This was another Spiritual Director training weekend for me. My heart and brain and filled to overflowing with new ideas, wisdom, and processing. I'm sharing a reflective reading from my blog, The Art of Powering Down. I love the idea of thresholds and the invitation they hold. This essay feels like a smaller & deeper practice. I hope as the week unfold you’ll notice and bless the thresholds.
I love when something utterly ordinary and quotidian (daily) suddenly sparkles with meaning, purpose, and the possibilities for growth.
I recently read (and loved!) The Soul's Slow Ripening; 12 Celtic Practices for Seeking the Sacred by Christine Valters Paintner. The first practice of the twelve she writes about was the practice of thresholds. This was a new idea/practice for me. She described it as:
Thresholds are the space between, where we move from one time to another, as in the threshold of dawn today or of dusk to dark; one space to another, as in times of inner or outer journeying or pilgrimage; and one awareness to another, as in times when our old structures start to fall away, and we begin to build something new. The Celt's describe thresholds as "thin times or places" where heaven and earth are closer together, and the veil between worlds is thin. In the Celtic imagination, thresholds are potent places."
Christine Valter Paintner- The Soul's Slow Ripening
Every. Single. Day we are living with and passing over and through thresholds. The rising of the sun, crossing into and out of the door of our home, the passage of seasons. Thresholds are all around us if we only have the eyes to see and appreciate what we may learn from simply slowing down.
What if just we let one of the thresholds we encounter a day be a reminder to pause, to pray, or to notice?
I've chosen one passage about the practice of thresholds as a reflective reading.
What does this reflective reading hold for you? As you read, look for the word or phrase that sparkles up out of the text, notice how the passage makes you feel, and sense what the invitation might be for you.
In the monastic tradition, statio is the practice of stopping one thing before beginning another. It is the acknowledgment that in the space of transition and threshold is a sacred dimension, a holy pause full of possibility. This place between is a place of stillness, where we let go of what came before and prepare ourselves to enter fully into what comes next.
When we pause between activities or spaces or moments in our days, we open ourselves to the possibility of discovering a new kind of presence to the darkness of in-between times. When we rush from one thing to another, we skim over the surface of life, losing the sacred attentiveness that brings forth revelations in the most ordinary of moments.
Statio calls us to a sense of reverence for slowness, for mindfulness, and for the fertile dark spaces between our goals where we can pause and center ourselves and listen. We can open up space within for God to work. We can become fully conscious of what we are about to do rather than mindlessly completing another task.
Christine Valter Paintner- The Soul's Slow Ripening
Add a statio pause between events in your life? In our Spiritual Director training, we do this! After our lunch break, we pause for five minutes in silence, before moving into the next subject. It allows our souls to arrive and invites a deeper level of presence.
Currently Reading:
The Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday
This is my second book by Ryan Holiday in the past month! His books are easy to read and thought-provoking. His passion for history and learning from the victories and mistakes of people in history, from Winston Churchill to Seneca, is instructive. Holiday makes big ideas accessible. The Ego is the Enemy is about Ego, but not in the way I was expecting. It’s based on history and how ego has advanced culture, and slowed culture. Holiday is well-read and able to connect big ideas to practical tools. I think his books are worth exploring.
A book I can’t forget…
In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden
I loved this book. It was initially published in 1969. It's the story of a successful businesswoman in London who leaves it all behind to join a cloistered Benedictine monastery. It's a story of transition and transformation. There are so many themes to explore in this book. I was struck by the expansiveness and impact of the nun's life within the narrow walls of the monastery.
(I try and pay attention to words or phrases that stand out to me in my reading and listening. There is a spiritual practice called Florliledgium that collects short, interesting pieces {words that “sparkle” up} and put them together. This is kind of like that. Watching for things that sparkle. Gathering them and seeing how they work together and what message, mantra, or new idea might arise.)
A Practice:
Read slowly.
Notice if a word or phrase stands out to you.
How do the words make you feel?
Is there an invitation?
(I’m sharing in italics the lines that stand out to me in these passages. Maybe it’s the same, or maybe it’s different, there is much food for thought in each of these passages)
“Invite Wonder: What if you bowed before every dandelion you met and wrote love letters to squirrels and pigeons who crossed your path? What if scrubbing the dishes became an act of single reverence for the gift of being washed clean, and what if the rhythmic percussion of chopping carrots became the drumbeat of your dance? What if you stepped into the shower each morning only to be baptized anew and sent forth to serve the grocery bagger, the bank teller, and the bus driver through simple kindness? And what if the things that make your heart dizzy with delight were no longer stuffed into the basement of your being and allowed out to play in the lush and green fields? There are two ways to live in this world: As if everything were enchanted or nothing at all.”
― Christine Valters Paintner, The Soul of a Pilgrim: Eight Practices for the Journey Within
When we pause, allow a gap, and breathe deeply, we can experience instant refreshment. Suddenly we slow down, look out, and there’s the world.
-Pema Chodron
“So we are told to love. We are told to listen. We are told to look. But a lot of the time we don’t because we choose damn well not to, and because only a saint could do it all the time, I think. You have to choose who to listen to because if you listen to everybody and you look at everybody—seeing every face the way Rembrandt saw that woman’s face—how could you make it down half a city block? You couldn’t. If you listened to what everybody says to you, how could you survive a day? But we can do more than we do—more than we do, surely we could do that.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life
“Our culture reasons that because we fell there is not enough time, we should increase our pace, multitask, and fit more into our already overbooked days. But even though it is counterintuitive to popular wisdom, perhaps the more effective response to the limits of time is to live more fully in the moment, to savor it and expand it.”
― Carrie Newcomer, A Permeable Life: Poems & Essays
