The Difficulty of Finding and Opening Doors

Photo by CrowN on Unsplash

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my longing to be a door-opener, and how Matt. 23:13 is one of the scariest verses in Scripture for me:

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you don’t go in, and you don’t allow those entering to go in”

I wrote about how important the imagination is in seeing all the doors to the kingdom of heaven that are around us, and the role of being a spiritual director, a soul-friend. It all sounds so fabulous. I’m still inspired by it. But as I’m working on this new clarified vocation, I’m realizing why there are so few door-openers. It’s hard, man. You’d think it would be easy.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not clumsily trying to follow some formula, or talk about doors, or even, say things like, “There! Do you see it? It’s the kingdom of heaven! There’s the door, let’s open it wide and behold its seeping into our ordinary lives! Let’s do some snow angels in this new reality that has been here all along!” I’m having trouble seeing doors myself.

But I was given a glimpse the other morning while making my coffee. My bordoodle, Moose, was taking in the morning, laying on our patio. When I looked out to check on him, a beautiful, black hummingbird with a red breast flew right up to his face and they stared at each other for a good ten seconds before the bird flew away. What a wonder! But that required nothing of me but to pause, behold, attune, be grateful, and then blab about it to my family later that day. I don’t know what it means, but it was a little God-gift of beauty. An invitation to something.

I’m finding multiple reasons for this struggle of door noticing and opening. Most of all, distractions and addictions that numb us. But the real struggle is what is behind these distractions and addictions. Why we love them so much. We don’t even want to recognize and name the rooms that we are in. We don’t want to tell our whole stories. We have our busy stories, our curated stories, and our identity stories, but we keep ourselves from attuning to those memories that haunt us for one reason or another.

We don’t want to look. We don’t want to face our pain. Or the time that we let our own selves down, not being true to our values. We don’t realize how transformational telling these stories is. And how that helps us see these doors. Our shame chokes our imagination and curiosity. We don’t tend to our wounds. We don’t question what certain humiliations or betrayals have done to us. We don’t admit false securities and faux belongings. And so we don’t lament what we lost. We don’t bless the good desires that were there. We don’t want to do the work to look at the rooms we’ve come from, what rooms we are in, or who’s in the room with us, and so we avoid the doors that invite us into the glory that accompany them.  

The door is often a chance to rewrite our stories. Not in a way that makes them less true—quite the opposite. Stories don’t remain in the past. They are still alive. We need friends who help us draw them out, who are attentive to them, who help us name our wounds, direct our desires, and imagine a bigger narrative. And funny thing, our stories provoke one another’s. My story calls forth something from your own. Because there are a lot of doors. Father Zosima gives a fabulous insight into the kingdom of heaven in Fydor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. And I think I will be meditating on this for the rest of my life. The truth of it. The wonder of it. And the practice of it.

Much is hidden from us on earth, but in exchange we are given a secret, treasured sense of our living contact with the other world; with the lofty and higher world; the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here, but in other worlds. That is why even philosophers say that it is not possible to grasp the essence of things in this world. God took the seeds from other worlds, sowed them on this earth, and cultivated His garden; all that would come up, did so, but what grows there lives only as a result of its contact with mysterious other worlds. If this feeling is weakened or destroyed in you, then what has grown in you will die. Then you will become indifferent to life and even grow to hate it.

Indifference veils the doors that are before us. And we don’t see that heaven is intermingling, even right now, with earth. That our own thoughts and feelings are rooted there. That when our hearts jump it is because we have a glimpse of recognition. Heaven’s nostalgia. The Sower has cast his seeds out among our earth. Our flesh. But weeds and weather fight against their growth. We need to tend to this. And find soul friends who listen and look with us. Who hold our stories and provoke our imaginations. Weed-pickers and waterers. Pausers for the hummingbirds who may give us ten seconds of their time. Fellow door openers. With the wisdom to know that the path always surprises us.