The Golden Threshold

The Golden Threshold*

Ana Paula Arendt

You stand where another world awaits

Strange, mysterious and magical realms,

the hidden attic of child songs.

The borderless liminal space of being.

Is that sea yours?

And is it the sea of love, the See of God,

the sea of death, the sea of freedom

Or that sea breaking upon everything,

making billows of a kind sultriness inside us?

At the threshold of the unknown

the bridge between being and becoming,

brink between the visible and the invisible,

The future remains open.

One world opens into another.

A multiplicity of landscapes,

Meeting of forces, interfering accidents,

Moulds still to be shaped,

Landscapes parade before us.

Along them, something remains certain;

a faith that does not depend on upshot.

First, the hidden abodes; heimat.

And earth is such an ancient word

carrying many worlds within it.

The dogmas we have received from

the land where we grew up,

the intimacy of feeling at home.

Faith in need of protecting certainty

against all the possibilities that threaten it.

O, come,

landscapes of dens beneath the cliffs,

dwellings embedded deep within the rocks,

homes withdrawn from the horizon…

The place where we feel comfortable

And confident enough to face a wild storm.

The faith as we received

and that we must pass on.

But as we go farther than our parents,

there comes also another landscape.

The coastal scrubland,

the upland plain against desolation…

We belong to earth, but the future does not belong to us.

Comes a tide that insinuates itself, a night of stark clarity.

The foam that endures tells us there is no decree at all

for what is going to happen in the world.

Comes the water that will not grow accustomed,

The rain that will not cease to fall into flood.

A shadow that the light only softens.

There is a prayer that carries on

from villages that become hidden from sight.

Come the waters of uncertainty,

but let faith be certainty without prediction.

A faith that does not abolish uncertainty;

that one making the uncertainty inhabitable.

And we move from faith as assurance about the world,

into the faith as a way of being in the world.

Faith that is still not hope:

an unshaken faith in an undecided future**.

Faith that keeps the unknown from

becoming a void of meaning.

No, not a blind eye to the odds stacked against a song.

Still, the universe does not owe us a reward.

And yet, without results,

we continue

to find meaning in what we do.

Then come the

skylark singing on your chest

raising the morning,

when we have little reason to hope for

the outcome we desire.

A song the bird devotes wholeheartedly to the sky,

a singing without knowing about the day that we will meet.

We can glimpse what might be,

cherish its promise,

lean toward its becoming.

And against desolation, we pass the gate

to the nests suspended above the sea,

to the bowers at the edge of our world,

and the shelters are leaning over the blue

and the homes are gathered into the breeze.

Faith being

the ultimate concern*** to which we

compromise unconditionally our efforts,

the certainty of an inward disposition;

A faith further that embraces uncertainty

without regarding it as a flaw in the world;

that need not explain every occurrence,

justify every suffering,

nor promise that all will end well.

Faith, a golden thread that binds us to God,

and to certain truths revealed before us.

A trust that may grow from

cultivating a life-giving relationship

with what is gradually revealed to us.

A faith in the existence

of an order unknown to us,

one that unveils the truth

about ourselves and the world.

Now the houses are asleep upon the horizon.

Small homes are built on the underside of the earth,

there are dwellings between the green and the foam…

Those little houses stolen from the landscape.

I may enter each of them:

that is my faith.

Effort after effort,

String after string,

I might reach the song of my hands.

And I may tell all of them

about the love I feel for you,

And about everything that

kept me running, and

that faith brought me here,

from suffering to hope.

And each of those little houses

in which we have seeded faith

will yield a sweet passage through the harvest

to the unexpected dreams we hope for.

The Golden Threshold is no door

to a future written in gold.

It seems the limit we cross to

enter a new home still veiled,

bearing deep and carved within us

what our hearts have learned to trust.

* Sarojini Naidu

** “I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.” T. S. Eliot.

*** Paul Tillich

Photo: Vista do Harmandir Sahib (Templo Dourado) através dos arcos de mármore, Amritsar, Índia. Leroy Julien/ Alamy Stock Photo

Ana Paula Arendt. The Golden Book of Faith.