Liminal spaces or bathing in the Styx

The walls of hospitals have heard more prayers than the walls of temple, mosque, or church 

claimed a recent social media post, emblazoned across a photo of a hospital corridor, no doubt hoping to provoke comment. Was it intended to invite condemnation of institutionalised religion? Or comments on the human condition? Or on our relationship with religions – press the panic button/ pull the rip-cord/ set off the distress flare – otherwise don't bother me?

My thoughts were "Ah! the liminal spaces."

liminal |ˈlɪmɪn(ə)l|
adjective technical
1: relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process.
2: occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.

What greater transition is there than that from life into death? Or lesser ones from able bodied to disabled? From having life threatening injury to being healed? From diseased to well? It is no wonder that they let patients sound a bell when their cancer treatment course is complete.

But, perhaps more importantly, they are spaces where our daily praxis fails – that web of expectation, action and result with which we order our day to day – where we are masters of events. We know how the day/week/month/year goes – except suddenly it doesn't. 

That's when we fall into a liminal space. 

The rules no longer work. 

It is very disorientating.

But it is also a rich source of wisdom. A space for potential growth. 

Rinzai Zen makes great use of catapulting the student into a liminal space where the student is dumbfounded. The koans are designed to twist the mind into capitulation because it is there that one's 'true nature' is encountered. 

The contemplative traditions of Christianity – largely denied to the laity –  likewise take the initiate into that liminal space.

Like Soto Zen, with its endless hours of sitting facing a wall, pilgrimages are intended not as glorified tourist trips, but to grind you down by physical exhaustion until you are nothing more than the pilgrim: they are intentionally liminal. No one should go on a pilgrimage with an iPhone! 

The meaning webs in which we spend our lives screen us from encountering the wilderness of the liminal; but they also confines us to culturally created comfort zones. 

The rationalist uses unimpeachable logic to cling to the safety of their web of meaning. The sharp edge of 'science' used as a sword to plunge into heart of any threat. Only science is not like that: it provides updatable answers depending on the best set of evidence available – it is a process. Sometimes an exquisitely honed tool – the gold standard of five sigma – sometimes little better than our current heuristic. 

Limply, those who would set religion off against science– you might as well say setting off irrationality against rationality – want to anchor their certainties in one or other received teaching – hallowed by time and no doubt deeply emotionally appealing and comforting – especially if you are 'born again' or 'saved' – but far too often contrary to testable fact. Belief is a poor substitute for hard earned knowledge, no matter how fervent the belief. 

There are those who, in the name of this or that faith, are only too ready to harvest people who are in liminality, posing as real life Charons ready to ferry the stranded to a safe shore on the other side, from one web of certainty to another: the real gift would be bathing in the Styx. 

Belief is a mistaken road if it is presented as a higher case of knowing. One should not believe. One should be open to experiences of the liminal – to its taste and feel – to the not knowing – to simply being in its raw state, shorn of intention. 

When people say they believe in the existence of God, it has never impressed me in the least. Either I know a thing and then I don't need to believe it; or I believe it because I am not sure that I know it. I am well satisfied with the fact that I know experiences which I cannot avoid calling numinous or divine.     Jung's reply to H L Philip's question about whether all we are limited to is knowledge of the God-archetype: H L Philip "Jung and the Problem of Evil": Rockliff, London, 1958

Belief

 I was asked the other day what Quakers believed, or, more precisely, what I believed. I realised that I was completely unable to answer this apparently simple question. I was left floundering.

I could have given a formulaic answer, something on the lines of 'being guided by the light' or 'answering to that of God in everyone' or, as I have often done, pointing to the Testimonies, but, instead I 'fessed up' – as the modern phrase puts it – and said “I don't know”. And then “I don't do belief.”

That answer came from quite deep: a knowing that I needed to be honest in response to a genuine question, but also a knowing that I feel deeply uncomfortable about claiming any form of belief. I had not until that moment formulated why that was.

I know what I experience. I know what comes to me in the silence. I know what moves me in the words of others. I know what makes me reflect and feel compassion. I know what challenges me and makes me feel uncomfortable. I know that I have blind spots and prejudices that are far clearer to others than they are, or ever will be, to me – but belief? No. I don't do that: it pretends to certainties where there are none. I think that is because it is a substitute for the hard work of not knowing, of being open, of being receptive, of discovering.

I do know that marinated in our collective silence, in attending to the words that arise, sometimes in the mouths of others, sometimes, even against my will, on occasions in my own mouth, I become more mellow and less hasty to judge; more inclined to listen and to see different sides; to be less partisan. This makes me understand why we speak of Quakers being 'seasoned', much like we season timbers before they are fit to use: Quakerism is not a slate of beliefs to be acceded to, but a process of putting aside and untangling, or even, to borrow yet again from modern parlance, of unplugging; of simply being in the presence of being; of being with others and what envelops us all.

I feel the more we name and label what we experience the more we diminish those experiences; the more we package them and put them into boxes, the safer and the less demanding they are: packed, wrapped and contained. For me this lacks integrity and authenticity: it takes us away from the raw stuff of simply being, and the honesty of not knowing.

In some ways I feel as if beliefs are like Christmas wrapping paper – tinselly and appealing, but insubstantial – when the real gifts are inside, and what you might do with what is inside.

I am on a spiritual journey, but it is no package tour – the point is the journey, not any supposed destination: is that why I do not 'do belief'?

Published in The Friend of 30 July 2021

Still a non-theist?

 I was asked the question whether I was still a non-theist?

You said, quite rightly I think, that my understanding is somewhat Taoist. Naming the nameless is to damage and limit: it is also an arrogance. Being open to the profoundness of what is - to the naked force of being - and knowing that you cannot know - that is fundamental. Imagining that we can have a transactional relationship with the totality of being is delusional: reality is remorseless. In the preciousness and precariousness of life we find the divine light. The spark that ignites the transmutation of the inert into the vital: the promethean fire that burns through us all. Minding, nurturing and guarding that light, both in ourselves and in others, is the function of religion.

So, am I still a non-theist?