The Doorway

The Doorway

There have been times when I thought the skies were the limit – that I was on a roll and anything in the world was possible. It was a large, expansive feeling producing a sense of success and fulfillment.

In those moments, things were “working out,” fame and fortune were coming my way, the big wheel was settling on my number and the lottery seemed in the bag. Excitement and celebration galore!

There have been other times when I felt as trapped as it was possible to get – like a rat in a cage. Hard duties and obligations beyond my strength or capability loomed, darkness filled the air.

The bars of the prison were debts of every kind – emotional and spiritual as well as financial. No release or redemption seemed even possible, and the future presented itself as an inevitable decline into greater and deeper gloom.

I loved the first experience and hated the second, but now I realize they were different faces of the same coin, both being totally conditional on events and circumstances in this world and my reaction to these. To accept one was to buy into the other as well.

The world presents many examples of its extremes – the apparent freedom of wealth contrasts with the apparent bondage of poverty and provokes us to choose sides and make preferences. We want this and don’t want that, and yet both are ultimately the same.


But there is a doorway through which a person can pass. It is not an escape from this world but rather a passage to a truer understanding of it, in which one’s happiness and peace are not conditioned by transient circumstances.

“I am the door,” said Jesus. “By me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture” (John 10:9).



The pasture by which we are nourished is in the world but not of the world. It is present everywhere, yet unrealized so long as we seek our truth in what is finite and limited.

To be exalted or cast down by external conditions which are constantly in flux is to ascribe to them an undeserved and unmerited authority. This is tantamount to worshiping and submitting to the servant rather than the master.

St. Paul wrote, “I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: everywhere and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need” (Php 4:12).

One can confidently suppose that Paul expressed it this way because this world in which abasement and abundance fluctuated around him . . .

. . . was not where he really lived.