Living in Sacred Liminality

First of all, Happy Mothers Day! My guess is that we will all remember this one for a long time! Where we were, whom we were with, but most of all the mothering care demontrated in these days and through our lives. Thank you.

Blessed be God who animates our lives and offers us guidance and refuge in our times of disorientation even in sacred space. AMEN

Several years ago I wrote a sermon in which i talked about liminality

afterwards i was criticized for using an obscure word and told that I lost the parish. 

I cringed and vowed to do better but confess liminal space is a concept which visits me every day. It is about tension and disorientation and possibility.

Since then I continue, nevertheless, to ponder liminality, thin spaces, thresholds, and recently have been surprised, happily so, by the plethora of liminality sightings in prose and commentary and poetry. The word is coming back perhaps because it is one of the only ones we have which approaches mystery and holds our ambiguities. 

Richard Rohr recently devoted an entire series to Liminal Space recognizing a myriad of contemplatives who have contributed to the subject. In essence he equates liminal space with sacred space. It is the space of transformation which moves us forward or deeper into the love of God and toward deep joy.

The word liminal comes from the Latin ‘Limen” meaning threshold, any time or place of entering or beginning...something new; liminal space then is between one point in time and the next or another. We feel liminal space when we are on the verge of something or caught in between two endpoints. In anthropology liminality is the quality of ambiguity or diorientation between two rites of passage. 

It seems to me that liminality applies to many disorienting spaces in our lives, including whatever it is we are living through and into these days...and I am particularly interested in human response to the disorientation and what our Christian faith has to say about all this: 

We live between the first and second coming of the Messiah! We live between the Kingdom of God being at hand and to come! We live between the world as we knew it before COVID19 and the world to be known after we emerge or as we emerge! We live between decisions, to stay, to go, to isolate, to gather. We live between an awareness of pestilence and greed and death and a vision of eternal life and love and abundance. 

These are liminal spaces. These are the thresholds we cross, or fail to. These are imposed and inviting spaces. The common theme in a liminal space is the unknown, the mysterious. And that may be why liminality is rarely discussed. We would rather wait on one side of the divide until we are certain of the other or have no choice in the matter. Or more often we scramble back to false security, false identity. 

I am drawn to discuss liminal space as I consider the Gospel today and the context of the psalm. The Gospel passage from John is considered by many and particularly by Martin Luther as the most consoling of all gospel passages. It assures us of the beauty of divine union in which every single one of us has a place. The mansion or room prepared especially for each one of us is genuinely designed to hold our fullest saved selves. It is the resolution of the great divide, the tragic gap, the liminality of life, now lived.

and the Psalm which speaks directly to the inherent response of each of us in that gap to seek safety tells us that our refuge is in God. Upon closer examination this psalm is a miniversion of the entire development represented in all the psalms: orientation, disorientation and reorientation. (Brueggemann)

As such the psalms represent the human journey as we move with levels of despair and joy through the gap between what is and what is to come. And so our orientation, in steadfast love of God, becomes disoriented as we encounter life and lament, how long dear Lord how long, until we open ourselves to and receive the grace of a reorientation, a conversion and returning to God with new insight, and so like Miriam we sing to the Lord. 

The psalms then inform and guide our earthly pilgrimage while in the tragic gap. These songs affirm our anxiety and our joy. They support our growth. They are the sacred content of the liminal space in which we reside with our God. They are the sacred pattern which help us make meaning of the divine rhythms we navigate. 

I invite you to embrace the liminality of this time and to dance between stability and predictability and uncertainty and risk. The psalms will be the music. Your dancing partner is God, who is also going before you to prepare a place for you. 

Life is short and we have too little time to gladden the hearts of those who travel the way with us. So, be swift to love and make haste to be kind….and may the blessing of God Almighty, Father, Son and Holy Spirit be with you now and always.