The beginning...

Ask just about anyone I’ve lived with and most of the people I’ve worked with and you’ll easily find that I’m a doorway talker. I don’t know how that habit developed , nor am I aware of the subconscious motivation behind the practice. The one thing I do know is that I am perfectly comfortable leaning on the threshold talking to someone sitting inside a room. If standing isn’t comfortable, I am more likely to sit on the floor, still leaning on the door frame, than I am to take an empty chair inside the room.

Perhaps this is what has caused me to notice something in particular about what I do. As a hospital chaplain, in many ways, I have become a minister of doorways, of thresholds. Often, I serve as an escort between waiting rooms and sick rooms. In the ER, I split my time between patients in the trauma bay and family in the waiting areas. I cross those thresholds on my own and often bring family across those thresholds with me. A couple of months ago, I was pulled out of bed sometime around 4 in the morning by a page to the Critical Care Unit. When I arrived, I found that a patient had died, somewhat unexpectedly. She had about a dozen adult children, and by the time the family had gathered, there were around 30 people in the waiting area. The intense emotions and subsequent behavior led to the decision by the medical staff to only let 2 or 3 people into the patient’s room at a time. In our critical care units, there is a hallway that surrounds the whole unit so that the waiting area gives direct access to the room. I would go out to the waiting area and summon the two or three whose turn it had come to say goodbye. I would escort them across the doorway from the waiting area to the room that held death. When they were ready, I escorted them out and brought in the next group. That morning was the first time I realized that I am a doorway minister.

I have grown accustomed to describing experiences such as these as “broken spaces turned sacred places.” In some instances, that doorway represents the broken relationship suffered between that family and the beloved sister, mother, grandmother. And in some ways, the doorway is the separation between two worlds. But I can’t help but think of the Celtic tradition’s understanding of thin spaces, those places that the barrier between the natural and the spiritual world is so thin that it seems to be possible to touch and be touched by God. I’d like to make a habit of recognizing the thin spaces, and thus begins this place of reflection, both on the thin places and all the times in between.