It had been a season of drought in our small farming community. The prayers for corn to be “knee high by the fourth of July” had changed into prayers for rain…any amount of rain. Seedlings who braved the surface, stood crispy, brown and shriveled against the parched gray earth. Everything was cracked, dry, longing for water, longing for life.
One afternoon winds swirled, picking up bits of earth until dust covered the sun. As the gray sky churned, my mother pounded at our neighbor’s door where I had been playing. She kneeled down, grabbed my face and sternly and lovingly instructed, “Kim, there is a horrible dust storm. We must go home. When I pick you up, close your eyes. Do not open them until we get inside our house. Keep your mouth closed. Keep your eyes closed. Hold on tight. Whatever you do, DO NOT open your eyes.” She wrapped her scarf around her long red hair and then firmly wrapped her arms around me. As she carried my 5-year-old body out into the storm, dust like sandpaper painfully polished my cheeks. The wind forced grit between my closed lips and into my teeth. My mother moved quickly, and I held tight, but I hated the darkness. I knew we had left our neighbor’s home, but I had no idea how long it would take for us to be out of the pressing, painful winds. “How much longer? How much more pain?” I asked myself. Frightened, anxious and rendered helpless by the darkness. I chose to open my eyes. They filled with tears as sandpaper bombarded my sight. I slammed by eyes shut, but I knew now, we were halfway home. We were no longer where we had been. I couldn’t see where we were going, but I knew we were in between. The only way forward was through the anxiety, fear, discomfort and the pain. Somehow, on the other side of it all, we would find our way home.
We each experience moments in our lives where we crossover a threshold from what we have known, what feels safe, certain and comfortable and enter into places of unknowing. These spaces are in between spaces, where we are unsure what, where or how we will reach our next destination. Spiritually, we refer to them as liminal spaces, and they are an essential part of our spiritual formation.
The word liminal comes from the Latin word limen, meaning threshold. In a liminal space we live in the tension of what was and what we cannot yet fully perceive for what is next. It is a season of waiting, trusting, surrendering and transition, we are prepared for what is next—our new home, our new existence. We may enter into liminal spaces through triumph or challenge. A promotion at work, an increase in income, the gift of a new child or a death of a loved one, a painful diagnosis or the loss of a job can send us into liminal space where we find ourselves searching for our new home.
We see liminal spaces throughout the biblical narrative. After being freed from slavery, the Hebrew people wander in the desert for 40 years. Mary the mother of God enters into a season of waiting after the immaculate conception as the Messiah grows in her womb, and she waits to hold him in her arms. The disciples on the road to Emmaus, having just seen their rabbi murdered, wait, pondering with confusion rumors of the Christ’s resurrection. They are normative in the Christian journey and biblical accounts remind us of the nearness of God in these intense times of transformation.
Liminal spaces challenge the ways in which we cling to control and certainty. They challenge our illusions of power. They are disruptive, disorienting and distilling because they stretch us, take away that which has made us comfortable, what we’ve considered normative, and they refine us. In liminal spaces the Holy Spirit invites us to open ourselves to God and receive the holy invitation of transformation which comes when we are feeling our way through the darkness and pressed by all the ways the darkness reminds us that we need light to guide us along our path.
Fr. Richard Rohr explains, liminal space is “a unique spiritual position where human beings hate to be but where the biblical God is always leading [us].” Our resistance to this unique spiritual position often leads to an anxious response in which we grapple for certainty, power, control and we are tempted to run back to what we knew or how we functioned before, though the old ways of doing things no longer fit us. Often in the struggle, the darkness, God feels distant. However, in the midst of liminal spaces and all their uncertainty, the God who sees us, loves us and guides is actually carrying us. In the midst of all the anxiety, the God who is near to us will ensure we find our way home.
Where do you find yourself today? At work? At Home? In your personal life? Are you in a season of transition? Do you feel disrupted? Maybe you have entered into a liminal space. Contemplate for a moment all the spaces in which you find yourself in liminal or in between spaces? Take some time to slow and jot down your thoughts. Noticing where we are experiencing disruption is the key to us opening the invitations of transformation God extends to us in liminal spaces.
