vitalwholeness

I have a dear friend who is absolutely inbetween everything in her life. Whatever it is, she is inhabiting space between what was and what is to come next. What a place to be. For good or ill every one of us has the chance to spend substantial time in that never-never land of the inbetween. Things get taken apart. But they also get put back together in a new way.

Some fifteen years ago I did research into this phenomenon called Liminality. The word derives from the Latin, limins, meaning threshold. We cross the threshold out of one thing into another. I even had a book published on it (Liminal Reality and Transformational Power: University Press of America).

There are multiple forms of liminality – everything from social disarray to inner dissolution and reconstitution. Some passages are ritualistic – such as the traditional rites of passage found in almost all cultures. Others result from unexpected calamity. Whatever the cause, whether individual or collective, cyclical or once only, we are not left the same on the other side. We can be transformed and for the better by such a passage.

And so the new year of the calendar looms ahead. You and I will have lots of opportunities to pass through liminal space. And we might even allow for the sacred forces at work to reshape us, like the potter and the clay. It’s possible. I’m counting on it, as is my friend who is in the inbetween right now.

So we were traveling to visit family after Christmas and before New Years and stopped off at a gift shop located near a place I lived over twenty years ago. I was mindlessly bumping from one gizmo to another when I came face to face with … a face. And she came face to face with … my face. There was that momentary thousand mile stare and then almost simultaneously recognition overcame both of us. That’s nice because sometimes only one person remembers and its embarrassing for both. “Uh, no, I don’t remember you…” But in this case it was remembering that went both ways: “Well, I can’t believe it!” A quick embrace and we’re talking children and where we live and have lived.

Time is a funny thing. Our experience of it is shaped by lots of things – intensity, boredom, memory, hope, excitement. In a way, I think, time rolls over and caves in on itself. Or at least we experience it that way. What seemed long ago is not, it’s really now. And the future is crashing into the present shaping and reshaping it every moment. Once a theologian by the name of Paul Tillich described it as becoming aware of the “eternal now.” It’s now forever and always.

And so there was the now in the gift shop that brought us into remembrance of the now of our past. The longer life is stretched over the canvas the more the distance between those many nows shrinks. Someday there won’t be any gap at all, in me or in the world. Now in now, all in all. Whether that’s the stuff of mystic consciousness or some derivative of the physics of life I’m not sure. But in the same way that musical notes float in a sea of silence, so do our lives. The space between the notes make them what they are. The time around right now makes it what it is, too.

Oh, and happy anniversary honey. How many years was that? It could have been just yesterday, or an eternity, or maybe both.