[Janua]ry
Searching for beauty in the door of the year
I went to a wedding last weekend, the second wedding in a family of seven, the only family that I can say I grew up with. When you’re a military kid, you don’t get to grow up with the same kids, but this family’s assignments followed ours from 2002 to our parents’ retirements – so, oddly enough, we did grow up together. The one closest in age to me, my friend Hannah, is an artist who is also studying theology and art at a different institution than mine. In this way, our lives still run on a strange parallel line, though we don’t live in the same place anymore.
She told me about her recent exhibition of landscape paintings, exploring the christological significance of bridges as a service to others and a deliverance over chaos (over the waters – which signify chaos in the Old Testament).
She sees Christ in a bridge; right now, I see Christ in a door.
In her book Parables of the Cross, Lilias Trotter begins the work with a hand-drawn seal in her dedication. The inscription on the seal reads: mors janua vitae. “Death, the door to life.”
I never learned Latin beyond a stray word here and there for medieval art history, so janua is a completely new, fresh word I’m turning over, like a smooth stone picked up on the shore. January, the door of the year.
I stepped through several doors in 2025: from a longtime Northern Virginian to a resident of a small Scottish coastal town, from serial freelancer to full-time student. I transitioned from seven years of longing to see a dream fulfilled to the beginnings of living out that dream in the eighth – a personal year of jubilee. Though these transitions have felt enormous, at the same time they have all meant taking the single step: first here, then there.
This year, St Andrews will review my first dissertation chapter. Though I’ve spent the last term reading, note taking, and writing, my research still feels like a patch of untilled earth, the ground frozen, though fertile. A gift, a calling, a responsibility. I still feel like I don’t know how to work the ground. At the end of March, I will offer the school this patch of earth, and what I have grown in it. Lord willing, I will pass through another door.
Trotter also considers doors in The Way of the Sevenfold Secret, a work written for the Sufi Mystic Brotherhood of Algiers. She shares the gospel by explaining Christ’s seven I Am statements. This is what she says about “I am the door”:
But the door is something different: it implies an entrance that needs but a single step, as we all know in daily life. No one thinks of a gradual progression in entering by a door: one moment he is without — the next he is within.
Christ is the only way to the Father, and Christ transforms us. He often does this through his most-employed art form: the parable.
Have you thought about Christ in this way, as a constant storyteller, a parable maker, an artist? Art provokes by asking questions; art can be an agent of transformation with the simple tool of our attention. Art asks the viewer to step into another world for a moment, and that moment can change a person. This is what Jesus did with his parables: he said, “Step into this world with me. You have heard it said one way, but I say a new thing.”
I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture.
John 10:9
Christ is not being literal here; he instead uses an image to stir our imagination. He invites the listener to imagine him as a door, and thus imagine part of his purpose in our lives, part of our relationship to him.
He is our janua, our door, our ultimate threshold for transformation. From death, to life. From lost, to found. As simple as passing through a door.
In 2026, at the door of the new year, I’m ever more convinced that all of life is truly charged with God’s goodness and beauty, if we can perceive it. I am doing this research at St Andrews to chase down this question: how can we cultivate that perception – vision, eyes – to see and know Christ and his prevailing beauty? Can the arts mediate in us a perception of beauty and prepare us to receive the gospel as beautiful?
I think we can expand our visions – and recognize reflections of Christ in bridges, doors, and more.
And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:
“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown”.
And he replied:
“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way”.
So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night.
And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.So heart be still:
What need our little life
Our human life to know,
If God hath comprehension?
In all the dizzy strife
Of things both high and low,
God hideth His intention.God knows. His will
Is best. The stretch of years
Which wind ahead, so dim
To our imperfect vision,
Are clear to God. Our fears
Are premature; In Him,
All time hath full provision.Then rest: until
God moves to lift the veil
From our impatient eyes,
When, as the sweeter features
Of Life’s stern face we hail,
Fair beyond all surmise
God’s thought around His creatures
Our mind shall fill.—Minnie Louise Haskins, God Knows (The Gate of the Year)
Happy January, friends.
10 Beautiful Things, my weekly missive on the search for beauty in ordinary life, returns to Substack next week. Hooray! Also, stay tuned for a 2025 reading roundup.
One aim of mine is to publish more longform writing here in 2026. It’s been my tendency for the last four years of Substack writing to only publish the easy things and let my deeper drafts collect dust. I love to write, and one of the great desires of my life is to become a good writer (yes, even as I stand at the door of academia, the land of notoriously bad writers). I know I must overcome my reluctance, stretch my legs, and muddle through some beginner essays here if I want any chance of seeing that desire come true in the land of the living. Thank you for being here and reading my words – it means more than you know.
Such a nourishing, interesting read. Thank you for sharing, Ellie ❤️ can’t wait to hear more from you.
So good and so well written