LIMINAL SPACE [R, 1-11-24]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter--LIMINAL SPACE [R, 1-11-24]

 

[WARNING: I like this column. I think it is worthwhile. But it is twice s long as my usual 500 words, so…]

I have been talking with a young pastor about the future of the ministry. We are already in a ministerial crisis. Most United Methodist conferences this year retired six pastors for every one they ordained. The same is true in other denominations. Not only that, but many already-ordained pastors are simply leaving the church.

There will be a church of some sort in the future, but what? Can that church afford to support a professional ministry? More importantly, will that church be worth serving as an ordained leader?

My young pastor friend says that the term “liminal space” is overused, but that she thinks it is accurate. I wasn’t quite sure what liminal space means, so I looked it up: “A space that is a transition between two other spaces.” In liminal space, we have left the old space and not yet arrived at the new space. Sort of like wandering in the desert for 40 years.

She and I are both in liminal space now, but different spaces. I am working on finding a congruence by which I could understand both spaces, and thus provide some slight guidance for both of us.

I found no congruence, though. Her space, to far understate it, is between past and future. Mine is between life and death. We can make some educated guesses about the future of her space, because of experience. The future of my space, life beyond this life, is totally unknown.

But then I realized, or at least decided, that we have two spots of congruence—hope, and the more.

I think that part of our overarching feeling of hopelessness in the church is because of our “recent” emphasis on social justice. That concern was with us, of course, at least from Jesus on, but it so easily got lost in the theories of personal salvation and eschatology, “getting to heaven” and “when will the world end?” Those were the main concerns for Christians for so very long.

In an era when acknowledged sin is social instead of personal, however, who needs salvation? Who needs a savior? We just need justice. In an era when no one believes in heaven or hell, except in vague psychobabble terms, who needs to worry about an afterlife?  CLM, Current Lives Matter. Especially the lives of those who are marginalized and neglected. In the past, the dispossessed found hope in heaven. Now they are told they can find hope by being included in this world.

Now, this should sound strange, coming from me, the quintessential, at least in my own mind, radical priest. There is the crux. I have to bear the blame, along with a lot of others, for getting us out of balance, for deemphasizing the personal relationship with God/Christ/Jesus.

Jesus wasn’t JUST a prophet, the advocate of “thy kingdom on earth as well as in heaven,” “When you’ve done it to the least of these…” He was that, for sure, but he was also a mystic, a miracle worker, a healer, a visionary. He knew where “the thin places” between heaven and earth existed. He had a direct relationship with God. He believed in and lived in “the more,” in Wm. James’ evocative phrase.

Perhaps because of my own “strange” calling--trading my life for my sister’s in a deal with God--looking for the more, and helping others to find and experience it, was what I thought the ministry was about, when I took my first preaching appointment, by accident, when I was 19. Relating to the more was not to get into heaven, but because that was where the ultimate meaning resided, in the transcendent and imminent “being” we call God.

Then the 1950s ended, which was too bad for me, because I was a straight, white, tall, short-haired, male. I graduated high school in 1955, college in 1959, a total child of the ‘50s, with all the perks and honors that went with my gender and race. Then MLK came onto the scene. So did Richard Nixon. Decisions were required. Ministry demanded more than remembering names and having a deep voice. The world demanded more! But we social justice liberals, in our correct attempts at providing more to those who had none, we began to neglect the more.

We sowed the wind. The answer, after all, is blowing in it. But we have reaped the whirlwind.

Our hope in social justice as the answer turned out to be false hope. Justice doesn’t change hearts. Original sin is always with us. What’s the point of being included along with everybody else if everybody else is lost?

Saul Alinsky always said, “If you want to see where the action is, look at the reaction.” We see the action in Obama and BLM and the notorious RBG. We see the reaction in Trump and the Supreme Court and the notorious MTG [Marjorie Taylor Greene].

The action has been worth it, but there will always be a reaction, and that reminds us that we cannot trust in action alone.

Don’t worry. I’m not giving up on social justice. Or environmental justice. Or any other kind of justice. But I’m saying that it loses its meaning if it doesn’t have a place in the more.

In a lot of ways, the uncertainty of this current liminal space is no different from what we have experienced before. There have been wars—I and II and Viet Nam and Afghanistan… There have been pandemics—plague and polio and small pox and flu… There have been economic upheavals—the Great Depression, and a lot of others that weren’t so great… There have been dictators and wannabes—Hitler and Mussolini and Nixon…

The thing that differentiates liminal space now is climate change, although I suspect climate change is already past the liminal phase. We really are destroying the very space we live in, be it liminal or not. That, I believe, provides the overarching sense of… nothingness. Meaninglessness. Hopelessness.

And there, I think, is the crux. We have put our hope in our own good works, and our good works are losing, especially environmentally. We can’t neglect those good works, not forego them, but this present liminal space wasteland reminds us that good works are not the source or reason for hope.

As I make my way across my last liminal space, I know that my hope is in the more.

John Robert McFarland