Threshold

I notice lately that the news boys are telling us we may be on the threshold of a possible nuclear war with North Korea, that prison-country bound to leader-worship and insanity. But what is this so-called threshold experience?

When we built our new home in Bishop, California, Dad didn't seem to get around to putting thresholds in the doorways. Soon the Mojave winds began to send sand and cold air under the door. Jack Nielsen came to the rescue once again and tightened down the house. 

We spend our whole lives crossing thresholds. This liminal experience shapes and forms our lives like it or not, because crossing a threshold, a boundary, moving from one kind of space to another remains a ritual we can't ignore.

When the bridegroom carries his bride over the threshold, they enter a new space, a new life, fraught with expectation and some fear. Can we make this marriage work?  When we walk the ceremonial Cub Scout bridge and enter Boy Scouts?  We pass into another phase, another passage towards maturity. Hopefully. Failure to jump through the "hoops of life" marks us as "arrested." Our timing is suddenly off. 

Who's looking for a high school dropout these days for a well-paying job, anyway?

My second father, Jack Nielsen, took me to my first day of school. Mom bought a red sweater with double white stripes on the sleeves--very collegiate. We still have the photo of that threshold experience: out of the house, away from my mom four hours a day and into the noisy often confusing world of kindergarten. I tried to keep the crayons inside the lines, relax on my towel for 15 minutes after milk break and then walk home.

Going off to elementary school or high school only prepares for the more traumatic farewell to friends and family when we drive off to another state and a whole new set of rules. And in some of those university settings, kids who were eating hamburgers and dating girls find themselves rushing fraternities and sororities, drinking gallons of beer and enduring endless indignities in order to be a  "member." Sense of time falls away; they sleep less, study occasionally, if at all.

What are the liminal experiences in your life?  An  LDS mission--off sometimes to a new country/culture/food and language. And constant rejection. Or, what of marriage?  Of becoming parents? Of joining or leaving a church or a neighborhood--or taking on your first "real" job. Some corporations are hiring "life coaches" just to get their newly hired MBAs through the day. "Hey, no one ever told me I do sloppy work and that I often fail to finish my project on time."

Yes, sometimes we stumble on the entryway or choose to remain in the visitor’s waiting room in a temple. Once you pass by those boys in white, card in hand, you've entered a whole new world of religious experience--you enter a forest of symbols. You've moved from the Profane to the Sacred. A friend who had been on Pioneer Trek one summer, said, "I am not quite the same person I was before we left. I stood on holy ground, and I felt it."

I see us moving through these boundary experiences until our final passage: from life to death. Sometimes our life rhythm shifts, however. I am now where my life has arrived. With little anticipation, I am still amazed how "old age" challenges me. I thought one Zion's Camp would be sufficient.  [Guess not!]

But in all our passing, however, we learn by experience. Sometimes it's like jumping off the river bank high above 7 feet in Bishop creek. It had to be done, if Buzzy Koonz could do it. 

Here we go--into another new, sometimes dangerous space by crossing one boundary and landing in a completely different setting.