You won’t find that word in the title above in many dictionaries, although I found it in my American Heritage dictionary…a short definition. Liminal is an adjective (my spell-check doesn’t recognize it) The entry in the dictionary is Limen, which according to its Latin root means threshold. The definition reads: a threshold to a physiological or psychological response. Perhaps the word found its way into English medical parlance. Threshold is the key here. In the academic circles of theology the word is used ubiquitously. Its rather clinical definition in English dictionaries has expanded exponentially to speak of the vast richness of faith, which at its heart is about transformation. For theologians the word means the threshold from one state of being to another…the in-between time of the old being transformed to the new…the created order pausing in the mystery that begins the recreation of the world. I have often spoken of it as: in between the now and the not yet. It is a place of profound hope, and a place of pain and it happens in the dark places of our souls and in our world. Transformation rarely takes place without the pangs of birth…there in that liminal space at which we arrive and arrive again, that same darkness that glows with hope. The cross itself a symbol thereof.
This word describes the way life evolves, that creation is an ongoing, thoroughgoing process of being made and remade. Liminality takes on archetypal, perhaps mythological status in our collective human lore. We find it rife in Greek mythology: Theseus must descend into the dark of the labyrinth and confront the fearsome minotaur, and emerge finding himself transformed, as well as the kingdom he rules; Persephone descending into Hades and returning to earth to find it utterly remade. Odysseus braves being lost at sea and facing test after test until he can return home to his rightful place with renewed knowledge of who he is called to be; Dante must descend into the depths of Hell until he can ascend to true knowledge and understanding of the nature of the cosmos and the love of God that drives it. In the very first canto Dante says he is lost in a dark wood…the limen….the threshold to a new state of being; T.S. Eliot laments in Four Quartets: “dark, dark, dark, we all go down to the dark”…but the poet doesn’t leave us there…he leads us as the protagonist of the poem to light and joy in the end, “where the fire and the rose are one”.You may remember the scene from Star Wars wherein Luke Skywalker must descend into a cave and face his own fears, so that his transformation and maturity might be nurtured…He pauses warily in the liminal space and then musters the courage to descend…To approach the liminal one must take courage. There are countless examples of liminality in literature, and I suspect in other art forms as well…The grand mythic story of transformation being the truth of the way life is….told again and again.
In our sacred lore…In the scripture we will read this week in particular, we see again the story of transformation from pain and death and the darkness of the tomb, to light and life and joy. Perhaps Jesus’ liminal space is the moment of uncertainty in Gethsemane, or perhaps appearing before Pilate and his remaining mute…but truly Jesus’ entire life is lived in liminal space transforming our world, recreating it into the way God would have it….He is the archetype of our true human nature…that we also are to take courage when in the dark for the sake of the world’s renewal, uncertainty and danger and risk and envy and unbelief notwithstanding. We have arrived at the limen….take courage good people, name the hope that glows in the dark, for ourselves and for our families and for our world. And know that the light awaits surely…so the ageless story goes.
