pat loughery

Here’s a fun word that I find myself using a bit more lately. Liminality. Here’s a wikpedia entry.

The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One’s sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition, during which your normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed, opening the way to something new.

I first read about this word in The Missionary Congregation, Leadership, and Liminality (Christian Mission and Modern Culture), which frankly was one of the driest books I’ve read in a long time (sorry, Alan). It didn’t really stick, but I should probably try that again.

To some extent, we who are in the Kingdom of God are in a liminal state. The fullness of God’s authority to rule is present, but not fully so. Already, not yet. We are in a transitional phase – we are not yet what we will be, but we are not yet what we used to be. To some extent we’re in both phases, but to a greater extent we’re in neither.

That certainly describes where I and my family are at this moment. We have a sense of being not what we were, not in the same sense of the Kingdom, but we know something is coming. Who we are in the meantime is very much in a state of tension.

I think our temptation will be to try to graduate to the next stage too soon, to try to control this phase by leaving it and exiting the mystery into something more known.