Stepping Into the Circle
A Sermon Offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette, Indiana
October 8, 2000
by Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia
Readings
Victor Turner from the Ritual Process
The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (threshold people) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols...Thus liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon.
Michael Cunningham from The Hours -- A Narration on the Mind of Virginia Woolf
At this moment there are infinite possibilities, whole hours ahead. her mind hums. This morning she may penetrate the obfuscation, the clogged pipes, to reach the gold. She can feel it inside her, an all but indescribable second self. If she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences, though it runs, like veins of brilliant metal through all three. It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance....
Well, I won’t pretend that this is an ordinary day -- it isn’t-- I’m being ordained this afternoon. Today is a day of ritual. A day of speaking aloud the processes of transformation. Of speaking aloud of the deep commitments that underlie religious community. It is a day set apart from other days to honor commitments of the soul.
These are indeed Days of Awe -- last Sunday I spoke to you -- I offered you an invitation -- one I said that I would take myself -- an invitation to take the period of the days of awe seriously and look within, to search your soul and make a fair reckoning. A time to step out of time governed by the clock and to sit with the soul in that place where time is free and unmarked. Time outside the boundary.
Time is money, they say, but truly -- time is power. Deep and mysterious.
Last week we celebrated Rosh Hashanah -- the head of the year -- the New Year on the Jewish Calendar. A time meant to deliver us into the hands of time -- to make us reckon every moment of life and then to make every moment count for more. We know that in Jerusalem it fell far short of that. Somehow the moment was not taken and the reckoning was not engaged and the Days of Awe were lost in arrogance, blood, and death. But that was the New Year.
And I remember quite well the New Year on the Christian calendar we follow most of the time and the change of the clock as it struck the year 2000. The New Year was like a great minute hand sweeping over the face of the earth and there were all manner of wild prophets foreseeing upheaval and destruction -- tied to the ticking of the clock -- there would be a moment of cataclysm. One moment of reckoning as the wheel turned and the old millennium passed and the new one came into being. It all made me more aware than ever of the power of the clock to govern our awareness of time. But I know we can reshape time -- it is a structure of the human mind. And we touch that structure here every Sunday and every time we gather for a sacred occasion. We take time out of time -- we move through a cosmos of understanding and what could take a lifetime to grasp is touched in a moment.
But most of the time it just isn’t like that. Most of the time when I take time in my hands it stings me, or traps me, or trips me up. Or I drop it, waste it, and leave it impaled on the sharp hands of the clock instead of translating it into my heart.
Like, when I drove here to candidate I had one of those experiences when the ability to control time just slid through my fingers. It took five hours to get from Chicago to Lafayette. I spent that time wasting time -- worrying, stressing. Wishing... wishing for a short cut... a magic...
I imagine some of you are familiar with Anne McCaffrey’s fantasy series about the Dragonriders of Pern. Maybe you remember that the flying Dragonriders sort of skip from one place to another by going "between". Between lasts only a few moments but it is intense, sort of gray, and freezing cold -- it’s a nether place -- nether here nor there.
It’s a strong --unnerving --image -- but there are times that I would have traded much for a chilling, scary, but quick leap between and on to the next thing.
It would be useful... And in fact there are many times in our lives that we move between -- but they much more resemble being caught in a nightmare of traffic than any chapter in one of Anne McCaffrey's books. Time suspended time out of time.
These times -- which have been called Liminal, from Limen -- the Latin for threshold -- are times -- in varying degrees -- of indefinition, of loosened identity, and of shifts of power. Jean Shinoda Bolen says: "It's like standing in a doorway, or even a long dark tunnel, sometimes between two phases of our lives."(p.8 Crossing to Avalon)
Frank Lloyd Wright captured this quality at Unity Temple in Oak Park. There are long low ceilinged hallways that you follow along a convoluted path into the sanctuary where the space opens out almost explosively -- filling with light and air. He meant to throw people a little off-balance entering that house of worship so that they could feel themselves entering a sacred space and time.
People often use physical, liminal space to define aspects of a rite of passage -- setting apart a person who is moving from one phase of life to another. I took part in a rite of passage a couple of years ago. The young girl, whose rite it was, walked twice around the outer edge of a circle. She faced people who had known and loved her for most of her life but she couldn’t step inside the circle until the time was right.
Liminal times are times of passage. The ordination this afternoon is a rite of passage. It is a ritual that marks a passage through liminality -- knowing, working, preparing, wondering, risking. The ordination this afternoon is simply a lifting up of that lengthy liminal period -- of that very long passage.
Our culture, lacks many of the formal rites and signs that define liminal times but, you know your life's unfolding, you know or remember these times -- among them are childbirth, the summer after high school, the onset of puberty -- you may be in or fresh from one right now -- walking down the aisle, waiting for the muse, grieving, beginning to "come out", divorcing, entering the thicket of mid-life -- so many changes and losses that shake the soul or radically alter the conditions of life. I’ve known the liminal time ...
You know it, too. You remember... the feeling of being in the margin, of standing in the passageway or on the threshold.
Someone I know, recently entering her forties, experienced the loss of her father, ended a twelve-year relationship, and began to seriously consider leaving her corporate job for a graduate program. She said to me, "I am hovering between lives. Where will I land? I feel like I am in fragments..."
The liminal time -- it’s empty and disorienting ... and it’s dense and dim at the same time -- dense with possibility -- the dimness comes from the thick cloud of choice, that permeates the between. Thus the liminal time is empty -- free of clear markers and potent -- holding the possible future within it.
The Buddhists believe that there is a Wheel of Life -- that we are born and reborn. But in-between these lives is a time of deep choice. Like the time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. A time when each soul has the opportunity to listen, to evolve, to make wiser choices, and create a more enlightened future. Potent. It is time out of time.
But, oh, up close the discomfort of these times out of time can be enormous. There can be great suffering -- these are indefinite, suspended, outsider times, times when one is neither here nor there but on the threshold. But we can find freedom when we are off-center - it is the disorientation that can shake us loose from habit and open us to new possibility. Pema Chodron, a Buddhist teacher said: The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don't get caught, and in which we can open our hearts and minds beyond limits. As Chodron says, off balance we can find a new balance for the moment.
To transit the liminal space requires only that the focus is beyond the self -- on the job, the arrangement of daily life, responsibility, taking care of business.
To transit the liminal space and be transformed to a new life requires something far different -- something that truly does resemble the set apart time of an initiation rite. In myth and scripture the liminal time is represented by any variety of thickets, forests, jungles, by wandering but the emergence brings to the threshold person a significantly new way of movement through life.
I remember a woman that I knew growing up -- a professor of social work who faced cancer in the late sixties. She had to endure the ignorance of hospitals and doctors at that time in dealing with death and dying. Somehow, after struggle and insight, she committed herself to creating programs in universities to educate social workers and health care professionals to the deeper dimensions of working with the dying.
I met a woman in Chicago who lost a child to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and somehow found a call to ministry out of that and became a chaplain to those struggling through passages with seriously ill or dying children.
Whether the threshold person is Percival, seeking the Grail, or Inanna seeking the renewal and liberation, or you, or me, the emergence beyond liminal space is one that yields fresh resources and a new manner of being.
There is power in the liminal space -- hidden behind the habits, fears, and wounds of lifetime, hidden among the choices and the confusions of the present.
To transit the liminal space and be transformed to a new life requires a profound mindfulness and honesty of being. Generally being mindful of our lives gives our lives a sense of direction -- like a road map -- sort of like a road map -- we pass along, often unconsciously, with our way turning in response to the terrain and the condition of the times and then we stop for a moment -- like a point on a map -- and take stock and learn and then move in new directions. In times of real liminality the mindfulness is more like being barefoot on the rough highway without a compass. Barefoot before the unmapped future -- before the holy. It can yield deep and at times painful recognitions -- of the lost past patterns: identity, relationship.
It’s power rises from a real and courageous willingness to be in the limen -- on the threshold. Not to fight it but to look through it -- in that space to look beyond habit and business into the self and into those few, essential things in which the self finds meaning.
Where do we find meaning? We find meaning in deep engagement -- relationship -- with creative energy, with those we love, with soul-filled service to the world.
There was a boy I met at summer camp who was an exquisite artist. One summer he painted a canvass of a deep, dark blue night sky glimmering with distant stars seen through a portal of wood beams. The perspective was realistic and at the same time so complex that it was hard to tell whether you were looking down or up at these beams but somehow on one sat this perfect, delicious little green apple -- poised in space --beautiful -- just like the boy, poised in adolescence -- between worlds. Such a process of soul-seeking creation can bring transformation because it tells you about who you are where you are and asks you to use yourself -- to live deep in your gifts and to offer them forth. But this young artist had more than that -- and you need more than that to emerge from the liminal space transformed.
Though much of the journey can be alone, is alone, it takes roots and connections to draw the wanderer back. Community -- communitas -- not the place but the network of relationship. People often seek spiritual community when they enter liminal times. In fact that is one of the key things that draws people to church. It's not just the sociability. Communitas can ground -- help the seeker to make sense or to reorient.
We, here, are not gathered seeking final answers -- our churchgoers are, as a group, seeking community to help them deepen their own search. And we don’t seek religious community to simply pick up where we left off but rather, in the presence of, inspired by, and healed by other seekers, to look into the depth and find a new direction. At it’s best that is the spirit of the Days of Awe -- it is truly the community that orders the process -- that liminal time is meant to heal the body of community, to mend the fabric, or strengthen, again, the covenant.
This time is, itself, a liminal time -- we seek new ways to relate to one another, to the world and nature, to our work and even to ourselves -- certainly that was an aspect of what made the turn of the Millennium so intense. It heightened, for a very long moment, the exact degree to which, as humans, we don’t know where our road leads. Just as this week did -- as I watched the events unfold in Jerusalem I ached and raged and wondered -- as I did last week -- what would redeem this world? And this week I watched breathless as Serbia took power from Milosevic. On NPR they asked -- was this a revolution? A relatively non-violent transition of power? And the Serbs answered -- no - we have been fighting and bleeding and dying for generations. And having won this day -- now the real work begins. Generations of liminality.
In our time of more global society we seek new ways to rise and meet the call of the world. The journey of the individual seeker and the seeking that must also be done in and by community. Both are needed -- we see this in our principles -- we begin with the individual and evolve through, growth, process, and justice to our participation in the whole. We seek a balance such as few times or places have ever created or seen but this creative tension between the journey of the individual and the journey of the reasoned and free community is what we claim.
We, here, join our journeys of seeking in our varying personal degrees of liminality and clear direction. If we want to empower this time together -- to give it depth -- we will bring to our gathering -- grounding and a greater mindfulness -- the mindfulness of community. Again when I think of Ariel Sharon, I think of someone who has made of a show of his faith -- a posture without depth -- a game to play for power and having done so he has lost the integrity of his own soul’s relationship with the holy, forfeited the spirit of the Days of Awe, and betrayed the very web of life. To take seriously our time together as a religious body is to reverse that -- to give ourselves the opportunity to affirm our relationship with that which we hold most sacred, to support the processes of beloved community, and affirm our stewardship of the web of life. And we also enrich the nature of time.
As a congregation you, and now we, have certainly known interesting, liminal times -- times of reevaluation, times of questioning. No magic, no secret shortcuts. I was so aware of that in the spring as you waited to vote on a new minister and on a capital campaign. Liminal times. And now the new processes of entering this new relationship and that campaign. Dense with possibility. When we take seriously our time together as a religious body we create together a powerful liminal space -- outside of ordinary time. In our circle, we make the space for transition, for transformation. In the intentional encounter of all of our journeys we create a sacred space in which to house them -- made of our intention -- like a web -- but stronger and deeper -- or, even more, like many maps, joined together in one powerful globe, sphere. A sphere where the possibility for transformation includes and moves far beyond the realm of the individual. For the energy of transformation that comes to the individual emerging from the passageway, stepping through the threshold is the same power that will come to deeply gathered people. This is the strength and potent of communitas -- to clasp hands through the liminal space and create a new form together. Each and all.
And -- we -- Unitarian Universalists are liminal people ourselves. It is our character. We inhabit a liminal space we have formed, gradually, over time ourselves from our very beginnings as heretics. Threshold people. Threshold people who have made a place to come together.
What can we not create together in this place we have made, where we can meet in ways that defeat both time and space. When I think of the young girl whose rite of passage I attended I think about the moment that she finally stepped into the circle. That moment did not mark the end -- it marked the new beginning -- when more real work begins... when the circle opens out into a new sphere.
Emerging from the Days of Awe is not the end of the cycle of the year but the beginning -- as each circle of the year and each transition makes possible the future -- opens out into another circle. We set into motion now the future. As passing through the ordination/installation will inaugurate the real journey -- the one for which I have worked and longed. The one we will take together.
Oh -- beloved community -- I wish for us all and each the courage and resources to transit our liminal space -- there’s no paved path -- not like an expressway in either the fast or the slow lane -- there is no shortcut through being. But we can make the journey together -- in deep engagement and mindfulness. Liminal, luminous. We are blessed by one another to transformations we are only on the threshold of imagining.