The concept of going through some kind of portal and entering another world is a common theme in books and movies. Dorothy’s tornado whisks her away to Oz. One of my favorite Star Trek episodes is “The City on the Edge of Forever,” featuring a mysterious time machine.
The discovery of the doorway to Narnia begins with something utterly ordinary: a wardrobe (a closet).
In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lucy is simply exploring an old house. She opens a door, steps past a row of coats, and keeps walking a little farther than expected.
Instead of bumping into a wall as one would expect, she finds herself standing in snow, beneath a lamppost, in a world entirely different from the one she left behind. It’s the world of Narnia, where she will meet talking animals, face exciting and dangerous adventures, and become a better version of herself in the process.
It’s a beautiful image, and perhaps one of the reasons the stories from The Chronicles of Narnia have endured for so many years. They whisper the possibility that the world might be deeper than it first appears. That ordinary things might be doorways.
In some religions, there’s a phrase for these doorways: thin places. Places where the distance between heaven and earth feels unusually small. Times when the veil between the ordinary and the holy seems a little thinner than usual.
The Bible is full of these moments. Jacob falls asleep in the wilderness and wakes up startled, saying, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” Moses meets God in a burning bush and on a mountaintop. Saul encounters Jesus while traveling on a road to Damascus.
Nothing about the landscape changed. What changed was their awareness of God’s nearness.
Faith, in many ways, is learning to discover that kind of awareness and live with that kind of attentiveness.
The wardrobe door reminds us that the ordinary world isn’t empty. It is quietly charged with God’s presence. A building can become a sanctuary. A table can become communion. Water can become baptism. Bread can become grace. Oil can anoint. Ashes can bless. Stones can be memorials.
And sometimes a simple moment—a prayer whispered in the morning, a conversation with a friend, a quiet walk under the sky—turns out to be a doorway we didn’t realize we were stepping through.
Lent is a good season to slow down enough to notice these thresholds. Because the truth may be that we pass wardrobe doors every day and don’t bother to stop, open the door, and step in and through to something holy.
Prayer: Gracious God, open my eyes to your presence in ordinary moments. Help me notice the quiet places where heaven and earth draw near. Give me a heart that looks for you in the everyday. Don’t let me get so preoccupied with the ordinary that I overlook the holy. Amen.
