This week we engage with some Celtic Exercises - ways of deepening our relationship with God through using everyday ordinariness to come into the spiritual richness of his grace.
1. Thresholds
Thresholds are the spaces between when we move from one time to another, as in the threshold of dawn to day or dusk to dark; from one space to another, as in times of pilgrimage or in moving from secular to sacred space; and from one awareness to another, as in times when old structures start to fall away and we begin to envision something new.
The Celtic peoples had a love of edges and boundary places, most likely as the result of living on an island, but they also held a keen sense of the Otherworld as a place just beneath the veil of this one.
Celtic Christian monks were also drawn to edge places, inspired by those who fled to the desert. They found their own threshold places, such as Skellig Michael, a jagged stone island jutting out into the Atlantic on which the ruins of a monastic community are still perched on top.
In daily life
Become aware each time you cross a threshold. This might be across a doorway, in moving from one activity to another, or the thresholds of the day, especially at dawn and dusk. Pause at each of these and offer a short prayer of gratitude.
Scripture meditation
Thus says the Lord: Stand at the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls. —Jeremiah 6:16
Prayer
And so we take the ragged fragments, the patches of darkness that give shape to the light; the scraps of desires unslaked or realised; the memories of spaces of blessing, of pain.
And so we gather the scattered pieces the hopes we carry fractured or whole; the struggles of birthing exhausted, elated; the places of welcome that bring healing and life.
And so we lay them at the threshold, God; bid you hold them, bless them, use them; ask you tend them, mend them, transform them to keep us warm,
make us whole, and send us forth. Amen
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