A door to another world
My favorite fall tree is in front of a nondescript brick office building that I pass on my route to pick up the boys from school. As you drive up the street, the tree looks bright red, but if you look up once you’re underneath it, the leaves above are a brilliant orange. Henry, with all the sincerity and wonder of a four-year-old, calls it the Magic Tree.
My favorite view of Pikes Peak is on my way to the grocery store. You can see the peak in all its majesty as you drive up the hill, a common enough view in a city where the mountains can be seen from anywhere in town. But when you crest this hill on Uintah Street, the vast mountain valley that you couldn’t see before suddenly opens out below with Pikes Peak still towering above. It is all breathtaking and too expansive to take in, especially when you thought the purpose of the next 10 minutes was to get in and out of the grocery store with the one item you forgot on your list that you just have to have to make dinner tonight.
When my dad read “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” to me as a child for the first time , I wanted more than anything to find a way into Narnia. I hoped that someday, behind the accordion-doors of my closet where there was ordinarily just a row of turtlenecks, corduroy jumpers, and stirrup pants followed by a layer of cold, hard sheetrock, there would somehow be the magical world of fauns and talking beavers and Deep Magic and a very Good Lion.
Eventually, we grown-up sorts stop looking for wardrobes that lead to snowy pine forests. We don’t notice on our busy way that there are adolescents pushing owl cage-laden carts running full speed at a brick wall in the middle of the train station, then disappearing from sight. After all, we have a train to catch.
Even those of us who know we were made for another world, who know enough of the Great Story to believe that what our eyes can see is not all that there is, tend to operate as though that world is distinct from our every-day surroundings, that we simply must wait to “fly away” to it.
But to me, the greatest gift of the changing seasons is an abundance of moments where these two worlds seem to touch. That a fiery Magic Tree that was just an ordinary green one mere weeks ago could exist on the otherwise unimpressive street corner on a route that I drive twice a day, five days a week. In the places where wonder breaks through monotony and we feel that unexplainable lift in our spirits, we are filled once again with hope that there really could be a door to another world, hidden in plain sight.
Could it be, I wonder, that we look for doors because we are meant to find them? Like Mary Lennox in “The Secret Garden,” we find forgotten keys embedded in the earth outside the garden wall, and know with renewed determination that if there is a key, then there simply must be a door.
Perhaps this is part of what Jesus meant when he said to his disciples, “I am the Door.” He is not only the Way to salvation in God, but the hinge of the “already” and the “not yet,” of reality in this bent and broken world and all that we are asking for when we pray “your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” In him, we are able to hold both those things together, receiving in faith that kingdom life and hope of a New Creation that comes to us now only in glimmers and flashes.
In my friend Amy Lee’s new book, “This Homeward Ache,” she says,
“In my own corner of this earth, a doorway between the visible and invisible now stands permanently open for me to come before the throne of grace. It seems I do not need midnight access to an enchanted forest so much as I need eyes to see the strange wonder of the tale I am already in…As I step into the high truths of a hidden kingdom, growing younger in trust and wonder as I learn to live by its code, the sparks become a compass, a tuning fork, a bright guide in the dark. A waking I can welcome.”
In Jesus, we find what we’ve always been looking for, what all these fleeting glimpses that leave our senses humming have been pointing us to—a Door to another world.