Not all who loiter are lost
First, I invite you to the discussion about pastoral authority and youth that sprung up in the comments on the last post. Follow the discussion, if you’d like!
And next: I learned a new term in a book I read recently on the subject of discernment. The term is liminal space: “that anxious space of ‘not knowing,’ that in-between time when the known and familiar have passed and the new has not yet come into being.” (Wilkie Au and Noreen Cannon Au, The Discerning Heart. New York: Paulist Press, 2006, p. 205.)
Are you there in that in-between space? Perhaps you’re between jobs or relationships. Maybe you are graduating this year from a school and you’re looking ahead to that liminal space. Like nature, we abhor vacuums. We don’t like unfilled space. We want to get to the next thing or the next person as soon as possible. When someone asks us what we do for a living, we want to have an immediate answer. It’s hard to say, “I’m not really sure what’s next.”
The authors of A Discerning Heart encourage us to think positively about ‘liminal space’: “liminal space is psychologically and spiritually significant because it is where real transformation can take place” (p. 208). They go on to quote Jesuit Anthony de Mello:
Some people will never learn anything because they grasp too soon. Wisdom, after all, is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling…. To know exactly where you’re headed may be the best way to go astray. Not all who loiter are lost. (p. 209)
This is kind of a different way to think about being unsure. Maybe not being somewhere is exactly where you need to be.
“We don’t like unfilled space.” In my life there could be no greater understatement.
I have just come through the most unique summer I have ever experienced. God clearly invited me to three months with Him - not “doing” anything - just “being” - to set aside and walk away from any and all leadership, ministry, service … It was one of the biggest struggles I’ve ever had. Here is one of my journal entries on this subject of unflled space:
Reading from Mark 4:35-41 (Jesus Calms the Storm)
vs. 38 “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?”
I’ve said the same thing to you, Lord, but with different words: “Don’t you care how lonely I am? Don’t you care how much our church is struggling? Don’t you care how they treat me? Don’t you care about what I care about?” I don’t say it with words, but I do with my reactions. And You (in complete control of the wind and waves) answer: “Don’t you remember what we’ve been through? Don’t you remember what I’ve shown you - how I’ve helped you - how I love you?”
“Why do you still have no faith?”
What did the disciples really believe about you, Jesus? What do I really believe? If the way we live our lives shows what we really believe about God - then what is my life showing?
Lord, it’s amazing how I can take any given space of time and fill it right up - with tasks and activity - with questions - with seeking and striving - with conversation - with opinions and ideas and possibilities and solutions - with guilt and pressure and judgement - with plans and step-by-step lists … I would say the majority of my time is filled up in this way, quite often accelerating into a frenetic, frantic whirlwind - sometimes with my body, but most often in my mind and spirit. I trap myself there, and I sometimes become paralyzed with it. (It’s kind of like the squall that came upon the disciples, isn’t it, Lord?)
This summer I have been experiencing what it’s like when You say “Peace! Be still!” Before this time with You, did I ever just have long periods of time that I didn’t fill up? And still the crowding in, the filling up, threatens to take over at any given moment… what I could be doing, what I should be doing, what You may be teaching me… and guilt over “not doing anything.”
But I do notice, Lord, that even though I don’t understand it, I’m eager for it - this time with just You.
What did I do this summer?
- I saw God’s majesty and power in the clouds
- I learned to breathe
- I recieved gifts - a flower, a color, a texture
- I felt God’s touch in the breeze on my upturned face
- I watched the candlelights dance
- I learned what it means to savor
- I began to let go of some things
- I framed my day in God’s Word to me
- I observed myself
Loitering indeed - but definitely not lost!
Personally, I like to have a game plan for everything. My life needs to be laid out so that I’m working towards something or else everything seems pointless without a definite goal. After I decided that medicine wasn’t something I wanted to study, I wanted to quickly fill the vacuum with some other goal. I agree that this “liminal space” is the perfect place to discern God’s calling but it’s also the most difficult place. You’d much rather come up with a plan and then get the big OK from God rather than just laying yourself open with no idea of what to do and really digging in and seeking God for who He is rather than what He can do for you. Discernment is really a discipline - it’s hard work. Perhaps those who loiter are the ones whom God will use because they’re the one’s who are more in tune with the Spirit and God’s calling in their lives. This of course is not to say that in having a plan God can’t work in you, but we just can’t hold too tightly to the things we have because we never know what God may call us to give to Him.
I have been experiencing what you have called “liminal space” for the past 2 years but have not been able to explain it quite so successfuly as you! My husband was suddenly let go from a ministry position after 17 years. I have tried to explain to him several times that maybe we were too busy or it was too “noisy” to hear God’s voice. You explained it perfectly! I plan to read the book you quoted. I truly believe that we get caught up in things that make it hard to hear God’s voice yet we do them because ministry requires them. I have learned more in the 2 years than in the past 17!
Thank you, Dawnelle, Rachel, and Chris, for sharing from your hearts - from the spaces in your lives. Here is a quote a friend of mine sent along to me from Annie Dillard’s ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’:
“Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have “not gone up into the gaps.” The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the cliffs in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn and unlock—more than a maple—a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”
Another way - a beautiful way - of thinking about those in between spaces!
“Liminal space” is a term used to describe the way that priests lived in the Old Testament- it is used to describe being on the threshold, of about to become something different. So you aren’t what you were, and you’re not yet what you will be. It is a state of utter dependence on another for identity.
In a Journal reflection for OT 143 (the summer course on Leviticus taught by Arie Leder), I wrote that the “liminal state is akin to the experience of the Seminary student—not a pastor yet, but ambiguously caught up in some of the tasks of full-time ministry already; not really knowing how to view the self at the present, but instead thinking constantly of what one will become once the “rite of passage” is over. For priests, this liminal state never went away—I hope that this is only partly true for us today.” But I also know that it’s probably not ever going to go away fully, because like the priests of the Old Testament, we are set apart by our ordination.