"Long ago thou didst lay the foundations of the earth, and the heavens were thy handiwork. They shall pass away, but thou endurest; like clothes they shall all grow old; thou shalt cast them off like a cloak, and they shall vanish; but thou art the same and thy years shall have no end." --Psalm 102:25-27
As the fireworks went off last night, I was curled up in my bed, lamp on, reading aloud to no one in particular. And these words seemed to hang in the air after I spoke them-- it was almost a palpable suspension, as though I was watching the smoke rise and swirl in the air from a candle just extinguished; slowly and languidly the words, thick with truth, returned to me, as I breathed deeply and spoke them again. "But thou art the same and thy years shall have no end." And for a brief moment, I felt as though I were breathing the air of another country. A country I belong to in a way I could never belong to this world. And there was something akin to patriotism there. I felt a stirring deep within me of citizenship and a settled assurance descended on me, releasing all the pent-up tension of this year, chasing away all those feelings of out-of-place-ness, all the lost-wandering of homesickness. The only way I can really describe it is by asking you to imagine a Jewish person in the midst of the Hanukkah season, walking a crowded street of strangers, inwardly wondering who among him also knows the light he knows. The country he is a citizen of may not collectively acknowledge the celebration, but all the same, it is something he clings to, whether he tells you or not.
There was a celebration in my heart last night, secret and full, simultaneous with the New Year's Eve celebrations, but only akin to the New Year's Eve celebrations in the way the slow-burning light of a candle is akin to the fast-fading spark of a firework. We can rejoice over finally reaching the threshold of a new year, but the new year only lasts for so long. It isn't new forever. At some point we have to step over it and proceed. But there's a threshold out there that we have license, even are called, to linger on-- with one foot in this world and the other foot in that other country. The one whose air I breathed for that brief moment last night. Eternity is itself a never ending threshold, always and perpetually new, a horizon always dawning. We can stand with one foot on this side of the horizon, the side we've always known with our eyes, and one foot on the other, the side we've always known in our hearts. Indeed, one day we will have to proceed onward, bringing both feet to the place we've felt pulling us all along, but that will only be when the threshold itself dissolves, when there is no longer need for a door.
And so until then, we can live in this world, but not be of it. We can live and move in this world, but our minds and hearts can choose to inhabit the other world. Urban Holmes writes, "Prayer is the movement of God to humanity and humanity to God, the act of meeting." Meeting implies two things coming together, and a threshold is just that. It isn’t our act of meeting with God which forms the threshold between the two worlds, but the threshold exists because Jesus came for us, because God, in His infinite love, took on human form. The incarnation opened up the doorway, created the threshold, so that not only could God come meet with us, but that we could come meet with God. When we choose prayer, we are choosing to meet with Him, we are choosing to linger on the threshold of Eternity with one foot planted on both sides. We ourselves become the place of meeting.
And the bounding joy of this is that it is boundless. We don't have to wait for a new-year threshold to come our way to begin again. The threshold of Eternity is always there, beckoning us into new life, its wild and sweet calls renewing daily, even moment-to-moment. There must be bells hanging from the doorposts, I've heard them and it's almost as though they know my condition, as though they want me to be clean. The bells rang through my soul even just a few hours ago-- I woke up this morning feeling generally perturbed and frustrated over petty things, but prayer, it changes things, the bells pulled me to the threshold and my heart was put at ease as He came to meet with me. We can go again and again. Or else it wouldn't be called Eternity. Oh Lord, "thou art the same and thy years shall have no end."