! In fishing, I live in Advent. On my better days anyway, I’m happy to just be fishing, and not worried about the catching.
We’ve been on this pandemic journey for so long now, and it’s had so many twists and turns, that we all must have asked, “How much longer? When will things get back to normal?” Right? I’m grateful that things are as good as they are these days, and I’m cautiously looking forward to Christmas Eve, here in our sanctuary for the first time since 2019. But still, these days we are still in a threshold kind of time, aren’t we?
As we inhabit whatever this new phase of pandemic will be, it’s a good time to wonder, are there things we want to let go of? Are there new ways of being that we want to lean into? how do we want to live in these days?
This is the invitation of the threshold, of the in-between places. To wait, and watch, and wonder. To be open to what might be unfolding or in process of becoming. Do you know the word “liminal”? It comes from the Latin word for “threshold.” A liminal time or space is one in-between, when something has ended, and what’s coming is not clear yet.
We’ve been living in a liminal time for a while now, and it can be tiring, this dwelling on the threshold, but it can also be a place of growth and discovery. Haven’t we learned some new skills, and become more flexible and adaptable and resilient? Would you say that you’re stronger because of what you’ve been through? I’m grateful for how we as a congregation are stronger because of how we’ve come though this time together.
Advent is a liminal time that invites us to be open to what is unfolding; it invites us to hold open a space what may be gestating, in us and around us, in these days. It invites us to look for ways to hold open that kind of spacefor others, too, so they can be more whole, more alive, more free.
The poet David Whyte does this by taking people on walking pilgrimages to sacred places in Ireland and Italy. He wrote the poem that was our reading today after leading a pilgrimage to an ancient tomb, and I invite you to hear his words again, to hear them as speaking directly to you now; to imagine he’s describing a place that you have been traveling towards, or an awareness of new becoming that you are seeking after.
Hear again the poem, “Etruscan Tomb,” by David Whyte:
We stopped
to say a simple word
of thanks that we could walk
to this place and find it
like a promised
understanding,
like an intuition long held,
that it stood always
at the end
of the long road
we took to get here
as if to welcome us;
as if to teach and hold us
in this time, now,
to understand at last,
how close the threshold
is that takes us
like a blessing
from a world
we think we know
and turns our face
to wonder
by the gift
of a sheer
imagined absence,
the twilight sense
of the ultimate purification,
to love and let go.
My prayer for us in this season of Advent is that this threshold season will invite us, and take us, from the world we think we know, into the mystery that lies all around. That our faces will be turned to wonder, and toward each other, and our hearts filled with joy and peace, now and always,
Amen.