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
