Standing in the Threshold

A Wider Experience of Reality

This week I met the man who now sits at the same historic desk where my father sat forty years ago as the president of a national religious archive. He never knew my father, yet quoted him in his most recent book, and he told me that my father’s book on the history of that historical society is one of his most consistent resources as the current head of that institution. He went on to say that the decade my father led the society was, in his view, the most vibrant period in its long history. There was a warmth and familiarity in our connection that day even though we were meeting for the first time, and quite by chance. In his own quiet way, my father was with us.

A few weeks ago, I met the new Director of Religion here at Chautauqua. When I introduced myself and mentioned that he might have known my father, a broad smile crossed his face. They met many years ago at the Disciples Divinity House at the University of Chicago. I could feel my father smiling on our conversation.

That same week, a woman I didn’t know sat down beside me at a lecture. We soon discovered she had stayed with my parents thirty years ago when they were hosts of a Chautauqua guest house. Her face lit up as she spoke of my father’s warmth and my mother’s graciousness and hospitality. When I ran into her a few days later, she asked if I had a photo of my parents in my phone.

This summer I feel like, more than ever before, I’m standing in a threshold between worlds. Threshnold not so much as a physical structure but rather as energy structure, an experience, a passage. It’s not new for me, yet these moments have been feeling both simpler and more profound. I sometimes sense more than one reality at the same time, even if only for a moment, without becoming untethered from the present. It’s not just meeting memories or sensing different realities; it feels more like inhabiting the threshold that connects them. Less fleeting, more real. Like that’s where I am living. Perhaps you’ve experienced something like this as well.

Photo by Ivan Aleksic on Unsplash

Thresholds are crossing points—gateways or passages between spaces and times. They’re places or perspectives from which you can step into and out of the spaces or the realities they connect. They are places of encounter. Places where one reality opens into another and where it’s possible to belong to both simultaneously. For me, they’re starting to become so familiar that they feel in some strange way like home. Or perhaps better said, they feel like the basecamp I keep returning to as I go about the living of my days. Standing in those thresholds offers an even wider experience of reality.

For me, Chautauqua itself is increasingly becoming a threshold between worlds. A “thin place” where the boundaries between seen and unseen are little more than veils. And from time to time, the veils seem to disappear. It’s more than just experiencing synchronistic connections. It’s allowing myself to walk at the edge between worlds more consistently.

As I prepared to embark on this Chautauqua sojourn back in May and June, I could feel a pull toward living at that edge. As I’ve let myself go there, I admit it can feel strange and unsettling at times. I’m getting more used to it, yet there are still moments, especially in the liminal spaces between darkness and dawn, when I’m not sure what belongs to this world and what belongs to another one.

These words from my poem “Shrouds” that I shared last week remain with me:

Everything moving and changing almost imperceptibly
yet constantly. People and stories drifting in and out,
one moment here, another moment gone.
One could wonder if insanity was taking up residence.
Except that there is a quiet sanity in all of it—
a strange coherent stirring within that is
beyond interpretation yet feels like
something important is happening
or shifting or healing.
Or maybe transitioning
in ways I can’t yet know.

—Excerpt from “Shrouds” by Alan Seale

I can feel a tension in those thresholds when the sanity question arises. Am I losing touch with reality? Or am I discovering another way of meeting and holding a larger version of reality? It doesn’t feel so much like a mystical question as it is a recognition that reality is more porous than we imagine. Time feels strange. Memory awakens unexpectedly. Relationships from long ago carry on. Those who no longer walk this earth remain present, just in a different form. Past, present, and future leak into one another.

Porous. I can be anchored in current time and space realities, yet open to a much bigger context in which this present reality is unfolding—a context that holds dimensions beyond the obvious or the apparent. Synchronicities become more normal. Life expands beyond linear reality. The more porous I become in my awareness, the more available I become to life and the more available life becomes to me.

Watching the sun rise this morning while walking along the lake in that threshold, I remembered words spoken by American writer, educator, and conservationist Terry Tempest Williams (b. 1955) in a conversation with National Public Radio journalist Rachel Martin. Terry Tempest Williams said:

We aren’t crazy. We’re alive.

Standing in the threshold, living at the porous edges,
sometimes I still wonder if I’m crazy.

Yet as soon as I breathe into my bones
and get grounded, I realize that
being fully alive, allowing the
full spectrum of the human experience
to move through me, and to sense
through the veil beyond physical reality,
is actually just another level of sanity.

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Invitations

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