Living on the Border
Reflections on the Experience of Threshold
by Esther de Waal
Paperback
Price: £9.99
Publisher:Canterbury Press imprint of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd
Published:31 August 2011
ISBN:978-1-853-11962-0
GoodBookStall Review:
Enlarged edition of the first publication in 2001.
‘A threshold is a sacred thing’ – these are among the first 14 words of the introduction to this book. Esther de Waal is someone who understands Celtic Christians and Christianity. The Celts were people who were marginalised – driven to the edges – the thresholds – Cornwall, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Brittany. There they encountered life on the edge – they lived and breathed borderlands
R.S.Thomas is quoted reflecting on the thresholds of Wales:
You can come in
You can come a long way…
But you won’t be inside.
The author understands borderlands, living as she does in the Herefordshire Welsh Marches, where the actual border was for centuries in a state of flux.
She then uses this concept to explore landscape, the seasons and times, followed by a few pages of passages for reflection and a border anthology of words and images, both of them offering us the opportunity to listen to the dialogue of the landscape.
Talking of the way in which the monk or nun crossing the threshold of the church would always allow themselves a time to divest of self, she says ‘…stillness permits each one to enter into that space kept empty in the heart for the Word of God.…..All of our lives are inevitably made of a succession of borders and thresholds.’
She reflects on the essential difference between a boundary or frontier and borderlands – the former being edges/barriers and the latter the point where the lands of two peoples run alongside one another.
I loved reading this book and found so much in it. I suspect I’ll come back to it again and again.
Reviewer: Nick Horton (05/11/11)
Enlarged edition of the first publication in 2001.
‘A threshold is a sacred thing’ – these are among the first 14 words of the introduction to this book. Esther de Waal is someone who understands Celtic Christians and Christianity. The Celts were people who were marginalised – driven to the edges – the thresholds – Cornwall, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Brittany. There they encountered life on the edge – they lived and breathed borderlands
R.S.Thomas is quoted reflecting on the thresholds of Wales:
You can come in
You can come a long way…
But you won’t be inside.
The author understands borderlands, living as she does in the Herefordshire Welsh Marches, where the actual border was for centuries in a state of flux.
She then uses this concept to explore landscape, the seasons and times, followed by a few pages of passages for reflection and a border anthology of words and images, both of them offering us the opportunity to listen to the dialogue of the landscape.
Talking of the way in which the monk or nun crossing the threshold of the church would always allow themselves a time to divest of self, she says ‘…stillness permits each one to enter into that space kept empty in the heart for the Word of God.…..All of our lives are inevitably made of a succession of borders and thresholds.’
She reflects on the essential difference between a boundary or frontier and borderlands – the former being edges/barriers and the latter the point where the lands of two peoples run alongside one another.
I loved reading this book and found so much in it. I suspect I’ll come back to it again and again.
Reviewer: Nick Horton (05/11/11)
