Liminal Time and Space

Written by Fran Bellingham

In college a word kept cropping up: liminality. We had no idea what it meant. Definitions were somewhat imprecise: a threshold, in between place. It was only when we experienced liminality ourselves that we understood its meaning and importance.

College days were over, and we were prayerfully awaiting a call to ministry. And we waited. And waited. Waited. Our peers were being called and ordained to service, but we were not. Instead we were travelling the length and breadth of Britain with interviews and preaching engagements, but nothing came of them. We began to question our sense of calling. This was a liminal place. (Eventually, after over a year, we were called to ministry)

Liminal places are uncertain, precarious, dangerous even. Being in this space challenges our hopes and dreams. What we hope for might not happen, our dreams may be shattered, our expectations reorganized and realigned. The old certainties fade, even if we are doggedly trying to cling to them.

J. Philip Newell notes the importance of twilight as being a liminal time, being neither day nor night. I am used to liminality referring to space, but this was the first time I had seen liminality in terms of time, and it struck me as being important. The resurrection happened at dawn, neither in the cold light of day or the mysterious darkness of night. The travellers on the road to Emmaus encountered Christ at dusk, and the disciples encountered Jesus on the seashore with the breakfast on the beach early in the morning. This in between time, dawn and twilight is when day and night meet. Newell describes twilight as,
‘the convergence of the unseen world of those who have gone before us and this presence dimension of space and time in chich the seen and the physical dominate. It may be a time of encountering messengers from the invisible realms of the universe that are linked inextricably to our realm, …This is the time that is closer to dream life and the half-wakeful state of knowing in which both light and shadow come forth and all things appear as one.’

Living in this liminal time allows us to hope and dream. We see things not just as they are, but as they can be. We can see how God’s kingdom can come on earth. Dreams are important, it is perhaps significant that Martin Luther-King’s most famous speech is woven around the motif of having a dream. This liminal time can also be connected with the idea of giving birth. Shane Claibourne in his address to the Baptist Union of Great Britain, some years ago, spoke of darkness being not of night and despair, but also the darkness of the womb, the secret place where new life was being brought into existence. We are to be midwives of this new life.

Reading about the Celtic saints, it seems they lived perpetually in a liminal time and space, knowing that the world wasn’t fully as God intended, the kingdom of God was often hidden behind the kingdoms of the earth with their power hungry violence, instability and lack of love. Yet they left the comfort and security of their homes, clan, tribe and wandered, acting like midwives in bringing the gospel message to rich and poor alike.

In giving birth the liminal place is the birth canal. It is a place of pain and sharp contractions force the infant away from the womb and into the world. It is also a dangerous place as the umbilical cord can get wrapped around the child’s neck, the child could be breach, or distressed. It is a place of life, and death, if not physical death, then death to the life hitherto led in the security of the womb. As midwives the task is to enable birth to take place, giving every assistance required for this new life to enter into our world, to comfort, soothe and rejoice.

Perhaps because we are afraid of liminality, both in time, and space, we tend to obscure references to the liminal in our daily lives. Yet those liminal times are evident in our language when we speak of birth, the threshold, the twilight and dawn, and the idea of waiting. T.S. Eliot speaks of it in Burnt Norton:
‘At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.’

As Lent hurls itself toward Holy Week and Easter, we are reminded that we, like the early disciples gathered in the upper room, in Gethsemane, at the cross and the half-lit tomb of an early morning, are living in a liminal time and space. A place of confusion, yes, but also a place of renewed hope, even if that hope turns out to be nothing like we imagined.

I am reminded of a prayer attributed to Francis Drake:

Disturb us, Lord, when
We are too pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when
With the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst
For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed the vision of the
New heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wilder seas
Where losing sight of land
We shall find the stars.
We ask you to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push back the future
In strength, courage, hope and love.

This we ask in the name of our Captain,
Who is Jesus Christ!

✏️ Fran Bellingham is the joint pastor (with her husband) at Camberley Baptist Church.

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