Wednesday, March 28, 2007

A definition of Liminal

I have my stuff strewn between two rooms. A new guy is moving into my house and where I used to sleep there is a TV, a mattress, a couch and an empty dresser. That's not my space anymore. Nothing is where I can find it. I heard my cell phone beep for a message last night and I realized that I had no idea whether my phone was upstairs or downstairs. I found it in a pile of junk things that had to still be moved.

I can't find my journal; the important one with all my notes from January first until yesterday; the one with all the really personal notes about what I feel God is calling me to, and how Michelle broke my heart; the one with a whole bunch of scraps of paper and airplane tickets. I know that in that journal holds a note from January 1 where Jenn McAffe jotted down prophetic words someone spoke to me in encouragement. There stories of my life being changed by people, some of which I will never remember any other way. What a shame it would be to loose it at a coffee shop.

I came across this word 'liminal'. First it was in a sermon, then I started hearing it as the root of subliminal and finally in a book. The book is Everything Belongs by Richard Rohr. There's a passage where he talks about getting to liminal space and getting there often as a way to experience God. According to Mr. Rohr (Or is it brother Rohr?) getting to liminal space and doing this very often is one of the best things things you could ever do for your spiritual walk.

With the word coming up so much, sounding like a godly thing and fitting my situation I started to use the word. It's become a bit of an inside Joke between Justin and I. We're both heading toward huge, unreal changes in our lives. We say things offhandedly like "Dude, I'm so liminal right now," meaning we are finding ourselves immersed in change and the consequences of exiting the realm of normal.

The problem is that when you're liminal nothing is exactly how you want it.

In fact I'm so up in the air right now that I just want something to be normal again. Right now I think very fondly of how things "were". Every new change from buying tires to being told an attractive female friend is dating someone becomes stressful. Our church announced a new campaign on prayer and I got angry about it for a while without a clear reason for my emotions.

I second guess every purchase wondering if "God really wants me to buy this" because I have so little cash right now. Some things I buy anyway because I feel they'll make things easier to deal with.

There are moments when the move to Maui itself is up to debate. I will be talking to someone and freeze up with a miniature anxiety attack. In under a second I hear a complete paragraph of reasons I must have misheard God in the calling to go.

But by far the best example was yesterday when I was getting a haircut. I didn't even really know how to ask Ja Quice for what I wanted. "A lot shorter than this" is all I said which in my head would translate "No clippers, long scissor cut, thin it out."

Or in other words, "The way it used to be." Never mind that she's only cut my hair once.

The first thing she grabbed was a set of clippers. I was so distracted by everything in my head I didn't even notice until she was about five passes into the back of my head with long hair hanging over an open expanse of what, at the time, looked like nothing.

I froze. I wanted her to stop. I wanted to tell her she was doing it all wrong. I wanted my shaggy hair back. At this point, because we were already committed to something that I wasn't prepared for she was the only one who was going to know what to do next. So I was silent ( as a sheep before it's shearers) and she finished up.

It looks fine.

Later Fraaza showed up and interrupted my workout. Another change and, no, I wasn't pleasantly surprised. I almost asked him to leave after a polite amount of time. I wanted to get back to my routine. Thankfully I again said nothing. And we began this conversation about something brave he's stepping into. The result was one of the more refreshing conversations I've had in a while.

One of the sermons I heard about the word 'liminal' said that on the way out of Egypt and into the promised land there was this time of in-between. It lasted 40 years. In that time and place the dessert -- the liminal space -- was home and there was a lot of following a cloud and a fire. A lot of doubt. A lot of snakes and heat. A lot of grumbling.

But that dessert is dear to the Hebrews. They call it God's land. They trace their heritage to this wandering Aramean named Abraham and they recite the stories of the dessert as law and identity. In that dessert they ate things they didn't know, drank water from rocks and got to know a God no other nation had known. When prophets would preach and when God would show His passionate, lover's rage there would often be a reminder of that dessert.

And into that dessert Jesus went. The Father had just told Him how much He loved Him and the first place Jesus went was the dessert.

I've heard people teach that Jesus was in the wilderness because "After a great experience of God (baptism) we'll be plunged into a dessert temptation," as if Jesus was there by accident or mistake. But that answer doesn't make sense anymore in liminal space.

When you're in liminal space you understand that Jesus went there on purpose.

posted by Scott # 4:00 PM 0 comments

Friday, March 09, 2007

From the Onion: funny and true

This is out of The Onion's "horoscope" section this week.

Remember: While faith can move mountains, only religion is capable of making you feel guilty for doing so.

posted by Scott # 8:38 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Dreaming of less

Last night I was at the end of myself. Early yesterday something really hurtful and difficult happened with a person I care about and it left me wondering if I should go on with some plans I've been making. So. last night I prayed that I would love to know God's direction. I'd take a dream or however He wanted to show me. As I asked, somewhere within me I heard "You don't want the dream. You don't want this answer. If you have a dream of God's direction, you aren't going to want to surrender to it."

The dream was simple. I drove down a dirt road just like the ones my relatives used to live on to a ramshackle house that had a single mother and a promiscuous young teen daughter. I felt all the same emotions that I've felt when I've visited my cousin like "This place is dirty. Why don't they clean" and "you know, young lady I don't think you should be wearing that kind of underwear at your age and I definitely shouldn't be seeing it." There was porn on the computer which made me very uncomfortable personally because I struggle with that vice.

Then in my dream we went to a Christian group together and I had to struggle with reconciling my church friends with these people I'd brought in.

When I woke up I knew that I had been called out. I didn't want to deal with this or any other part of the dream I had. I didn't want to pray. I didn't want to read. I wanted to sleep because I knew God was calling me to descend.

I've been using the words "the poor, the needy and the afflicted" in my monologs of social justice and love and the gospel. I've been saying that the hope for the church is to reach out to these "others". That is true. It's all over the gospels, the Law, the prophets and Psalms. The only thing I couldn't figure out was how to have a shorter label for the poor, needy, widows, orphans, afflicted, homeless and needy.

-- As a side note it turns out that there is no simple category to put all these people. There are no acronyms. If you think about it, that's a very good thing. The cumbersome nature of having say this full list of oppressions means that you have to think about it. It's almost a forced meditation. --

The people we seem to want to be called to are usually somewhere else. The default places for Americans are usually India or Africa. Have you ever wondered why? As hard as this is to say I think it's because these places fulfill our desire to be generous or be known as "good people" and at the same time fulfill our desires to "ascend" and be well traveled and well-to-do.

But what I think a lot of us fail to realize is that the people we developing romantic notions about outreaching to are actually a lot like people we already know, but don't want to be around. They are the cousins in my family that we all look just a little bit down on. They are the people who drive cars with tinted windows that you make fun of and who live in trailer parks and neighborhoods the lawn has junk in it.

For the hipsters among us they are the suburbanites who work in cubicles and buy into the capitalist lifestyle. For the suburbanites among us they are those people who just don't seem like they want to improve their lives because they won't take our advice. They are socially awkward people who invite themselves to our parties or small groups and make everyone feel a little uncomfortable.

They are the people that I made fun of or thought I was better than today.

They are probably not the people I like, are like me, I want to like me or want to be like. They are very likely an offense to their relatives because of the way they dress or what they drive or how they talk or simply because they can't help those around them "ascend" unless it's to make them feel superior.

My dilemma is that I have such a hard time loving these people here and yet I want to go abroad to a place with little or no support and try to do it there.

I understand that Jesus sent out disciples. And I know He said, "a prophet is not without honor except in his own hometown" and that the people of Nazareth who knew him the longest wanted to kill him. There's something about being sent. But there's also something in the gospels about counting the costs to make sure you can finish. I don't know if we do that.

I can't say that you or I shouldn't go someplace else and try to bring the kingdom of heaven. I very much want to do exactly that. What I am saying is that we don't always know what it is we're asking for. We may very well get to our missionary post and see that it's not only them that needs to change, but us. The gospel has been shared without love in many places and in those places the gospel has failed to drive out oppression. I'm not sure the gospel without humility and love is even the gospel. Meanwhile there are opportunities right here to practice the same kind of love and I don't think we're being very faithful in them.

A young man with a lot of money once asked Jesus how to have a fulfilling life. He called it eternal life. Jesus answered with some basic commandments. The young man asked what else he needed to do. I guess to him being rich and obeying the commandments wasn't enough. So Jesus told him to sell everything he had and give it to the poor, then follow Jesus and he would be fulfilled.

We know that the man was sad because he was being asked to give up all his riches and everything that made him comfortable. But this morning I realized that the other hard part is that in order to follow Jesus -- before this man could do any other good thing -- he would first have to interact with the poor. I think that in order to be as rich as he was in that society he may very well have had to ignore the poor to do it. He would have had to interact with people he may never have wanted to see.

That's something I have to think about because I asked for this dream.

Luke 8:15 "But the seed in the good soil, these are the ones who have heard the word in an honest and good heart, and hold it fast, and bear fruit with perseverance."

posted by Scott # 8:29 AM 1 comments