The Door of Revelation

“Every human being dwells intimately close to a door of revelation they are afraid to pass through.”
-David Whyte-

Parker Palmer once said, speaking about the years he spent struggling with deep disabling depression, that all along there was someone or something right behind him, asking for his attention; but he couldn’t turn around, not for years and years. Our doorway of revelation is like that: it’s right behind us, or beside us, or in front of us, but we cannot walk through it. Because walking through that doorway strips us naked; it peels away everything we have been using to get along in life. It leaves us unprotected from our deepest vulnerability, our most wrenching sense of loss, the longing that pierces us right to the core.

Of course I turn away from that doorway, again and again. There is no mystery in that-it makes a lot of sense. The mystery is what actually, at last, draws me through that doorway, into the chamber of light, mercy and healing that lies at the other side?

I have a feeling that this willingness to enter the doorway often comes to us when we are older. When life has broken us, shaken us, softened us, prepared us for the task of saying yes to what we have been avoiding for so long. It might be a feeling that has been crying out to me for years, asking me to embody it, a feeling that has been shunned and forbidden in the ancient script of my ancestral lineage. It might be an apology, a deep and heart-rending “I’m sorry,” that was locked away and hidden from the light, in a secret chamber of my heart. It might be a deep acknowledgment of some essential part of myself that I have left behind, that is still waiting for me to embrace it. It might be a deep realization of how I have been compromising, playing it safe, and that I have abandoned my soul in the process.

We can never know what is on the other side of our doorway of revelation. We cannot pass through that doorway through the power of our will. Nor can we lie back and rely on the power of something greater to carry us through. There is no singular way to pass through the doorway. It’s a process of maturation, of learning to fully inhabit our life, of passing through initiations of both water and fire. It’s learning to bow down and learning to stand up tall. And at the very heart of it, is our willingness to stay in relation. Because the one thing that keeps me from walking through that doorway is my isolation. Even though I have to walk through that door alone, up until the moment I dare to do it, I am resourced most profoundly by my capacity for true intimacy.

What I dare to see in your eyes, maybe for the first time, what I hear when I am tender enough to receive your whisper, the moment when I can reach out and let your hand make me a little stronger-these moments of intimacy are the source of what will take me through that doorway.

As Rumi puts it,

“With friends you grow wings.
Alone,
you are a single feather in disgrace.
With them you master the wind,
but alone,
you’re blown in all directions.”

This is how it is, and has it has been in our human journey. It just takes us a long time to let the truth penetrate through, right to the center.

with love,
Shayla