The Renovating Reverend

The front door. It wasn’t high on the refinishing priority list, but after the house had been painted and the landscaping had wrapped around from the south to the east, its shabby state had become that much more obvious. The best guess is that the original shellac had turned nearly black somewhere around the time Herbert Hoover was in office, then someone had painted it black during the Kennedy and Nixon eras, with at least two different types of paint—the top coat of which had crackled into millions of spidery cracks a good twenty or more years ago. A sliver of veneer had peeled and broken off from the lower section of the door. There were many digs and dings, and the ornamental scrollwork below the glass was missing a small chunk at the very end. I had to admit it looked rather sad, and wasn’t so sure that refinishing would improve the appearance a whole lot. But that old door with its beveled glass was one of my favorite parts of the house when we first looked it over, so it was well worth some attention.

Doors have a lot of traditions associated with them, completely apart from what sort of building they are attached to. Red doors have long been a sign of welcome to weary travelers. We speak of opportunity metaphorically knocking at the door. Open doors signifying welcome, inclusion, and abundance. Doorways can be places from which we symbolically set out on journeys, leaving what is known in order to step out into the unknown, perhaps leaving the common or profane to travel the path of enlightenment.

Of course, doors can also have negative connotations. They can be figurative and literal obstacles, boundaries past which a certain group of people are not welcome and may not pass, symbols of rejection, hierarchy, or selfishness. Those who enter are the favored elite, while others are not worthy to enter—T here are “sides” to a door. I was surprised, as I thought about this, to have an old Sunday school song come up from the depths of memory. It speaks of one door with two sides. The singer declares “I’m on the inside,” and asks, “On which side are you?” That’s pretty much the whole song. I don’t remember what I thought of it as a kid, but as an adult it sounds less like an invitation to experience the Divine and more like a whiny taunt of “nanner, nanner, nanner!” Not very welcoming or appealing, to say the least.

I’m happy to report that our refinished front door has turned out to be warm and appealing. I stopped short of using something like oxalic acid, which could have removed all traces of the old blackened finish, and, instead, used a black stain to blend and soften its well-used appearance. The result is satiny wood, with a lot of depth, in a warm brownish-black. It says, “Welcome. Come on in.” [Please feel free to experience a contented sigh and warm, fuzzy feelings here!] Although a lot of our home is as welcoming as the beautified door, there is still some of it that is more on the order of a creepy old house, so I had to chuckle, once again, at the contrasts of the renovation-in-progress experience.

The last step in refinishing the door was new weather stripping. As I was tacking it up around the doorframe, I began to consider both the welcome/opportunity and the chosen-sides aspects of doors. Doors certainly can represent a choice, but which side is the “good” side seems to be a tougher thing to determine. C.S. Lewis, the great fantasy writer, literature scholar, and highly respected Christian apologist, did a great job of demonstrating how tricky doorways can be. If I remember correctly, Lewis did this in the seventh and final book of the Chronicles of Narnia.

***Spoiler alert! I’m about to reveal, in part, what happens at the end of the saga!***

In “The Last Battle,” Aslan welcomes many Narnians, humans, and even one Tash-worshipping Calormene warrior, to the home of his father, the Emperor Over the Sea. It is literally Paradise. However, one group of rather grumpy dwarves who have passed through the door to Paradise still believe they are in a dark, smelly stable, during a nighttime battle, which was the last thing they experienced in Narnia. No matter how anyone tries, they are unable to open the grumpy guys’ eyes to where they are. To them, all sorts of good things to eat smell like manure and feel like straw, and they huddle together in a tight group, miserable in the heavenly home of the Creator, miserable on the “right” side of the door. There are additional layers to this part of the story, which all point to the fact that the door, and even the location of Heaven itself, weren’t nearly half as important as what was in the characters’ hearts and minds.

I hope our front door will always remind me that the doorways to fulfillment, peace, and love are within each one of us.