Unemployed people. Refugees. People in shaky relationships. Homeless people. Couples struggling with infertility. Those waiting for a visa, or a verdict, medical results or exam results, election results or whether they accept the offer made on that house . . .
"Liminality is a place in between. It is emptiness and nowhere.
Adolescence is the liminal space between childhood and adulthood.
But liminality is more than a point along the way to somewhere else.
It represents anti-structure to structure, chaos to order.
The place between two worldviews is a liminal place.
It is a place of dying and rebirth, even of metamorphosis,
the place where the caterpillar spins its cocoon and disappears from view.
Liminality is Israel in the desert, Jesus in the tomb."
Leonard Hjalmarson
Richard Rohr says,
"I am convinced that without experiences of liminal space (that place where all transformation happens), there is no truthful perspective on life. Without truthful perspective, there is neither gratitude nor any abiding confidence. It is precisely this deep gratitude and unfounded confidence that I see most lacking in people today . . ."
The opposite of this abiding confidence, this transformational faith is a lack of emotional and spiritual maturity, a lack of soundness, leaving us incomplete, coasting on the crumbs and hand me downs of others, not self-feeders in faith and spirituality, but fragile, fickle, fearing that something will happen that might undo us, push us over the edge.
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"There is a place that must be left before we can find a new place, and in between there is a place without a place, a place without support, a place which is not a place, since a true place is a support" (Torier p160)