This week’s column reflects on a hike and the close of the season of Advent.
Friday morning I hiked a portion of the Johnny Park Road, one of my favorite areas in the Roosevelt National Forest. It was a day with no destination. I hiked where my feet took me, exploring the perimeter of a large meadow I’d often passed and meant to linger in; climbing to the top of a knob; following a game trail partway along a ridge. Usually I hike with purpose, with a destination in mind, but on this day the route I chose was directed by what I saw in the sky.
For nearly three hours I hiked underneath the edge of the storm front that brought snow and bitter cold to the Front Range on Friday night. Directly over my head the sky was divided: roiling grey thick with snow to the west and innocuous blue calm to the east. It’s a fascinating and unsettling way to hike, and you find yourself lulled into meditativeness on the one hand and then shaken into full alertness on the other.
I like hiking in strong and gusting wind. It reminds me that God is, that God is large and that I am not. I also found this hike on the edge, on the threshold, to be a good metaphor for the season of Advent. Advent is often described as a season of hopeful expectancy, and of course it is. But it’s also a season of hiking along an edge or standing in a threshold. Advent is an unsettled time, a time when you can stand in one place and look back at the comfort and relative clarity of what was, and then turn in the opposite direction and peer unseeing into the dense grey unknown of what is to be.
In an age of 24-hour-everything we have largely lost touch with the symbolic power of thresholds. In our history as Christians that has not always been so. The ancient monks marked thresholds throughout the day with prayer, which came to be known as The Hours or The Daily Office. The turning of night into day was marked with Morning Prayer. Noonday Prayer marked the zenith of the sun overhead in the sky. The turning of day into night became Evening Prayer, and the threshold between activity and sleep was marked by Compline. There were more offices or sets of prayers in the monastic day, but the point is simply that our ancestors in faith paid attention to thresholds, and responded to them with prayerful intent.
Thresholds invite us to be aware of two disparate things or states of being. I think of Mary, whose pregnancy was a threshold time. She could look back with some clarity at her life as a young Jewish girl and do little more than peer into the unknown ahead called motherhood. I think of many in our nation who are hovering in an uneasy threshold, looking back with longing at what is known, and peering ahead anxiously hoping for a clearer vision of what is to come. The fascinating nature of thresholds is that they divide the known from the unknown. They give us a door frame to cling to or at least lean against until we muster the courage to step on through.
Not feeling courageous? Here’s the thing: the mystics remind us that the Christ figure who pre-existed all Creation is equally present and alive and active on both sides of any threshold. As you prepare to step into what is unseen, unknown, and perhaps for you unbidden, consider these words attributed to St Patrick, the 5th century missionary—for what do missionaries do anyway, but step through into the unknown?
Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
