Christmas is the Threshold of Invitation

A Christmas Poem

In a mountain town near my home in Western North Carolina, I found these doors which led into a church. I can better put it this way for you, these doors found me. It was not the church which begged for my attention but these doors. I stood there, almost as if standing in a threshold of invitation.

After the year we’ve had, perhaps all of us have had, I’m thinking that what might just help us all the most is for the doors to be opened to each of us that would offer us a threshold of invitation—a place of departure but also, a place of arrival.

What is it that you most need to depart from this season?

What is it that might offer me a new beginning?

What or whom do I most want to be behind these doors of invitation?

If you sit with these soulful questions, the answers, no matter what they might be, will lead you to a threshold—a place between; a space to hold you and offer you new understanding; new vision and new life.

Christmas is this kind of threshold for us I believe. As someone who believes not only in the Christ child but also the Christ light and the Christ life, the big, red doors of my heart are ready to be opened to what lies ahead. These doors symbolize something very deep and personal for me. As I prepare to walk through these doors, my work is to prepare my own heart—not just buy the last minute gifts and get the right food, these doors are really the access to my ow heart.

These doors remind me that is it the heart—that great inner space where both Spirit and True Self reside in soldarity. It is in that room—that space that I am most eager now to open up for me.

I do not nor can I confess to know what will be inside these doors. But what I know is this. Nothing in the past is as inviting as what lies ahead.

This is the invitaiton of Christmas—the threshold of invitation.

Christmas Blessings!

Steve

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My poem, titled, The Threshold Doors of Christmas, was written in my mind as I stood before these church doors in Highlands, North Carolina about an hour drive from our home in Brevard. We met friends there for lunch this past week and I took the time to walk around a white framed Espicopal church there and ended up at the front door of the church where I at last saw these red doors adorned with Christmas wreaths. I wrote some of the lines using “Notes” on my iphone this week and then today, in the quiet of this very Winter Solstice day wrote the poem. I hope you enjoy it and I hope you might be so kind as to leave a comment for me and us who read Substack here.

What’s the line or phrase that stands out for you?

What do you notice as you look at the photo I took?

What is your “name” of your threshold?

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