The Threshhold

*

Elf's dreams finally pushed her to a decision. In her dream there was always her mother -- the devil's wife? the devil herself? -- sitting in a comfy armchair reading the paper. How cozy we all are in our affluent house! 2 or more dogs were curled at Duessa's feet. One of them always had the face of her beloved, her Dave. The other dog wore the frozen howl of some other man. It was a Kurd or a Turk who had wandered too close.

Out the window, the neighborhood church was always outside the window, just outside, normalcy, peace. Elf the athlete climbed out the window to get closer to it, I want to be close to you, but then the backdrop wrinkled and really that's all it was. Scenery. A dream.

We don't really need those places anymore, her mother said.

Church just gets in the way of shopping and soccer.

The 2nd dream was of the Garden of Orthodoxy. Another place she was not allowed to enter for real. When she probed her foot into the ground beneath the last lorn bush there was a demoralizing squish, a gray swoosh. Her mother was a worm who travelled rapidly through the bushes eating everything she touched. Other little beasts lay cuddled in tight Darwinian balls, copulating with and then consuming each other. The outer branches shook with dismay. If she only get past these thorny outer places, if she could get herself into the Garden, she would be okay. Finally okay. But the creatures, shimmering with their DNA ("just like you and that's all you are!") would not let her take the smallest step or even think herself through to where it was safe.

I want to *be* where it's safe, Elf said.

I am nothing but a helpless little girl.

Then -- she simply did it. Stepped through the branches bodily and came to a stop in the midst of the garden where indeed even doubt was able to stand still and take a breath of calm, standing so very near one's Lord. The dogs circled the fountain, playing and frisking, freed at last from the burden of having human faces. The indecisions and pain that existed here (and everywhere) could finally be shared with God, absorbed in God's wider power, so that there was a lessening of tension in the garden. And he walked with me. And he talked with me.

She thought wistfully about this safety that was more than simply hugging a base and not being "it".

What if safety were a substance as deep as salvation? And what if it were something that covered her too?

The next morning, gaunt and quite nauseated, was a Sunday, one slim seventh of the week. She said to herself, Today I'm going to risk it, I don't care.

She pulled the heavy door toward her. She went inside the darkish building. Suddenly she was there. She was in church, she was somehow inside and her friend Elise was hugging her. She had crossed the threshhold.

*