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Wouldn’t it be cool if there were a magical world beyond every door?
When Lucy opened the door to Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, it didn’t look like anything special. It was just a boring door to a wardrobe full of clothes and coats, but across its threshold was magic. Lucy already had a foot in Narnia before she quite realized what was happening.
Many of the thresholds in our lives are like this: we don’t know that we’re crossing into another world until we’re already halfway there.
The door of a church takes us down a pathway of growth we might never have expected.
The door of the doctor’s office suddenly opens out into life with a hard diagnosis.
A restaurant door opens onto a first date and echoes forward into the relationship of a lifetime.
A beloved person’s door closes behind you and sends you out into the world heartbroken.
The door to a library, or a gym, or a dance studio introduces you to a life’s passion you might not have otherwise discovered.
We cross these thresholds every day of our lives, for good and for ill—in joy, in sorrow, in bittersweet truth.
Truly, even our own front door is a great threshold, no matter how familiar the worlds within and without may be … Given our lives’ reality of constant change, every day we open the same old door again, only to step out into a world that is new since the day before. In this way, there is a new world behind every door, awaiting our discovery if we will only encounter it as such.
Adapted with permission from the homily “Crossing the Threshold” delivered May 3, 2015, at the UU Church of Columbia, Missouri.