born. Thresholds, transitions, boundaries, crossings, moments when all creation seems to pause and breathe deeply, silently, watching to see.
I have learned that dusk and pre-dawn are the best times to pray; God is most willing to be present, or perhaps we are most open to Her presence. The instant when I discovered my wife dead, God held me back from tumbling down into the black abyss of chaos. When Nancy and I stood before our gathered family and friends and said “I do” to each other and to the gathered community. I have sat on the boulders at Govan’s Chapel tucked into the gap in a cliff side as a gale blew sea foam around me and over the cliff top and knew I was with God. All places and times of transition are limens, moments when, for an instant, we are in between. My dad used to talk about “Hobble-de-hoy, neither man nor boy,” in between being a child and becoming an adult. Limens are everywhere once we begin to recognize them and watch for them. And they can be very important moments in our spiritual lives, moments when we are vulnerable, and can be very present to God.
I have been in lots of liminal places. Sometimes Nancy and I make that an element, a goal of our travels, to discover and collect a few more liminal experiences. In-between places, in-between times. Places where time seems to slow and pause for a little before moving on to tomorrow. Places where the land ends, and I creep as close as I can (I’m acrophobic) to the edge of a cliff and look down eight hundred feet at the waves crashing on the rocks, and ask . . . (there are no words). Caldey Island is a liminal place where time itself doesn’t quite stop, but becomes unimportant, where the ancient and the present collapse together, and I could stand in one place and ask all the questions that had never been answered, no matter that there was no one, and nothing to answer. But there came an answer, not in words, not even in ideas or forms or images. Locked in a burial chamber in Loughcrew. Spaces for wondering. Sitting on the rocks at land’s end and watching the waves crashing for hours, and hearing non-voices uttering, perhaps in my imagination, or in the rhythms of the seas and the pounding of the waves. Places to listen—and to hear the sound of the great nothing that lies beyond it all.
The illustrating example of the liminal commonly given is of the tribal initiation rites for boys-becoming-men. The boys, about to become un-children are taken from their families and villages to a remote ritual site and subjected there to various ordeals or humiliations (sounds much like hazing rituals), trained by older men. The dark is often an integral part, as in a darkened hut, at night, in a cave. Sometimes mutilations such as tattoos or scarification or circumcision. This may go on for a few days or months or even years. There is often some encounter with the gods or the ancestors. They may be taught skills. At the end, a highly ritualistic reunion. The boys have died and are now reborn as men, sometimes with new names, sometimes needing to be taught to recognize relatives and friends. The liminal is a “betwixt and between” time, no longer boys, but not yet men. All old is stripped away, and the new is received, like recruits in miliary barracks stripped of “civies,” dressed in ill-fitting uniforms, given rifles, and forced to live in an unnatural community. For a period the boys have no family or friends, just each other and a few older men as guides, so new relations must be built, without status or class. This is an in-between time when you give up the old and prepare to take on the new, get ready to become something, someone you have not been before. It is a time given to begin the processional from the known to the unknown. And it is a time to consider what it will be like to be a man. A honeymoon is a very palpable liminal time in which we stop being an individual and become a mini-community.
There are liminal places (boundaries, no-man’s-lands, crossroads, land’s ends, mountain tops, seashores, river banks, artesian springs, sacred worship places, cemeteries), and liminal spaces (two-dimensional plots of land, one-dimensional pathways and ley-lines, zero-dimensional omphalos [translate: navel] and axis mundi [translate: axis of the earth] the dream time (i.e., of Australian aboriginals), and liminal times (the New Year, equinoxes and solstices, birthdays and anniversaries, dusk and dawn, initiations, waking from sleep, “Once-upon-a-time” [of faerie tales]), and liminal events (births, marriages, deaths, life-changing happenings), and liminal journeys (pilgrimages, retreats, dyserts, sabbaticals), and even liminal living (persons of lameness or disabilities, babies born with cauls, hermits, tramps, priests and monastics and such, contrarians, fools). Liminal is stepping from the known to whatever lies beyond.
God is very close, very present, very accessible in liminals. Or perhaps, inversely, it is we who are, can be, more open to God in liminals. When I came down the stairs and discovered Suzy cold and dead, God clasped me tightly in Her embrace.
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Maundy Thursday, 2008—Thoughts
We stand, we kneel, we sit, we sing together, we listen to the priest and to the choir, we recite in unison memorized ancient pieces, we read others aloud together, we speak responsively back to a reader. Liturgy is multi-sensual: splotches of colors, beautiful brocades, the sight and smell of candles (and in some other churches, the luscious, choking smell of incense rolling up in clouds), the sounds of the organ and piano and on occasion other instruments played with deep devotion, of voices singing, speaking, chanting, the taste of fish food wafers and wine, the warmth and smells and sensuousness of gathered bodies. And in the midst of all that we imagine we are speaking to God.
What does it mean tonight? This Maundy Thursday? We commemorate and symbolically enact the last meal Jesus had with his disciples. Tomorrow on our liturgical clock he will die! But this is tonight. And we try to live it out by commemorating the eating of that last meal, a Passover meal, the betrayer fleeing the room, the ragtag procession to Gethsemane, their sleeping vigil, his pleading “Take away this cup from me!” with gobs of bloody sweat, the clanging and chinking noises of steel weapons as the soldiers work into the park to take him, his surrender, him led away to trial, the faithful followers’s stark terror of flight, scared shitless, running for their very lives. We commemorate. Tonight.
So tonight we gather as it is darkening, to go through the regular, familiar liturgy with only minor variations. The music is darker this night, heavier, to try to capture the mood of that last supper. Or perhaps to capture our own moods as we think forward to the gruesome execution tomorrow morning, as though we might be there. The rest of the liturgy is not so very unlike the way we celebrate it every other day. Until we get to the end. And then, in silence, they strip the altar. Take away every piece of color, every bit of shiny metal, every candle and bit of light. They veil the cross. They remove every moveable thing that makes this space look and feel liturgically lived in. While we watch, in silence, listening to the awkward noises. Noting the slight disorganizedness. And finally we leave in silence, sombered, as the place is darkened and some one lonely person prepares to spend hours here in this darkened, empty, spooky space, vigilling. In some places there is an unnerving variation, we wash each others’s feet! Because he did it. In other places there is one additional piece; after they have stripped the altar, and everything else they can, they wash the altar, as we silently watch, not with soapy water to make it clean, but with wine and water to ritually purify it, to make it ready for the sacrifice. And what does all that mean?
This is the circle of standing stones that I have chosen for myself and which seems to have chosen me as well. So tonight I have to ask, “What does it mean? What is it about? What, beyond the obvious and the stated, is going on here? Why do we bother to do it? What is its power, for us? What are we here to commemorate? To do? Does it make ANY difference whatsoever?”
Eucharist (making thanks) is always about community about this community of the faithful (whoever they happen to be). In this very symbolic, very stylized meal we celebrate our community, we enact our chosen community, we reinforce and solidify this community we each have chosen for ourselves and for each other, this community that is for us the living body of the risen Christ. And as this community gathers we imagine that the Christ is present in every person who joins the circle, and in the gathered circle itself. Christ is here. Now. At this very moment! Or so we imagine.
But what is different about this night is that tonight we celebrate not just the community, but the community
