Liminality is a big word describing the in-between or middle stage of a journey. Each journey of life has about it uncertainty, disequilibrium, ambiguity, disorientation; chaos in sum.
Importantly, although we come to want to escape or resent a life that makes little sense, the very point of life is that life will inevitably make little sense, there’s a hope beyond it that makes sense of it all.
Follow along as I describe a process of the-what, the-why, the-how, the-who, and the-when.
THE WHAT
Life calls us into the gospel reality of agreement — the very essence that the Kingdom of Heaven is both now but not yet. It is consummate liminal space. We feel the presence of God but cannot see God. We believe by faith in things we cannot prove, and we know by faith that these are real without being able to prove them. We may execute the divine vision of loving others, but there’s no guarantee they’ll feel loved. Et cetera.
If you have been called to a life of loss, and grief has swarmed about you and through you for time and depth enough that part of you died, you may know a blessing few have experienced. This is the resurrection life that comes when part of us dies: not least, our self-dependence.
Better still, although it can often feel anything but a blessing, the overall sense of liminality, once it arrives, never truly leaves. That fact can lead to unresolvable bitterness and resentment. That usually leads to a life of denial or anger — and commonly a combination of both. The purpose is to resolve this by moving through it to acceptance.
Be encouraged. If you were suddenly plucked out of the liminality, you’d quickly abandon God, because that kind of ‘freedom’ is deceptive. It is good that your life has much about it that’s unresolvable. We never feel completely home here on this earth, and that’s how it’s meant to be.
In simplest terms, adversity holds open to us the meaning of life.
THE WHY
I’ve touched on this immediately above. God knows our nature. If we don’t need God, we don’t need God. But for life to go well, we need to recognise we do need God. Life only has hope when we begin from this standpoint.
The-why is answered by two truths that fit nicely together. Life only works when both truths work together in unison. These are the two truths, first and second:
1. Life for all of us, at some point, yet also overall, involves liminality. The One who created everything, including the concept of life, has — by divine and inscrutable wisdom, i.e., we don’t fully know why — created a perfect heaven and a perfect earth, but because of love, earth is now both broken in the sense of suffering (the-now) and perfect in terms of the cross and the resurrection (now-but-not-yet). We live on this earth ever seeking heaven but are ever unable to attain it.
2. When we accept the above truth, which we could consider ‘the problem of this life’, we’ve been given power to see and to agree. We therefore see the cosmic relevance of the gospel as the only way forward.
THE HOW
Accepting these two truths — holding them in tension by unison — leads us to the wholeness of Christ (life, death, resurrection, ascension, for us new life in the Spirit) by the fundaments of faith and the hope of glory in and beyond this life.
In other words, in Christ there is the reality of perfection but in this life that perfection can only be accepted as a hope, the realisation of which is a possibility one moment at a time, through, as we say in the Lord’s prayer: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” That hope represents the only perfection possible this side of eternity.
The ‘how’ of this hope — of bringing heaven’s perfection to earth in a moment — is established in the “One final command I give you: love one another as I have loved you,” said Jesus.
THE WHO
The easiest of all is the-who is everyone. Humanity makes this difficult by our biasing everything. Psychological science attests to this unconscious phenomenon. So, if there’s any hope we might achieve the-how, each of us must be honest about those — the-who — we exclude. Much of the time people are either completely unaware of their prejudices or they feel justified making them.
Including everyone in our expression of the-how is our biggest problem. We all want permission to exclude some. But God won’t have it.
We cannot resolve the problem of our inherent liminality until we love everyone.
We can now see how important forgiveness is in the cosmic plan of God. We’re all on this journey of practicing forgiveness for our own healing that we might experience the reality of it.
THE WHEN
The when is, of course, now.
The ‘now’ is a cosmic paradox. We only ever get now, it’s all we have, it’s cosmically limited, but also, it’s cosmically safe as it’s known, yet it’s cosmically unsafe for the traumas we bear.
We would hope for more — and that by faith — but fear of the unknown and also the uncertainty of the unknown envelope us in the reality that we don’t know if we can trust this unknown reality.
Now is both a better and a worse concept: better, because it’s known, but worse because it’s broken.
In context with the-what, the-why, the-how, and the-who, the when is pertinent. There is only the-now. Only in the-now can we demonstrate to God that we get the-what, the-why, the-how, and the-who, and the-when.
So, to sum up:
§ THE-WHAT is about liminality: accepting its presence as the clue for the living of a problematic life that begs resolution but cannot be resolved — the very definition of liminal space.
§ THE-WHY is about the God behind the liminality: the-what and the-why heralding the-how.
§ THE-HOW is about the concept of “on earth as in heaven,” which leads us to discover Jesus’ “One final command I give you: love one another as I have loved you.”
§ THE-WHO is necessarily everyone — all who bear God’s image — including those we want to exclude.
§ THE-WHEN is now; for all and each of the days of our lives. We’re here for but a short time.
Photo by Matt Hardy on Unsplash
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