Holy Doors
Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in and eat with you, and you with me. – Revelation 3:20 (NRSV)
If you make travel plans soon, you can walk through the Holy Door of the Notre Dame Basilica-Cathedral in Quebec City, Canada.
Or, if that doesn’t suit your schedule, you can wait until 2025 (the Roman Catholic Church’s next Jubilee year) and travel to Quebec or one of seven other cathedrals with Vatican-sanctioned Holy Doors, most of them in Rome. But you’d best hop to it, because after that the church won’t unseal and open the special doors again for another 25 years.
That’s pretty much how the earnest young man outside the Quebec cathedral, which got a special holy-door dispensation this year on account of its 350th anniversary, explained it to me. Walking through the door, he said before offering to sit with my dog while I made the passage, marks a special moment in our relationship with God. More official explanations speak of traversing from sin into grace, as well as the culmination of a spiritual pilgrimage.
I don’t have anything against holy doors or pilgrimages or quests. I’m game for almost anything.
Still, I can’t help thinking that the holiest door of them all, the most consequential and sacred portal, is the one that leads to our heart of hearts. And only we can open that one. Only we decide who and what is allowed to pass through.
But when we do open up, we discover that Love has been standing just on the other side all along, knocking quietly and waiting patiently to pass through our private holy door.
Prayer
Come in, come in, Holy One. So sorry to have kept you waiting.
About the AuthorVicki Kemper is the Pastor of First Congregational, UCC, of Amherst, Massachusetts.