Customer Reviews

To Pause at the Threshold: Reflections on Living on the Border

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Deceptively slim, this book of meditations from de Waal's reading and personal experience asks for careful reading and cogitation. I found myself reading it aloud, softly and slowly, in order to take in the deep meaning. This is truly matter for Lectio Divina. A quotation: " If the borders are not frontiers, and if the thresholds are continually crossed and recrossed, then we open up to the new." Readers of de Waal will find familiar sources-- St Benedict, Celtic writings-- as well as fruits of de Waal's wide current reading. This book should become a spiritual classic.

Esther de Waal never lets us down! In To Pause at the Threshold she explores how even the busiest life can be lived mindfully and prayerfully. She attunes us to what the Celtic Christians called "thin" moments, those times when what is before gives way to the new, when God is experienced as most palpably present. Life is immeasurably blessed, she assures us, when we receive the next moment, the next event, the next person with reverence and expectation. This fine little book is a lovely companion for the one who lives life on pilgrimage.

Esther de Waal's life has long been wrapped up in the geography and continuity of Celtic Christian heritage.

Many books have hinted at the relevance of "Celtic Christianity" to the needs of today's Christians, hungry for authentic forms of spirituality and authentic experiences of Christian community. To do so is as much an act of poetry as of information.

This little book by Esther de Waal is a poetic offering and, essentially, is highly personal. It is true to the spirit of our Celtic heritage and encapsulates important themes well enough to give the reader more than a little to think about on a rainy afternoon. read and pondered, Esther guides in a way that can engage us with our own lives more poetically and with reason enough even to change how we live. To my mind this makes "to pause at the threshold" an important book for any person hungry for a more authentic, spiritual, Christian and human pattern of life.

Paul Wallis OJG - author of "BE THOU MY BREASTPLATE - 40 days of giving your life to God the Celtic way!" (Continuum/Paulist) "This serene, superb...book is...a rich gift to the Church." Phyllis Tickle)

In our 21st century world, this meditation on the ordinary becomes a poetic statement about finding one's way, and is so needed. A work that broadens ones vista, the subtitle of the book, "Reflections on Living on the Border," contains new visions of life from ancient wisdom. A small book, the author Esther de Waal explains how and what to do with the new found in places like, "So when I went walking along the stretch of Off's Dyke that ran only a few miles away, I came to know afresh the world that had earlier delighted my father." This book tells the way to live in the world. It speaks of living with the inner world of the heart and mind, as well. For me, these are important.

"All our lives are inevitably made of a succession of borders and thresholds, which open up into the new and promise excitement or fear. The traveler encountering unknown places has all the exhilaration, the thrill of another country." For some time, I have sought to find newness of seeing things and knowing things, and also in regard to people in my life. This book helps to change the reader in ways that open the eyes to new ways of living and seeing. It is a work of vision and ongoing renewal. Again, in a book, she accomplishes with clarity and easy style lessons of the meaningful in life, and finding meaning.

She writes about pausing in the book. Titled "To Pause at the Threshold: Reflections on Living on the Border," published by Morehouse Publishing, she writes about living a spiritual life, of living life within the Anglican Communion. The book is both dear, as in personal and telling, and objective as in telling and demonstrating. "Above all I want to explore the role of thresholds, of the crossing-over places, not only geographical ones but also metaphorical thresholds," she writes in her introduction. This book is for the spiritually inclined, for the religious individual, and for the seeker of new life in living.

Our world is uncertain. Her instructions on living a better life go like this: "The first step in listening, learning, and changing is to see that different is not dangerous; the second is to be happy and willing to live with uncertainty the third is to rejoice in ambiguity and to embrace it." Originally published under an imprint of St. Mary's Works called The Canterbury Press Norwich, this formerly English book will find many readers in the United States. She says so many things that speak to the Anglican religious way of living, and so many things that speak to a society that is diverse as America. She finds the central places of the spirit in her writing. Two other books are noted here as worthwhile: "Living with Contradictions: An Introduction to Benedictine Spirituality" and, "Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict." One quickly gets an idea of the thrust of her work from the titles.

Laying a way to enjoy and reflect on the ordinary in life, she draws large inferences in this book: "...we find ourselves touched by something primal, that repetition of birth and death, dying and new life, experienced again and again, year in and year out, repeated throughout our lives." These are some patterns of the day, like the simple task of bowing ones head down during the day in the bright light, "...giving glory to the great God of life for the magnificence of the sun and for the goodness of its light to the children and men and to the animals of the world."

Here is another nugget from a book that flows and contains nuggets of establishing oneself in a place. Esther de Waal quotes from many sources. Here she quotes John Howard Griffin's diary: "August 6, 1969. 5:45 a.m. Before dawn. With the beginnings of the predawn-light some of the birds come to life--not with singing yet, but with a kind of murmuring. I carried my coffee out on the concrete porch and drank it walking back and forth. The air is cool, almost cold, and fresh. Light came slowly. I watched the trees assume black shapes through the fog. I thought of Tom who saw the sounds, smelled the same predawn freshness, allowed the same silences to do their work in him."

For people who like a good read, the 102-page book categorized as spirituality is intelligent and inviting. There is importance in opening up and being inviting to one's surroundings, as the book blurb states. I agree, this is a book that sees "A threshold as a sacred thing..." Her book is like the porter in St. Benedict's rule who waits at the gate, the work "...shows us a conversation between the holy and the everyday..." Esther de Waal points the way to enjoyment.

--Peter Menkin, Pentecost 2007

In our current culture, we usually rush through threshold moments - those borders between past and future, life transitions. We don't pause and reflect; we don't celebrate or mark those passages. But borderlands are meant to be explored, and thresholds are meant to be encountered and processed.

This little book is a powerful punch.

Esther de Waal looks at what it is like to live in actual border country, the Welsh countryside with its slower rhythms and earth-linked textures, and explores the importance of opening up and being receptive to one's surroundings, whatever they may be.