Liminality and Hope in Advent
A Webinar presented by Bishop Kate Prowd and Revd Dr Wendy Crouch - 1st December 2020
Introduction
Welcome & thanks to Fr Hugh
· Opening Prayer: I first heard of this in an airport. In a “betwixt and between space” before my consecration as a bishop. (Husband) Roger “mopping me up” in my place of unknowing, and he said to me: I always find the Thomas Merton prayer so helpful in such times.
The prayer will be known to many of you. And t’s one I’ve prayed over and over in the past 2yrs since being a bishop. I think this prayer absolutely expresses both liminality and hope. And so let us pray:
A Prayer of Unknowing By Thomas Merton
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that, if I do this, You will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust You always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for You are ever with me, and You will never leave me to face my perils alone. Amen. Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, page 79.
Well, tonight we’re focusing on Liminality and Hope in Advent
· Actually, one of the inspirations for this talk was the title of a book: How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You are Going– Leading in a Liminal Season by Susan Beaumont[1]). But people way before us have been reflecting on this very experience, so as we prepare for this next hour, let’s begin with a musical expression of being in that liminal space…..
Play MUSIC : O Come O Come Emmanuel (Salt of the Sound)
· Definition of Liminal: Latin: limen meaning threshold. Liminal space is transitional space—As Richard Rohr says: it’s the space where we are “betwixt and between the familiar and the completely unknown”[2]. Our old world has left us disoriented, but we are not yet sure of the new existence.
· Michelle Hampson (UK priest and Psychiatrist) suggests that it is helpful to think of liminality not as an inevitable passing through but as a place where we deliberately choose to pause and reflect; to discern what we are now called to be or do, before moving on. It is a place of creativity and surprises. And so Jacob, pausing in the desert, wrestles with God overnight but leaves transformed; both disabled and blessed. [3]
· Perhaps it is the uncertainty of what might emerge that may be why we might try to avoid liminal spaces …
“Liminal space”--I couldn’t think of a more apt way of describing the life we are living right now in this pandemic, and as we’ve moved into the season of Advent : as Hampson writes:
Most of us like the comfort of routines; they help us to feel we are in control and confident. The pandemic and its changing restrictions is an ongoing challenge and we may simply wish it were all over. We may fear being overwhelmed by the fear of Covid and distress at the devastation it has caused. The temptation is to yearn for the familiar and to ignore how imperfect that was; like the Israelites in the wilderness who yearned to return to Egypt, where they in fact had been slaves.
We are living in a liminal space—not knowing. No going back to the old. But not sure what going to the new--or COVID normal-- will look like.
Format for TONIGHT
· We’ll talk about the experience of liminality—its challenges and opportunities
· And how COVID has been a liminal experience as we’ve transitioned from one liminal space to another
· We’ll explore how liminality provides thresholds that are invitations to transformation—and how even as we cross over thresholds into the new, we remain part of what is left behind
· We will explore in what ways Advent is a liminal space—that space where God’s very being enters in to our lives, into the messy circumstances and grief and confusion where we have been living for such a long time now—and bringing a new way forward (Dorisanne Cooper)[4]. We will look at key characters in the biblical story and their approach to liminal spaces.
· And we’ll ask the qn: What role should liminal space play in our ongoing life and that of our communities?
Liminality and its Meaning
Liminality, as Kate said, comes from the Latin term limen- which was the bottom part of a doorway – a stone that must be crossed to enter a building.
Esther de Waal[5]: describes the threshold as “a sacred thing” and cites the example of the Japanese taking off their shoes at the door threshold and putting on slippers to enter the house space. This shows respect she says for the difference between one space and another. And then there is the Monastic example of statio- which as the discipline of silence and a pause when the daily office space is entered.
As we pause as we move from one space to another, we have entered an “already and not yet” space: an analogy is like being in an airport- a sort of non-space-we have left behind where we have come from and not entered the next part of our journey yet. And then there is the next moment of going through the security door that leads to another space and shuts behind us- we are now separated from family/friends on the other side and there is no going back. A moment of anxiety mixed with excitement is often felt.
William Blake the 18th Century poet described this pause, then movement, as:
In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between them, there are doors.
On a threshold we are on the cusp of something and we may well get in touch with what has been described as : “a fault line running down the middle of our lives that connects our ordinary reality with its deeper roots”. (William Countryman)[6].
Life itself is a succession of thresholds to be crossed. And each one also usually involves a transition phase, which can be uncomfortable:
Human life itself is a succession of thresholds to be crossed. And each one usually also involves a transition phase, which may be uncomfortable:
Each new life developmental stage entails an inevitable ending and loss, which we often resist. In each of these there is usually a transition phase. And so we emerge from the womb, somewhat reluctantly; as a toddler we finally give up the dummy or blanky or soft toy we take to bed (interestingly the technical name is a transitional object); at age 4/5 we are forced to give up the illusion that we are the centre of the universe; we enter adolescence; we leave home; we begin and end a relationship etc, and finally we exit earthly life. There is a liminality that often occurs in the process of dying. De Waal says that when we have a sense of the movement of time, between light and dark, the changing seasons of the year, and the underlying themes of death and life then “we find ourselves touched by something primal, that repetition of birth and death, dying and new life, experienced again and again, year in and year out, repeated throughout our lives.”[7] The Celtic Christian tradition helps us reflect on this as it marks the changeover of the days and the season with certain rituals. Prayers each morning that celebrate the coming of the light; prayers each evening as the light fades, as well as rituals to mark the seasons. Rituals open us up to the sacred, the holy.
Although liminality is depicted as a ‘thin space’ in Celtic Christianity, in the sense of being close to the holy, it also can have more of an edge [as Dorisanne Cooper says]- an edge that is about discomfort because it is an unknown space we are entering. We could be said to be ‘on edge’ as we transition or wait. We may be paused although not frozen. There is a “quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs during transition- between something ended and the next not ready to begin”[8]. In summary, a liminal space is a place of transition, one where we often feel unsettled or anxious. Life is not as it was before, but we don’t yet know how it’s going to be. And in that transition space where we pause, we need to find the courage to stay with uncertainty- to “hold the space for mystery”[9].
COVID and Liminality
· The experience of COVID in 2020 has brought us face to face with what it is like to be imprisoned in a sense, acutely aware of life and death issues, of our own vulnerability, our fragility.
· And also our dependence on something greater than ourselves that we have not been able to control. Some have found that frightening, others freeing.
· Perhaps it has been something like the experience Julia Baird describes when she was gravely ill, in her book Phosphorescence, as being submerged under the sea- “The sense of being alive but suspended . . .a sense of the quiet sacred, of a kind of patient waiting, of a dark peace in the liminal stretch between the ocean surface and the depths”.
· Perhaps we have moved between the two experiences of fear and freedom and everything in between. And then the waiting experience - daily we have been faced with having to wait- for the daily news conference, for the daily numbers, for the results of our own COVID tests.
· And now with the easing of restrictions, we are nearly entering “COVID- Normal” a time of transition, having left behind the lockdown but not quite sure of where we will be in 3 or 6 or 12 months’ time. The ‘unknowing’ space continues (the recent resurgence of COVID cases in Sth Australia has shown us this….). Quick resolution and closure are not possible.
· So the question for us is:
What have we done with/in this space? Perhaps, when we have remembered we have brought it/this COVID19 space to God, for ultimately liminal space is sacred space. – God’s waiting room
(R.Rohr)—when we think about waiting rooms and reasons why we would find ourselves in one… the implication is that in this paused time called COVID19--we may have learnt openness and patience during a difficult time in the world when our sense of what is normal has indeed been challenged.
So COVID has perhaps put us in touch with the invitation of liminality. Because Liminality can be an invitation to transformation as we recognise and acknowledge the space we are in- perhaps like the bulb under the earth in winter before spring warms the earth so we can emerge above ground to a new reality.
Liminal spaces can be thought of as a gift, a space of transition—a time of being on the threshold --- where we are alert and ready to receive the richness of the new reality we are about to behold and enter.[10]
Advent and Liminality
How much we need Advent and the meaning and experience of it at this time!
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said from prison during the 2nd World War,: life in a prison cell may well be compared to Advent- one waits, hopes, and does this, that, or the other, things that are of no real consequence. The door is shut and can only be opened from the outside.[11]
This is really a description of Advent as a liminal space. (Neither here nor there; between the known and the unknown).
Throughout our liturgy in Advent we call out to Christ to come in the Aramaic word Maranatha, the language spoken at the time of Jesus. Advent, from the Latin word Adventus is about something coming. But it does not simply mean coming or arrival. It means more than that. Adventus itself also refers to an invasion, incursion, ripening, and appearance—all words that are rich with implications for the gospel accounts of Christ. And this appearance brings light into the chaos and darkness that seems to surround us.
These meanings carry within them the strong element of hope. If we can call out Maranatha in the midst of a culture that proclaims a very different way of viewing the world then we are giving ourselves over to another reality, one that is already here and yet still coming. We place our confidence in the one who has come, is present, and is the future, and who draws us into that future.
The biblical stories with their examples of waiting and hope are an invitation into liminality. There are many example of characters wandering in and out of liminal times and spaces: Abraham and Sarah; the Israelites in the wilderness enduring a long liminal period struggling to leave behind their slave identity and discover their new one; Ruth, Joseph, Jacob, Job etc. all leaving a known space to journey through disorientating transition to a transformative process where they are bought into a deeper relationship with God.
Two characters have kept coming to my mind as we enter Advent- two characters that we usually don’t reflect on until Candlemas or Presentation of Christ.- Simeon and Anna. They waited on the promise of God in a liminal space for years. So, in Advent I am reflecting on their waiting before they encounter the fulfillment of the promise of the Messiah.
We are told[12] that day after day for many years this good and holy elderly ‘tag team’ have been hanging around the temple; Anna in particular is always there. Perhaps they have been viewed as just part of the furniture by many, and maybe even somewhat eccentric. However, it seems that, unlike us often, they had continued to expect the unexpected. Why? Could it be because they are open to it; they have been preparing themselves: looking, expecting and hoping for a long time?
In that waiting period they have been immersing themselves in the promises of God in the scriptures, and in constant prayer. So Simeon and Anna are open to the movement of the Holy Spirit when Mary and Joseph bring to the infant Christ to the temple; they are open to the irruption of light into the darkness of waiting. They are, in the words of W.H. Auden in his evocative poem Musée des Beaux Arts, “reverently, passionately waiting for the miraculous birth”. So, they are open to revelation, to the implosion of God’s presence in a little scrap, 40 days old, brought to them by two devoted, ordinary and quite poor parents who are acting in obedience to the law of Moses.
Simeon long attuned to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, always looking for God’s coming, and constantly listening with his heart to God’s word to him, is moved by the promptings of the Spirit to come into the temple at that very moment. His eyes and heart are already open to recognise the divinity of the human infant and his arms are open to embrace this child as the Light of the World.
Anna, the prophet with an impressive family tree, is also moved by the Spirit to appear at the point that Mary and Joseph come in. It has been many years since her husband died. Seven years was all she had with him, and the sharpness of grief has yielded to faithfulness in the shadows of the temple. Necessarily she has prayed in the Women’s Court section of the temple where she has waited with desire for God’s salvation in what will become an incarnational space. When she woke that day, she did not know that this day would be like no other. And yet it would be the one she had caught glimpses of as she meditated on the scriptures, soaking herself in the promises of God’s deliverance, and praying without ceasing- the true prayer of the heart. This was what enabled her to be open to the eruption of divine Light in the infant Jesus. This was openness forged in the crucible of daily life through a passionate commitment to prayer and worship. And so she, like Simeon, had come to believe that at the heart of all reality is a Love which is not exhausted- the Love from which we all exist.
For us at this time in our troubled world Advent is a wonderful gift to us that we need to savour. Advent is expectant waiting, hopeful anticipation and joyful preparation for God coming into our lives and hearts in all moments, all places, all times. Past, present, and future. Advent prepares us for Christ’s birth, his second coming, and reminds us there’s joy in waiting. And we do all this while we name our losses of this year and lament those. For that opens us also to hope. We ground our hope in the memory of God’s enduring story that has held me, has nurtured me, although not solved all problems. We remember that the future will be different to the past.
Qn: What is required of us in an Advent that feels like nothing we have experienced before?
· Firstly we remember the gift that is present in waiting, waiting in as fully present a way as possible. In Advent we are often impatient and want to rush to Christmas, but as a pregnant woman knows you can’t rush the period of gestation.
· We remember the holiness of the pause- the space in between (Esther de Waal). To return to music for a moment: there can be a pause in music which gives meaning to the whole. It’s the importance of the pauses, the silence; the spaces that actually make the music possible.
· In Japanese music, the term “ma” suggests the space in between sounds that a performer must master.
· Debussy wrote that the music is not in the notes, but in the spaces between them. In a similar vein, the jazz pianist Miles Davis said, “It’s not the notes you play; it’s the notes you don’t play.”
· And so, a closer listen shows musical silence to be just as eloquent as pauses in human speech.
In a NY Times article: “How the silence makes the music”, Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim writes: “Before Western composers came up with a way to notate them, the length of rests in music were often dictated by buildings. When groups of monks, facing each other in a reverberant chapel, intoned psalms in plainchant, they inserted a pause in the middle of a verse. The length of this “media distinctio” was partly determined by acoustics: It prevented the next line of text from getting entangled with the resonance trail of the last.”[13] But as the musicologist Emma Hornby has pointed out, it also created a meditative space. It synchronized the community and underlined, as she writes, “the unity of the monastery breathing and singing together.”
Interestingly, when I came across this quotation, I was taken back to my time as a theological student at Trinity College. We’d meet for Morning and Evening Prayer in the chapel and would use this pause when saying the psalms. But actually I always found it awkward—the anxiety was in my waiting! Getting the length of the pause just right. It felt stylised, rather than meditative. There wasn’t the trust in creating that “unity of …breathing and singing together.” To quote the title of one of Paula Gooder’s book: there wasn’t that trust that “The Meaning is in the Waiting”— This perhaps is what is meant by the word that is present at the end of some of the psalms: Selah – meaning; ‘pause, and think on that”.
So how do we do this waiting, this pausing in Advent?
· Not passively but attentively, actively. Simone Weil (the French philosopher, mystic and political activist) spoke of the power of waiting, as a special time of focussed attention, of expectation.
· We make sure we have some time for quiet, for reflecting on ourselves and where we are at in our lives. We ask the Spirit to show us where there is darkness in our lives.
· We can ask ourselves the questions:
Am I locked into some old patterns that limit my freedom?
As a church community, are we locked into old patterns that limit the overflowing of the peace and light into the wider community and the world?
· And we remember as we read the prophecies of Isaiah through Advent that the desert will bloom with flowers, that the day will dawn after a long, long night.
· And so we hold on in faith. We slow down, let ourselves open up like a flower bud coming to blossom. We clear enough space in our hearts and minds to listen to God’s word of hope.
The challenge to us all is to be attentive, alert, aware, in our waiting and in our daily activities.
To know there is something deeper we are called to.
We make sure we are going in the right direction, focussed on the One who calls us to lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light.
For: “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has never overcome it” (Jn 1:5)
And like Anna in the temple- we ‘keep turning up for God’—day after day in our Temples….and then our openness is forged in the crucible of daily life through a commitment to prayer and worship. And in particular, in this season of Advent we can immerse ourselves in Advent’s symbols and liturgies.
We’ll be playing another piece of music now—during which we invite you to be open, watchful, alert, actively waiting…. We encourage you to pause; to listen to the beauty of the music...
-Rooted in the present moment so that you can access God’s moments of grace and blessing, even as you wait to move on.
Play: MUSIC: Instrumental Piano Boys: O Come O Come Emmanuel. (cello and piano)
Final Prayer (RS Thomas)
Prompt me, God;
But not yet. When I speak,
Though it be you who speak
Through me, something is lost.
The meaning is in the waiting. AMEN
[1] Beaumont, S. How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You are Going– Leading in a Liminal Season, Rowan & Littlefield, 2019.
[2] R. Rohr, April 26 2020. Between Two Worlds — Center for Action and Contemplation (cac.org)
[3] Liminality-in-a-time-of-Covid.pdf (anglican.org)
[4] The Liminal Space of Advent: An Advent Sermon by Dorisanne Cooper
[5] Esther de Waal, Living On the Border: Reflections on the Experience of Threshold, 2014.
[6] L William Countryman, Living on the Border of the Holy: Renewing the Priesthood of All, 1999.
[7] Esther de Waal, Living On the Border: Reflections on the Experience of Threshold, 2014.
[8] Beaumont, S. How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You are Going– Leading in a Liminal Season, Rowan & Littlefield, 2019.
[9] Christine Paintner, Holy Saturday: The Space Between (abbeyofthearts.com)
[10] Brendan Robertson,” On the Threshold of Tomorrow” from Oneing, the Biannual Literary Journal of CAC, 2020. [“Oneing” is an old English word that was used by Lady Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) to describe the encounter between God and the soul.]
[11] , Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letter November 21, 1943
[12] Luke 2:21-38.
[13] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/arts/music/silence-classical-music.html