Liminal

 Liminal-a word that has always grabbed my soul, perhaps one of those words whose sound of breath and cloud imitates meaning. It is actually the word for a door's threshold, which sounds firm enough place to step. But in so stepping, one is momentarily between inside and outside. It is the space that joins two realities, part of both and neither. If we accept that the visible, concrete, perceived-with-five-senses reality in which we live and move and have our being is not the sole reality, that there is a parallel universe of the spiritual realm, then the liminal places are those in which one passes from earth to heaven, from seen to unseen.

Good Friday is a liminal day; the cross is a liminal place. After 33 years of walking the paths of Palestine, of heat and dust and thirst, of reclining at meals and drinking of wells and embracing the sick, of touch and smell and taste and sound and sight . . . Jesus hung at the threshold between earth and heaven. Over those hours, he slowly ebbed from the world of oxygen and lungs and hemoglobin, to enter a space that we know of only in the most foggy ways. Hebrews 10 connects this place to the curtain that separated the holiest inner sanctuary of the Temple from the rest of our existence, the veil between God's presence and the priest. When Jesus gasped "It is finished", the physical earth convulsed and the curtain tore in two, opening the space between God and the world. Jesus' human body, his flesh, became the threshold, the passage, the pathway to connect us. In so doing, that body was torn, that blood spilled, and uncountable shifts in reality occurred.

Chagall, White Crucifixion

We are spending this Good Friday in liminality as well. Our two realities are Uganda and America. Our lives are embedded in both, simultaneously. The threshold for us is an airplane, an enclosure of transport that opens a passage between our worlds, that is neither here nor there. Sometimes the travel feels like suspended time. We have people we love in both places, meaning and work and life and home in both places. We are people shaped by both places, who love both places. The analogy fails at some point of course. But Jesus as a full citizen of both heaven and earth, Hebrews says, transformed the system of sacrificial death to one of obedience to the will of God. In doing so, instead of requiring a surgically painful and bloody operation, God transforms hearts to align with good.

Clifford Possum Tjalpaltjarri, Good Friday, 1994

William H. Johnson, Jesus and the three Marys, 1939

Liminal spaces invite lingering. Like the bewildered core friends, we pause today at the cross. I'd rather gloss right on over into arrival, Sunday, sunshine. But let us stand on the threshold of worlds today, weeping, hoping.