ON THE THRESHOLD

There are boxes in my life. Piles and piles of boxes litter the landscape of our old/new home and our new/old home.  Maureen and I are moving, of course, back to Gorham, after our years of wandering in the disastrous real estate wilderness.  It feels good for both of us to be moving back, although, like most transitions it is fraught with anxiety and tinged with sadness.  Transitions are hard.  While there is certainly excitement and anticipation, there are even more moments of chaos and disorientation.  There are times of regret and doubts.  There is a sea of boxes in which you've packed your entire life and you can't remember which box holds what things (no, the labeling job is never adequate as there are at least twenty boxes marked miscellaneous).  

However difficult it is for us, it is much worse for the dogs.  They are completely creatures of habit and routine.  They do the same things each day at pretty nearly the same times, and they depend on that consistency.  They don't like new experiences or new places.  Our more sensitive dog, Rosie (a Newfoundland), on arriving at the old parsonage the day we moved in, approached the front door and absolutely refused to enter.  She couldn't just continue standing there on the threshold, and yet she just couldn't bring herself to step over.  She was paralyzed.  It didn't feel right or smell right to her and she just refused to go in.

Some years ago, when we were traveling in the south of England (with a theatre troupe), we met a farmer in a pub in Cornwall.  He told us the sad story of how he had arranged to buy the perfect farm that he had always wanted.  He put some "earnest money" into the contract with the seller and then he spent a few days there "getting used to the place."  Ultimately, he backed out on the sale, gave up on his dream farm and even lost his money because, as he put it, "the dog wouldn't settle."  (The story is funnier if I can say that with a Cornish accent.)  Obviously, he was more committed to his dog's mental health than we are.  But dogs show us what is in our animal hearts-- they don't trust the unknown, they trust what is familiar.  And sometimes, when an uncertain future looms, they just want to refuse to enter.

We are all living in uncertain times right now and, like the dogs, it makes us anxious.  I've been amazed by the national health care debate.  It has become so obvious over the last decades that the health care system in this country is a disaster.  We spend more per person than any other country, and yet we are less healthy than most, less cared for, and so many, many people are just completely left out.  Horror stories abound and no one feels good about what we have.  The status quo is simply not an option, and yet, so many people are terrified of any change.  People are afraid of the future if it feels different.  Sometimes, even when staying where we are is not an option, we just refuse to enter the next moment.  We don't want change.  It doesn't feel right or smell right.  We become paralyzed.  And so our nation seems to be.

The current debate here in Maine about marriage equality has so much of the same feeling to it.  Yes, there are people with strong moral convictions on both sides of the debate (including me, as you all know), but for so many it is just the image of men married to men and women married to women that seems so alien, so new, so unfamiliar.  For many, it doesn't seem to feel right or smell right and so, no matter what our brains tell us, no matter how impossible or unfair it is to stay where we are, fear paralyzes us and we just can't step over that next threshold.

Of course, coping with such fears is what our religious faith is about.  For some, hanging onto "that old time religion" gives them a feeling of being in touch with something old and familiar that doesn't change much.  Our religious traditions usually lag behind the culture by a few decades or even a few centuries.  The Roman Catholic Church just recently lifted the excommunication of Galileo from the sixteenth century, admitting that he may have been right about the earth orbiting the sun.  But there is something far deeper and more important in the way in which we turn to faith in our fears of the future or our anxieties about change.

Faith gives us a relationship upon which we can rely that is stronger than our fears, that is deeper than any change, and that outlasts any transition.  Faith gives us the confidence that no matter what lies over the next threshold-- the basic foundation of our lives, of who we are, of what really matters-- is secure and unchanged.  There is something that we can hold on to that touches eternity and sets our feet on firmer ground than anything our times and trials can shake.  Note that I did not say that it is our beliefs that we can hold on to.  Beliefs change, become outmoded, and can only narrow our lives if we come to depend on them for our security.  It is a relationship that matters.  It is a love that sustains us.  It is the embrace of God that gets us over the next threshold.

And so, last night, our first night back in the old parsonage, lying in a hastily put together bed amid the sea of boxes at whose contents we could only guess, feeling the disorientation of a new place and the chaos of massive change, Maureen and I could embrace each other and know that as long as we had that, everything else would be OK.  Likewise, as Rosie stood at the door, unable to cross over the threshold into her new world, I got down on my knees and gently nudged her forward in my embrace, loving her into the future.  So God does with us all.