There are thresholds we desperately want to cross.
We can see what is on the other side.
Sometimes we can even feel ourselves becoming the person who could step across.
And yet we stop.
For a long time, I thought this hesitation meant I did not trust myself enough.
I experience it in prayer.
There are moments when someone asks,
”Who would like to pray?”
Something in me wants to answer.
I can feel the prayer I have the words for it. I sense something stirring, something wanting to be spoken.
And then I hesitate.
What is I don’t have the right words?
What if I stumble?
What if what comes is not what someone needs to hear?
A lot of ‘what ifs’.
I thought I was afraid of the prayer.
Then I remembered the red pencil.
When I was young, letters I had written would sometimes come back to me marked in red, my words corrected on the page.
I had almost forgotten.
But perhaps the body remembers thresholds the mind believes it has left behind.
There I was again, standing before words that had not yet been spoken, already wondering how they would be corrected.
The red pencil was no longer in someone else’s hand.
I had learned to hold it myself.
That is the strange thing about echoes.
They can sound like the present.
An old voice can become so familiar that we mistake it for our own.
Be careful.
Get it right.
Don’t say it until you know.
And so we remain on one side of the threshold, believing we are waiting for courage, when perhaps we are waiting for permission that no one else can give us.
The Gap asks something different.
It asks us to notice the echo without obeying it.
I hear you.
I know where you come from.
But you do not get to speak to me.
Perhaps this is why prayer asks so much of me.
Prayer does not give me time to polish every sentence before I speak.
It asks me to listen.
To breathe.
To become still enough to notice what is already there.
And then to trust the next word.
Not because I know it is the perfect word.
Not because I can know what another person needs to hear.
But because I am willing to offer what has come to me with an open hand.
There is vulnerability in that.
Maybe that vulnerability is not what keeps me from the threshold.
Maybe vulnerability is the threshold.
For so long, I thought I needed to arrive there with the right words.
But perhaps what I need to bring is my humanness.
I may stumble.
I may pause.
I may reach for a word and find another.
My voice may reveal that I am standing in the same uncertainty as everybody else.
And perhaps that is not the failure of prayer.
Perhaps that is where the prayer begins.
Because when I stop trying to stand before another person perfectly,
I can stand with them honestly.
Something opens.
The distance between us becomes smaller.
We recognize ourselves in one another.
Not one person who knows,
praying for another who does not,
but human beings
standing together
before something larger than any one of us.
And perhaps this is what I have misunderstood about prayer.
Prayer is not a performance of certainty.
It is communion.
It is the moment we stop standing apart.
The one speaking does not carry the Divine into the room.
The Divine is already there.
In the person speaking.
In the person listening.
In the silence between the words.
In the breath we take together.
Perhaps the prayer simply helps us notice.
And suddenly I understand the threshold differently.
I thought I was trying to cross it so I could become brave enough to pray.
Perhaps I am being asked to cross it so I can become vulnerable enough to connect.
To stand before others without leaving my humanness behind.
To bring my unfinished words,
my trembling,
my uncertainty,
my open heart.
And discover that none of these separates me from another person.
They are where we meet.
Perhaps that is the sacred place.
The Gap is not empty.
It is where we find one another.
It is communion.
The red pencil may still appear.
But it no longer has to write the prayer.
I can set it down,
open my hands,
and begin.
And so it is.
— a Torchbearer Wisdom by Corvalya