The liminal state is a threshold, a door which opens out onto a new way of being, seeing or understanding. Author and teacher Ann Rennie reflects on how liminal moments have enabled her to expand her consciousness and touch the sacred, as portals “to the other side of self”.
Liminal moments occur during rites of passage. We move from the expectant woman to mother, from student to graduate as we await university results, from parent to grandparent, from worker to retiree, from child to adolescent to adult.
Life events such as the loss of a loved one, divorce or being made redundant can propel us into the liminal state where we are not who we were before. We are in a state of in-between-ness where there is no going back, only a forward momentum that we may or may not recognize at the time. It is no longer life as we have known it. Transformation is taking place, just as it does, immutably, during the seasons of the year.
Sometimes, too, this waiting time is simply a holding pattern as the next stage comes to fruition. Sometimes we do not actually know that we did something for the last time. We look back and know that we will never do it again. It has been consigned to the past. Perhaps we have simply slipped away into a new way of thinking or being without the explosiveness of a Damascene moment. We are entering a new authenticity that energises who we are in the world.
This may mean the letting go of plans and lifestyles and the imposed external limitations that have bound us to one way of being. We can now encounter a path that allows us to thrive in a new fulfilment. Sometimes our old patterns and predilections need to be disrupted so we can claim our better selves. Sometimes we may have to unmoor ourselves from habits or ways of being that have not been generative or holistic to our personhood.
Liminal moments are portals to the other side of self. They create deep immersive opportunities to touch the sacred. Sometimes these liminal moments are the bliss of sudden consciousness, a sliver of revelation, a lifting up of the soul beyond the confines of the mere here and now, a blaze of cosmic synchronicity, God.
For some, meditation encourages a new spiritual shape as the old self is surrendered. Deep contemplation enables one to forsake the hold of ego. For others, prayer is a portal. You are not the same person after you have prayed as you were before. In that deep concentration of thought and Godly intention, time loses its urgency. It cannot be pinned down, quantified, limited, calibrated into tiny use-by parcels of human immediacy. It is time written in stardust and the embroidery of the infinite.
Prayer is the original time out!
With it comes the strange and benevolent elasticity of time; shortened and sharpened or expanded and spaced out, depending on one’s need and desire to communicate with God.
For me, dawn and dusk have liminal qualities as they act as portals to morning and evening. They are the talismanic in-between. Their very indistinctness is invitational because it is subtle and incremental, those immeasurable moments of moving from darkness into light and vice versa. This is my prayer time.
The first prayer of my day is to thank God that I’m alive to hear the beautiful carillon of birdsong that tumbles through the dawn and eases me from my downy slumber. What a joy to hear this canticle of creation. It’s a suburban concerto and sets me up with gladness to be getting on with the day that lies unscripted ahead of me. I love the serenity of the morning when the world is still quiet and when I can think and plan and breathe out in gratitude for the twenty-four hours ahead, even though they will be predictable in their course.
I love the hush of this untrammelled time with hope brimming the horizon; when those other-worldly doors are open and the secret of it all is almost touchable. Before I know it, the clouds have rearranged themselves into apocalyptic gold and within minutes the full promise of morning is heralded. I love the shades of violet that steal in after the sun has set, deep-set tendrils wrapping up the sky in this crepuscular interlude. It is a melancholy time; that wistful evensong, a time for solace and soothing as the day slips away and we wonder if we have used it well. In these liminal moments that bookend my days, I can imagine anything. These moments are mind-altering in their lucidity. They create a new spaciousness within me.
I am on a threshold. The door is open. I can step beyond.
What comes next is meant to be as the day unfolds as it should.
When we find ourselves released from these liminal times, we step onto the holy ground of the new and recreated. We are moving away and going ahead. We are readying ourselves for the next chapter in life’s precious mission possible.
This is an extract from an essay published in Ann’s recent book, ‘Blessed: Meditations on a Life of Small Wonders’, published by Laneway Press. Melbourne. Available on Kindle. See:
https://lanewaypress.com.au/blog/portfolio/blessed-meditations-on-a-life-of-small-wonders/