Beauty and Thresholds

On Being with Krista Tippett is a public radio show and podcast, produced by On Being Studios and based in a studio, work, and public event space on Loring Park in Minneapolis, with community, colleagues, and partners around the world. Every Thursday a new episode about “the immensity of our lives” is released at onbeing.org, along with poetry, music, and questions and answers with Krista.³⁵

In the episode “The Inner Landscape of Beauty” with O’Donohue, Krista asks him about his frequent use of the word “threshold” in his book Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, and its relationship to beauty.

The following is an excerpt from the transcript of that conversation:

Ms. Tippett: And what is that relationship between beauty and thresholds?

Mr. O’Donohue: Well, I think that the threshold — if you go back to the etymology of the word “threshold,” it comes from “threshing,” which is to separate the grain from the husk. So the threshold, in a way, is a place where you move into more critical and challenging and worthy fullness. And I think there are huge thresholds in every life.

I mean I think, for instance, to give a very simple example of it is that if you are in the middle of your life in a busy evening, 50 things to do, and you get a phone call that somebody that you love is suddenly dying — it takes ten seconds to communicate that information, but when you put the phone down, you are already standing in a different world, because suddenly, everything that seemed so important before is all gone, and now you are thinking of this. So the given world that we think is there, and the solid ground we are on, is so tentative. And I think a threshold is a line which separates two territories of spirit, and I think that very often how we cross is the key thing.

Ms. Tippett: And where is beauty in that?

Mr. O’Donohue: Where beauty is, I think, is — beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness, like. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming. And I think, when we cross a new threshold, that if we cross worthily, what we do is we heal the patterns of repetition that were in us that had us caught somewhere. And in our crossing, then, we cross onto new ground, where we just don’t repeat what we’ve been through in the last place we were. So I think beauty, in that sense, is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.³⁶

Coincidentally, the beauty O’Donohue recognizes in thresholds is similar to Simone Weil’s somatic description of the radical decentering we undergo when we experience something beautiful:

When we come upon beautiful things…they act like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through some vaster space…or they lift us (as though by the air currents of someone else’s sweeping), letting the ground rotate beneath us several inches, so that when we land, we find we are standing in a different relation to the world than we were a moment before.³⁷

The thresholds we encounter in life could involve “illness, suffering, or loss,” as well as healing, new beginnings, or new life. O’Donohue writes, “To acknowledge and cross a new threshold is always a challenge. It demands courage and also a sense of trust in whatever is emerging.”³⁸

To me, the beauty of thresholds is that by the time we have crossed one, we often learn something new that permanently changes us for the better, usually mentally, physically, and spiritually. With painful experiences in particular, I have learned that if we do not learn from our pain, we are just in pain. Thresholds produce in us perseverance, character, and more importantly, hope.³⁹