CROSSING BORDERS, THRESHOLDS

As long as I can remember, I've always had a certain reverence for crossing a border. When I was young, it was usually the Canada-U.S. border. One time we went to Winnipeg for a family vacation. Another time our 4-H group went to the waterslide park in Kanose (don't ask me why a 4-H group would do this, other than for fun).

I think this reverence for border crossing was learned from my father. My father was almost always the one driving, and so, he was the one who answered the border guard's questions. It didn't matter which direction we were crossing the border, about 10 miles before or after we crossed my father might crack a joke, but when we were only a mile away from the border crossing, the space in our automobile took on a certain hushed quietness - a silence.

It was almost holy, like driving home after church on a Good Friday service. Words were used only when necessary and only to answer a question from one who seemed to hold our fate in their hands.

To be honest, the only other place where my father spoke and when he acted with the same kind of reverence was during worship at our small, rural church.

There is a certain border crossing that happens with worship, isn't there? At least, we like to think that there is this crossing into the sacred, a certain entry through a portal to the divine. But lest we think that the divine and the sacred can be contained in a box or a building, there are plenty of other places where God meets us. But it is true that God seems to like thresholds to be revealed.

I think about this as we wait in the customs line. It is 6:30am in Paris, but my body knows it is getting close to midnight in the place I call "home." My body also knows that it needs sleep, and soon. My body knows that I barely got five hours of sleep the night before. My body knows that I have been awake since 4:30am "home-time." My body knows that I can't really call the times I closed my eyes on the two plane rides of four and seven hours "sleep." My body knows this and it knows there's not much sleep in the near future.

Maybe, my body thinks, there will be sleep on the one-hour bus ride between the airport and the Gare de Lyon train station in downtown Paris. Not likely though. Perhaps, my body thinks, there might be a place to sleep in the train station as we wait the four hours for our train to depart. Turns out there is no more than a hard wooden bench divided into chairs. Surely, my body hopes, there will be sleep on the one and a half hour train ride from Paris to Macon-Loche. There is, but only a half hour of in-and-out sleep that feels more like hallucinations. And there is no sleep on the bus that takes us from the Macon-Loche train station to our final destination after 25 hours of travel - Taizé.

"This better be worth it," my body whines to my spirit, my soul and anyone else who has ears to listen.

When I sit down for worship the first night at Taizé (after a two hour nap on a gloriously real bed and the first thing that felt like any real meal in a full day) it is…

And then, the reader speaks, first in French, then in English, then in German, then in Spanish, "The Gospel of Matthew:"

Now when Jesus saw great crowds around him, he gave orders to cross over to the other side. A scribe then approached and said, "Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go." And Jesus said to him, "Foxes have holes, and birds have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head."

And in the sleepless delirium, as I cross this threshold, tears come. Then a smile. And all the borders vanish, if only for a time.