Excerpt from My Monastery Is a Minivan by Denise Roy. Published 2001 by Loyola Press, 3441 North Ashland Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60657. Copyright © 2001 Denise Roy. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

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Entrances to holiness are everywhere
The possibility of ascent is all the time.
Even at unlikely times and through unlikely places.
-Bamidbar Rabba 12:4
My four-year-old daughter's favorite art projects these days always involve tape. She peels the stickers off of apples and bananas, then attaches these in designs all over the kitchen walls. She measures her height with string, then tapes the string to the side of our bookshelf. And she labels everything, everywhere. She carefully writes out the names of items on pieces of paper, then tapes these to each one so we'll all know what they are: FLOWER VASE. VCR. PIANO. Last week, after hearing me yell (quite frequently) at her six-foot-tall brothers to stop wrestling, she sat down and wrote out the word NO fourteen times. Then she cut out each one and, with tape in hand, fastened the command to walls everywhere. There is a NO near the oven, a NO near the stereo, a NO on the pantry door. I'm thinking of just taping one to my forehead.

This week she has a new project. She has drawn tiny, colorful doors, about four inches tall by two inches wide, and has attached them to various walls, each door held in place with forty-nine pieces of tape. A little orange door in the entry hall was the first to catch my attention. Then, while putting away a pencil in the desk drawer, I was surprised by a tiny pink door just above the Post-It notes. I even found a new door in the laundry room.

Every now and then, I see her standing before one of these miniature doors, talking quietly, apparently welcoming whoever has just come through. Sometimes, she tells me, it is one of the mice who live in our castle; often it is one of her invisible friends.

I find myself breaking into a smile whenever I pass one of these little doors. Maybe it's because I'm Irish, and my Celtic heritage, with its belief in "thin places," is seeping into my imagination-or perhaps into my home. "Thin places" are those places where the everyday world and the realm of the divine meet, where the walls that we normally experience as solid, dividing one reality from the other, are permeable. They are places-or even the moments-where God leaks through, where the divine peeks in and waves at us. In these holy places, extraordinary things happen.

As I pass these doors, I wonder: maybe my daughter knows something that I've forgotten. Maybe doors are all over the place, and grown-ups are blind to them. Maybe this is what Jesus was talking about when he said the reign of God is spread out all over the earth, and people just don't see it. And maybe that's why we need to become like children-in order to have eyes that can find the doors, the crevices, the cracks, the thin places in our everyday ordinary lives where we might catch a glimpse of the divine.

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Denise Roy is a licensed psychotherapist, an author, and the mother of four children, ages 6-21. Her recent book, My Monastery Is a Minivan: 35 Stories from a Real Life (Loyola Press, 2001), was named one of the Best Spiritual Books of 2001 by Spirituality & Health magazine. Denise is also the founder of FamilySpirit, an organization that seeks to inspire and nurture family spirituality. Visit her website at www.familyspirit.com to find out more about her writings and her workshops.