The Third Door, Beginning to See Beyond

[HKHaugan]

“The man said to me, "Son of man, look with your eyes. Listen with your ears. Pay attention to everything I show you. That is why the Lord brought you here. Tell the people of Israel everything you see (Ezek.40:4)."

This third brush stroke, this third open door. I really don’t know how I got there. A friend perhaps had invited me. I just don’t remember. What I do remember is walking down a street and seeing a big spired church building with jutting parapets along the edges of its roof. It was crowded unceremoniously between more six-story brownstones that looked as if they were put there to take advantage of being in the company of a superior. It was obviously the master of its surroundings. Attached to it by a long corridor were two other similar smaller buildings making a kind of architectural statement, a compound speaking to a stubbornly resistant neighborhood. A large ornate iron fence surrounded the huge Gothic complex and its open gates beckoned me. I found my self entering.

The beauty of the exterior shape held another beauty within in its walls. When I first entered I was overwhelmed by the majesty of the figures in rich and vibrant colors that filled the stained glass windows circling row after row of dark brown wooden pews. The pillars that held up the distant wood arched roof stood like sentinels on each side of the interior to the left and right of the pews. The red-carpeted center aisle directed your gaze through a gauntlet of choir stalls toward a huge stone altar with a backdrop structure of exquisitely carved figures set in brown wood. A brilliant polished brass cross sat emphatically in the middle of two elegant brass candelabra each holding seven candles. In their company were two tall candlesticks also giving center stage to the cross.

The beauty within and without bespoke another dimension, an unseen deeper inspiring reality. As I stood in the rear of this regal setting I knew I had entered another kind of court. One in total contrast to the slummy darkness of East Harlem. Its attached buildings would be the socially safe harbor holding activities dressing the wounds of my adolescent hurts and pains. For a period of time I would no longer be the victim but the escapee, an exile from the courts of the world.

What I put in words now I could not articulate then. I only knew that there was a home here, a place I could always come, where the gates were always open day or night and it was rich in comfort, heart comfort. I wish my parents could have been a part of that but I guess I was even escaping them too. I had entered the courts of something totally and completely different than the courts of my family, my neighborhood, my ethnic background, my schools, city, state and nation and those other courts of my Carolina and Maine memories.

The minister was a dignified Englishman with a posture that could be described as the calm confidence of someone whose class and education drew your admiration, respect and attention. His wife had a complimentary warmth and similar confidence. Whenever he spoke or came into a room it seemed as if someone you couldn’t see was with him. Whatever was behind the beauty of the building was behind him. He was my first experience of a clergyman.

Twenty plus years later I knew what was behind him---the Lord Jesus. What that minister knew and taught planted the first seeds of faith in me, which, at that time, I did not know. In fact I don’t remember any of his sermons, only their effect which is what is important anyway. I only kept track of the memory of being in a safe place and always wanting to find a similar one. It had to be in a similar building, with similar ministers in similar dress and the atmosphere that went with it. These things would later be accounted as drawing me away from His courts but I had begun to find them. It would take me on a path of later self-confrontation where the real courts of the Lord were not external but internal;
A new heart relationship with God in Jesus.
A new mind as Scripture challenged me to think spiritually.
A new spirit, the Holy Spirit, overriding my errant spirit.
A new moment in that every next moment was brand spanking new and demanded faith in Jesus to handle it.
A new promise that the life I found was a spiritual life, Jesus' life, lasting forever and it is lived in every next moment as we trust Jesus in it.

“Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere; I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked (Ps.84:10).”