comes in many ways and with many textures – I have mentioned only three. In this essay I wish to talk specifically about two: the spiritual and the sexual.
It is especially in these two areas that society and the Church set out to claim, construct, sanction and control the liminal experience. This happens primarily through the structures of marriage and of official religious ritual. Some experiences, some pathways into the Mystery, become hallowed, celebrated, enshrined, even made mandatory, while others are forbidden, condemned, denied and even demonised. Some people and their experiences are ‘in’, and other people and their experiences are ‘out’. However, true liminal experiences cannot be legislated for or legislated against. Indeed, in them a deep freedom and truth is discovered, a touchstone by which to test the preaching and posturing of the institutions themselves, if we have the integrity and the courage.
All the same, it is not simply malice and power that lead society and the Church to try to control and issue caveats around these experiences. That which is tasted in them, whether it comes through prayer, sex, nature, drugs, dance or ritual is intensely powerful, even overwhelming. Wisdom, prudence and guidance are essential in the drinking of this water, as a little taste of it goes a long way. We all know, I suspect, the seductive tendency to seek the thrill of the liminal moment again and again at the expense of ‘ordinary’ life, relationships and commitments, ultimately forfeiting the true transformation to which the liminal moment itself points, as we shall see.
But first, if we are to be human, to be free, it is essential that we become profoundly open and deeply attentive to our own liminal experiences, and especially in the areas of our sexuality and in our prayer. There can be no true spirituality or growth without this. The ‘Wisdom of the Ages’ is vital, but we must live our own lives, live from our own deepest centre, which is sensed and glimpsed in these moments. We must embrace them even as we are embraced in them. Better, we must embrace not the liminal moment itself, nor its context (church, sex, dance, drugs, nature, etc.), but rather we must embrace that which the liminal moment reveals to us: that Mystery, that essence, which we taste and surrender to, inarticulate and inarticulable, utterly free. We must embrace and drink deeply of the Mystery whenever and wherever and however and in whomsoever it reveals itself. Laws must not stop us.
Elsewhere I have referred to this as ‘telling the truth’, first to ourselves.2 Let us drink deeply, letting the ‘chips’ of social, religious and personal structures fall where they may in that moment. We who are ourselves ‘on the edge’, whose spiritual and sexual experiences are so routinely condemned and denied, can we have the courage to ‘drink of the truth’ and to proclaim it to others, witnessing to the freedom of the Spirit who will not be articulated, legislated or controlled, who ‘blows wherever she wills’ (John 3:8)? Here is a truly prophetic, truly revolutionary, truly human vocation!
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2 See my video course The erotic contemplative:the spiritual journey of the gay/lesbian Christian, vol. 1, Erospirit Research Institute, Oakland CA, 1994.
What then of the wisdom and prudence I spoke of earlier? And what of the inevitable, all too immediate moment when the tasting, the embracing, the showing is gone, and we either tumble deliciously in its wake like dolphins behind a ship, or feel the chaos and emptiness it has stirred up in our stagnant pond of a life? What then?
The showing and the withdrawing
This withdrawing, this ‘hide-and-seek’ is the other essential quality of the liminal experience. It must be faced. All too often we, who are excluded from so much that society and Church hold dear, cling tenaciously to the thrill of the moment, seeking it over and over again, compulsively, even desperately, ‘like vultures fighting over a corpse’, as a gay friend put it recently. We must allow the withdrawing. We must let go.
When Heidegger says, ‘that which itself shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the Mystery‘3, he is expressing a truth that all of us know at a deep, soul level. We also know it in our bodies. Perhaps the experience of orgasm is the clearest example of this for most of us. In that very moment of ecstasy, in that tasting, that bliss, that knowing, that briefest communion with that which cannot be named, as we are thrown over the peak of consciousness, at the burning ‘white hot tip of sexuality‘4 as ‘It’ shows itself, it withdraws. We are left astonished, filled and shattered by sex, but still we are left.
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3 F Browning,The culture of desire, Crown Publishers, New York, 1993, p. 88.
4 R Burrows, Ascent to love, Darton, Longman and Todd, London, 1987, p. 115.
What is going on here? Is ‘God’ playing games with us? (And there are names for games like this!) Are we being enticed, teased and abandoned? It is relevant to state that this precise question is also faced in the spiritual life of prayer, as the One who set our hearts on fire seems to abandon us and we are left ‘on the streets’, ‘beaten’, ‘wounded’ and ‘stripped’ like the bride in the Song of Songs.5 This is a serious question, and in our longing we ask it from the depths of our heart.
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5 Song of Songs 5:7.
Could it be that this showing-and-withdrawing actually reveals to us something of the nature of the Mystery itself, something of our own nature, and something of the nature of human transformation? Could it be essential to the spiritual journey? In the Book of Exodus, Moses, after receiving the Law, asks to see God’s face. God tells Moses to hide in the cleft of a rock and as He passes, God will shield him with His hand, so that Moses can look out and see God’s back (Exodus 33:18-23). It would be death to see God face to face – not in the sense of being punished, but because the encounter would be humanly overwhelming, unbearable; it would ‘shatter the container’ of the human.
To encounter the Mystery, the Unnameable One, ‘God’, is to go beyond words, concepts, images and doctrines. It is to stand naked, utterly vulnerable in the embrace of the ineffable essence of That Which Is, encountering It in ourselves, as ourselves, as All. This is that which ‘no eye has seen, no ear has heard, nor has it entered into the mind of humans to conceive’ (1 Corinthians 2:9). This encounter can only be borne in the briefest of touches; a full revelation of the Mystery is literally unthinkable, impossible for human life as we now live it. Even our fleeting glimpses baffle and stun us.
In the immediate withdrawing of the Mystery, even as it embraces us, as it licks our lips, we see its nature as utterly ‘more’, ultimately ‘beyond’, transcending all, just as in its showing we see its immanence; for it is closer to us than we are to ourselves – intimate and immediate in the depths of our humanness.
In our truly liminal experiences, in the depths of prayer and in the depths of sex, I believe we do indeed encounter this Absolute Mystery, showing and withdrawing, embracing and emptying, and we long for it with all our heart and soul. ‘My body pines for you, like a dry weary land without water’, cries the Psalmist (Psalm 63:1) and the mystic and the lover in us cry out with him. We know the yearning of those who ‘are willing to make shipwrecks of themselves in order to gain the one they love’.6 It is the withdrawing of the Mystery that kindles and re-kindles this longing.7
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6 Saint Augustine, Confessions, translated by RS Pine-Coffin, Penguin Classics, Middlesex, 1961, p. 232 (Book X, Chapter 27). 7 This ‘showing and withdrawing’ of the Mystery, the ‘emptying and embracing’ reflect the two great movements of the Christian spiritual life: the Apophatic
