El Sanctuario de Chimayo. (Image Courtesy of Jim Burklo)
Special to United Methodist Insight | March 17, 2026
We would arrive at our home, open the front door, and walk inside, with our 3-year old daughter toddling behind us.
But she would stop and stand in the doorway, contentedly looking inside and out. Lost in thoughts and feelings, she seemed to be disinterested in going any further. Clearly, she liked being there. At first, we urged her to go into the house so we could close the door. But after a few of these incidents, we just let her stand in the doorway until she was ready to enter.
Who's Jim Burklo?
Christopher Alexander’s seminal book on architecture, “A Pattern Language”, devotes a section to houses of worship. He says that a key feature of a religious sanctuary is the entrance. He suggested that it should have dramatic, narrowing stages of entry into the front door – larger portals into smaller portals, opening into expanding space for worship. Alexander’s insight was reflected in the structure of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, with its succession of portals into increasingly exclusive spaces, culminating in a Holy of Holies where but one priest could enter with a rope tied around his waist so he could be pulled out if something went wrong. We are born physically through a narrow portal leading into the wide world. To be born again in spirit, we reverse the journey, passing through narrowing portals of spiritual discipline or painful life-passages that open out into the expansive kin-dom of heaven on earth. The experience of entering a sanctuary through successions of arches and doorways rhymes with our inner journey back to our Source.
For years, I’ve been making pilgrimage to El Santuario de Chimayo in the mountains of northern New Mexico. It is a little adobe chapel dating back to 1813 in the Spanish colonial era. You enter it through an adobe portal leading through a garden and up to its ancient wooden doors. Inside the dark sanctuary are old wooden pews and a “retablo” behind the altar with old hand-carved and hand-painted images of saints. At the front, to the left of the altar rail, is another door into a room lined with crutches and testimonials. In that room is another low door into a little room with an adobe floor, and in the floor is a hole filled with powdery tan dirt. The dirt is said to have healing power, and pilgrims come – some on foot for hundreds of miles – to scoop it up and rub it on whatever parts of their bodies are ailing, and to take some home to share with others. (A front-end loader next to a huge pile of identical dirt sits behind the sanctuary.) I’ve been to the Santuario many times. I begin to get emotional when I go through the garden portal, get more emotional when inside gazing at the retablo, and by the time I get into the room with the dirt, I’m weeping. Each passageway leading into the holy of holies in the Santuario squeezes my soul until the tears can’t help but flow. I join with countless other pilgrims over the centuries who have made this place sacred with their intentions for healing and wholeness.
In the “Godly Play” church curriculum for children, an adult is assigned the task of “doorkeeper”. As children come to the door of their classroom, in which they will act out Bible stories with wooden figurines in a sandbox, the doorkeeper solemnly asks each of them: “Are you ready to enter?” This ritual transforms a non-descript, institutional-looking door into a passageway to an encounter with the divine dimension. Children understand this innately, and enter with reverence.
“I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture.” (John 10:9 NRSVUE) The gate of the Christ swings both ways. Before opening it, we pause reverently. It leads us into a narrow passage and sanctuary where we re-unite with divine Love, and, in turn, leads us out of the sanctuary, through the passage, and into the wide world where we put that divine Love into action.
Our daughter, lingering in the doorway, was enraptured with the transition between the familiar womb of home and the fascinating, unpredictable, wide world outside. To be in or to be out? To savor the choice, to appreciate the difference between one direction and the other, she honored her need to mark the moment and take time before answering the sacred question: “Am I ready to enter?”