Neither Here Nor There
Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
September 12, 2021
Rev. Craig M. Nowak
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity…”
Dickens’ opening lines from A Tale of Two Cities could not have been more appropriate. Indeed, I could hardly believe what I had done, when in 2009 during the Great Recession, I quit my very secure job so I could finish seminary full-time. I quit my job with no future position in sight, no clear path to meeting all the degree and denominational requirements to come, indeed with no guarantee that the whole reason I was quitting my job, to enter the ministry, would even come to pass.
I was stepping into a great unknown, leaving behind what was for what shall be, whatever that would be. And should my telling of this story now or ever give you the wrong impression, keep in mind this line, one of my favorites, from The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy asks Professor Marvel aka The Wizard if he was frightened when his hot air balloon was blown off course and sent him to Oz. “Frightened?”, he says, “You are talking to a man who has laughed in the face of death, sneered at doom and chuckled at catastrophe. I was petrified.”
The truth is, transitions, from the familiar into the unknown are almost always accompanied by some sense of trepidation or fear, even when entered voluntarily. And it is a fact of life that more often than not we don’t get to choose how or when these transitions will occur. Indeed, all of us, if we look back over our lives can identify periods of transition when we stepped away from the familiar, regardless if what we knew was good or bad or whether we chose to or not, and moved into the unknown.
Births, deaths, a change of job or living arrangements…going off to school, puberty, retirement, celebrations and rites of passage, diagnoses and periods of serious illness, even our daily waking and falling asleep, are all examples of transitions that place us, at least for a while, in a space literally, emotionally, or spiritually betwixt and between what was and what is yet to come. A space that feels neither here nor there.
Spiritually speaking, these spaces, which again may be literal locations or mental/emotional states of transition are called liminal space and the experience of being in such a space is called liminality. The word liminal comes from the Latin word limen which means threshold. So liminal space and liminality refers to the gap…the threshold… between what we have left and what awaits us. As such it is almost always at least a somewhat uncomfortable space to occupy, and often very uncomfortable. Indeed, the spiritual teacher Richard Rohr describes liminality as, “ A form of holding the tension between one space and another.”
Tension is one of the hallmarks of liminal space. Things often feel “up in the air” or unresolved. And for good reason. They are. Liminal space usually has an undercurrent of anxiety about it, for within it we are made keenly aware that nothing is certain and that we are not in control. Thus liminal space can create or magnify a sense of aloneness or isolation even in the company of others. And we find ourselves longing for resolution, for resettlement into a new, more comfortable or comforting existence.
We can hear that longing in our first reading, the excerpt from Galway Kinnell’s poem, “When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone” particularly where the poet speaks of wanting to, “live again among men and women…” and stand, “…in the light of being made one: kingdom come.” And I’m certain with some thought and reflection on our own experiences of liminality, we too can recall both the tension and the pang for its abatement.
Indeed, we need not look beyond our present time.
The pandemic has thrust all of us, the entire globe, into liminal space. We have left the life we knew prior to late winter 2020 and are still, for the most part, standing in the threshold, awaiting entry into a new life that feels, as far as life can, more reliably familiar. For a year and a half we have lived in a state of being neither here nor there and though it’s not been as long as other periods of global liminality, like World War II, for example, the anxious undercurrent is there and it is powerful. And it has us itching for something like normal.
For some this has given rise to a fearful quest to eliminate all risk, something that neither existed before or will exist after the pandemic, and which for some has even meant declining vaccination, believing it the greater risk. Still, for others it has given rise to fury as manifest in the defiant insistence it is all a hoax, a refusal to get vaccinated, and loud calls to “unmask our kids.” Then there are those whose fury finds expression through talk of “culling the herd” in reference to unvaccinated adults.
To say that tensions are running high would be an understatement of epic proportions. And so, if you feel fearful, that’s okay. If you feel angry, that’s okay. If you’re not sure what you feel, that’s okay too.
“Holding the tension between one space and another”, as Richard Rohr describes liminality is not easy, especially for an extended period of time. To feel conflicted, confused, disoriented by the whole thing is one thing we can actually expect when we’re in liminal space. And this period of liminality is longer and more widespread than most of us are used to. This threshold feels more like a long corridor, both crowded and isolating at the same time, with no sign of a door at the other end. And we want out…now!
But, as our second reading reminds us, “Some things can’t be forced.”
A few years ago I was at a museum known as the Green Vaults in Dresden, Germany. It is housed in the former royal palace of the Electors and Kings of Saxony. Strolling from one gallery to the next meant passing through many thresholds, most of which were like any other doorway, albeit larger and grander in this case. But there was one gallery where the threshold was different. You couldn’t just pass through from the adjoining room. You had to step into a deep threshold facing a pair of closed doors and as you did the doors behind you closed, for a period of time you stood completely enclosed in this deep threshold waiting for the doors in front of you to open to the next gallery, where some of the most treasured objects in the collection awaits you.
This time we’re living through collectively is kind of like being in that deep threshold. The doors to the world we knew are closed behind us and no matter how much fear and fury we hurl at them, they’re not going to open again. What awaits us beyond the doors in front of us, which have yet to really open, remains unknown. But there is something we can be pretty sure of. And that is if, when the doors before us open WE are the same, then we have wasted an opportunity.
For liminality is not only, as Richard Rohr asserts, “a form of holding tension. ” It is also, he notes, the, “ultimate teachable space” in which, “authentic transformation can happen.” Liminal space can in fact be a gestation period leading to a significant and meaningful rebirth, personally, for society, and the planet.
But it is far from assured.
When we find ourselves in liminal space we are confronted with our vulnerability, called to question what we call “normal”, and profoundly humbled. The noisy, busy lives we complain about but continue to invent and purchase new ways to sustain suggests we don’t like to think too much about the asylum of our own making we call normalcy that we share with almost 8 billion other inmates on this planet.
“One of the most effective ways to avoid liminal space”, writes Richard Rohr, “is to be quick, efficient, successful, and goal-oriented. Or to be super-religious on the Right or super-correct on the Left. In either place”, he says, “you will only reconfirm all your crutches, addictions, and false securities.”
And indeed, look at our heroes, not the one’s we pay painless tribute to with cheerful lawn signs and bumperstickers, but the one’s who fill your newsfeed, who appear on magazine covers and have millions of “followers” on social media. Good God, imagine what a more intelligent life form scrolling through Twitter or observing who we pay the most attention, money and deference to as a species would think of us and what we value. And look at the degree of self-righteous grandstanding that occurs on the right and left, religious and secular on just about any issue. I mean, masks. Masks, standard protective equipment in medicine for decades have become a volatile, politically charged subject, for crying out loud! Do you think we have a problem with liminal space?
We avoid it like the plague…even when we’re thrust into liminal space by an actual plague! The irony is almost too much. This is where the theist might talk about God’s quirky sense of humor or working in “mysterious ways” and the atheist might declare the god they don’t believe in is kind of a J-E-R-K.
And this points to the contradictory nature of liminal space. On the one hand it can appear everything has stopped, that all is lost, and we’ve been are set adrift in confusion and discomfort. On the other hand, it can also bring to the fore possibilities that we’d never considered, stir something that has been dormant for years, and reveal opportunities to explore and express our creativity, initiate change, make a fresh start.
It is in this sense, holy ground, where we’re invited to remove our sandals, that is, to be fully present in this space outside of our usual routine that we might consider another perspective and discover a deeper understanding of ourselves, our world, and what we value.
And we’re already seeing some of this as we appear to be in the process of an uneven, bumpy descent toward our eventual landing on the other side of the pandemic. Many of us have heard or read about people leaving their pre-pandemic employment for other, more personally meaningful work. Or of those taking the time to explore a talent or interest long set aside. Maybe you’re one of them. Still others of us may sense some not insignificant change or transformation is afoot within or for us but are unclear as to exactly what it might be or mean.
This would suggest the hardest part of living in liminal space is the waiting.
But is it?
Are we really like the child in our second reading who wants our way in a world that turns at our wish?
Or do we instead struggle, deep down, to trust what the boy’s mother asserts? That, “Some things can’t be forced. They happen not when we wish, but when time is ripe. Like growing tall. Or when ice cubes freeze. Or such a beautiful purple and yellow sunshiny day for your birthday.”
Indeed, are are we so attached to what we call normalcy that we can we only identify with the poet’s longing in our first reading to be with others again after a long time living alone? Has it escaped our notice that it was his time living alone that revealed his needs, the meaning of returning, and the importance of standing, “…in the light of being made one: kingdom come.”?
If so, liminal space is the antidote, not the cause, of our spiritual hunger and longing. A remedy sunny self-help hacks and cheap religion would have us avoid.
“Cheap religion”, Richard Rohr reminds us, “teaches us how to live contentedly in a sick world, just as poor therapy teaches us how to accommodate ourselves to a sometimes small world based on power, prestige, and possessions.” Now, I doubt any of us, if given the choice, would choose a global pandemic as our liminal space, but it would be a mistake to view it only as a tragic chapter in our personal and collective histories to get through as fast as possible. That would be the view cheap religion would take and for it would provide a sweet and sentimental balm to apply until we can “get back to normal.”
I don’t want to be a purveyor of cheap religion and I don’t think you’ve gathered here again at the start of this church year looking for cheap religion either. Whatever else this pandemic is, it remains, like all liminal space, an ultimate teachable moment and chance for rebirth. And rebirth doesn’t follow passive hope or assurance of a return to normal. It comes when we explore, deeply, how this time and any time we find ourselves in liminal space, has been for us. When we reflect on and share what those spaces have revealed or opened us to. And how they have and continue to challenge us, our values and changed our understanding of normal.
And so, as we gather to celebrate the start of a new church year this morning, standing neither here nor there, let us, in the spirit of this faith, seek not hurried escape from liminal spaces, but instead enter each fully, as they come, that we might venture through together toward many a rebirth. May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
September 12, 2021
Rev. Craig M. Nowak
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity…”
Dickens’ opening lines from A Tale of Two Cities could not have been more appropriate. Indeed, I could hardly believe what I had done, when in 2009 during the Great Recession, I quit my very secure job so I could finish seminary full-time. I quit my job with no future position in sight, no clear path to meeting all the degree and denominational requirements to come, indeed with no guarantee that the whole reason I was quitting my job, to enter the ministry, would even come to pass.
I was stepping into a great unknown, leaving behind what was for what shall be, whatever that would be. And should my telling of this story now or ever give you the wrong impression, keep in mind this line, one of my favorites, from The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy asks Professor Marvel aka The Wizard if he was frightened when his hot air balloon was blown off course and sent him to Oz. “Frightened?”, he says, “You are talking to a man who has laughed in the face of death, sneered at doom and chuckled at catastrophe. I was petrified.”
The truth is, transitions, from the familiar into the unknown are almost always accompanied by some sense of trepidation or fear, even when entered voluntarily. And it is a fact of life that more often than not we don’t get to choose how or when these transitions will occur. Indeed, all of us, if we look back over our lives can identify periods of transition when we stepped away from the familiar, regardless if what we knew was good or bad or whether we chose to or not, and moved into the unknown.
Births, deaths, a change of job or living arrangements…going off to school, puberty, retirement, celebrations and rites of passage, diagnoses and periods of serious illness, even our daily waking and falling asleep, are all examples of transitions that place us, at least for a while, in a space literally, emotionally, or spiritually betwixt and between what was and what is yet to come. A space that feels neither here nor there.
Spiritually speaking, these spaces, which again may be literal locations or mental/emotional states of transition are called liminal space and the experience of being in such a space is called liminality. The word liminal comes from the Latin word limen which means threshold. So liminal space and liminality refers to the gap…the threshold… between what we have left and what awaits us. As such it is almost always at least a somewhat uncomfortable space to occupy, and often very uncomfortable. Indeed, the spiritual teacher Richard Rohr describes liminality as, “ A form of holding the tension between one space and another.”
Tension is one of the hallmarks of liminal space. Things often feel “up in the air” or unresolved. And for good reason. They are. Liminal space usually has an undercurrent of anxiety about it, for within it we are made keenly aware that nothing is certain and that we are not in control. Thus liminal space can create or magnify a sense of aloneness or isolation even in the company of others. And we find ourselves longing for resolution, for resettlement into a new, more comfortable or comforting existence.
We can hear that longing in our first reading, the excerpt from Galway Kinnell’s poem, “When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone” particularly where the poet speaks of wanting to, “live again among men and women…” and stand, “…in the light of being made one: kingdom come.” And I’m certain with some thought and reflection on our own experiences of liminality, we too can recall both the tension and the pang for its abatement.
Indeed, we need not look beyond our present time.
The pandemic has thrust all of us, the entire globe, into liminal space. We have left the life we knew prior to late winter 2020 and are still, for the most part, standing in the threshold, awaiting entry into a new life that feels, as far as life can, more reliably familiar. For a year and a half we have lived in a state of being neither here nor there and though it’s not been as long as other periods of global liminality, like World War II, for example, the anxious undercurrent is there and it is powerful. And it has us itching for something like normal.
For some this has given rise to a fearful quest to eliminate all risk, something that neither existed before or will exist after the pandemic, and which for some has even meant declining vaccination, believing it the greater risk. Still, for others it has given rise to fury as manifest in the defiant insistence it is all a hoax, a refusal to get vaccinated, and loud calls to “unmask our kids.” Then there are those whose fury finds expression through talk of “culling the herd” in reference to unvaccinated adults.
To say that tensions are running high would be an understatement of epic proportions. And so, if you feel fearful, that’s okay. If you feel angry, that’s okay. If you’re not sure what you feel, that’s okay too.
“Holding the tension between one space and another”, as Richard Rohr describes liminality is not easy, especially for an extended period of time. To feel conflicted, confused, disoriented by the whole thing is one thing we can actually expect when we’re in liminal space. And this period of liminality is longer and more widespread than most of us are used to. This threshold feels more like a long corridor, both crowded and isolating at the same time, with no sign of a door at the other end. And we want out…now!
But, as our second reading reminds us, “Some things can’t be forced.”
A few years ago I was at a museum known as the Green Vaults in Dresden, Germany. It is housed in the former royal palace of the Electors and Kings of Saxony. Strolling from one gallery to the next meant passing through many thresholds, most of which were like any other doorway, albeit larger and grander in this case. But there was one gallery where the threshold was different. You couldn’t just pass through from the adjoining room. You had to step into a deep threshold facing a pair of closed doors and as you did the doors behind you closed, for a period of time you stood completely enclosed in this deep threshold waiting for the doors in front of you to open to the next gallery, where some of the most treasured objects in the collection awaits you.
This time we’re living through collectively is kind of like being in that deep threshold. The doors to the world we knew are closed behind us and no matter how much fear and fury we hurl at them, they’re not going to open again. What awaits us beyond the doors in front of us, which have yet to really open, remains unknown. But there is something we can be pretty sure of. And that is if, when the doors before us open WE are the same, then we have wasted an opportunity.
For liminality is not only, as Richard Rohr asserts, “a form of holding tension. ” It is also, he notes, the, “ultimate teachable space” in which, “authentic transformation can happen.” Liminal space can in fact be a gestation period leading to a significant and meaningful rebirth, personally, for society, and the planet.
But it is far from assured.
When we find ourselves in liminal space we are confronted with our vulnerability, called to question what we call “normal”, and profoundly humbled. The noisy, busy lives we complain about but continue to invent and purchase new ways to sustain suggests we don’t like to think too much about the asylum of our own making we call normalcy that we share with almost 8 billion other inmates on this planet.
“One of the most effective ways to avoid liminal space”, writes Richard Rohr, “is to be quick, efficient, successful, and goal-oriented. Or to be super-religious on the Right or super-correct on the Left. In either place”, he says, “you will only reconfirm all your crutches, addictions, and false securities.”
And indeed, look at our heroes, not the one’s we pay painless tribute to with cheerful lawn signs and bumperstickers, but the one’s who fill your newsfeed, who appear on magazine covers and have millions of “followers” on social media. Good God, imagine what a more intelligent life form scrolling through Twitter or observing who we pay the most attention, money and deference to as a species would think of us and what we value. And look at the degree of self-righteous grandstanding that occurs on the right and left, religious and secular on just about any issue. I mean, masks. Masks, standard protective equipment in medicine for decades have become a volatile, politically charged subject, for crying out loud! Do you think we have a problem with liminal space?
We avoid it like the plague…even when we’re thrust into liminal space by an actual plague! The irony is almost too much. This is where the theist might talk about God’s quirky sense of humor or working in “mysterious ways” and the atheist might declare the god they don’t believe in is kind of a J-E-R-K.
And this points to the contradictory nature of liminal space. On the one hand it can appear everything has stopped, that all is lost, and we’ve been are set adrift in confusion and discomfort. On the other hand, it can also bring to the fore possibilities that we’d never considered, stir something that has been dormant for years, and reveal opportunities to explore and express our creativity, initiate change, make a fresh start.
It is in this sense, holy ground, where we’re invited to remove our sandals, that is, to be fully present in this space outside of our usual routine that we might consider another perspective and discover a deeper understanding of ourselves, our world, and what we value.
And we’re already seeing some of this as we appear to be in the process of an uneven, bumpy descent toward our eventual landing on the other side of the pandemic. Many of us have heard or read about people leaving their pre-pandemic employment for other, more personally meaningful work. Or of those taking the time to explore a talent or interest long set aside. Maybe you’re one of them. Still others of us may sense some not insignificant change or transformation is afoot within or for us but are unclear as to exactly what it might be or mean.
This would suggest the hardest part of living in liminal space is the waiting.
But is it?
Are we really like the child in our second reading who wants our way in a world that turns at our wish?
Or do we instead struggle, deep down, to trust what the boy’s mother asserts? That, “Some things can’t be forced. They happen not when we wish, but when time is ripe. Like growing tall. Or when ice cubes freeze. Or such a beautiful purple and yellow sunshiny day for your birthday.”
Indeed, are are we so attached to what we call normalcy that we can we only identify with the poet’s longing in our first reading to be with others again after a long time living alone? Has it escaped our notice that it was his time living alone that revealed his needs, the meaning of returning, and the importance of standing, “…in the light of being made one: kingdom come.”?
If so, liminal space is the antidote, not the cause, of our spiritual hunger and longing. A remedy sunny self-help hacks and cheap religion would have us avoid.
“Cheap religion”, Richard Rohr reminds us, “teaches us how to live contentedly in a sick world, just as poor therapy teaches us how to accommodate ourselves to a sometimes small world based on power, prestige, and possessions.” Now, I doubt any of us, if given the choice, would choose a global pandemic as our liminal space, but it would be a mistake to view it only as a tragic chapter in our personal and collective histories to get through as fast as possible. That would be the view cheap religion would take and for it would provide a sweet and sentimental balm to apply until we can “get back to normal.”
I don’t want to be a purveyor of cheap religion and I don’t think you’ve gathered here again at the start of this church year looking for cheap religion either. Whatever else this pandemic is, it remains, like all liminal space, an ultimate teachable moment and chance for rebirth. And rebirth doesn’t follow passive hope or assurance of a return to normal. It comes when we explore, deeply, how this time and any time we find ourselves in liminal space, has been for us. When we reflect on and share what those spaces have revealed or opened us to. And how they have and continue to challenge us, our values and changed our understanding of normal.
And so, as we gather to celebrate the start of a new church year this morning, standing neither here nor there, let us, in the spirit of this faith, seek not hurried escape from liminal spaces, but instead enter each fully, as they come, that we might venture through together toward many a rebirth. May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
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