Liminality

I learned some amazing words whilst studying at university and one of them was liminality. A perfectly good English word, its definition is something like, "Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold") is a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective state, conscious or unconscious, of being on the "threshold" of or between two different existential planes" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality

This is something that is experiential and subjective, in other words it can be different for each person who experiences it. In comic book terms think Spiderman or Superman who hold in perfect balance within them humanity and superhuman qualities. One never ceases because the other one is more evident. Spiderman does not stop having an emotional connexion to Mary-Jane simply because he is taking out the bad guys.

From a religious perspective there are significant people who have embodied this in the eyes of people of faith, those who stand on a threshold and bridge a gap between one world and the other. In the case of Buddhists there are people who for a time stand between this world and complete enlightenment, at some point they are no longer on the threshold but instead fully in one plce or the other.

For Christians it is Jesus who encompasses fully this liminal existence, and in that existence opening up access to the Sacred. And yet so often people take that as their own and think that where Jesus has made that access free to all and to all things that they as people have the power to deny access to some who do not fit a predetermined mould.

Lets for the purposes of this blog call all those things "queer", as in all those things or people who do not fit the mould for whatever reason. The thing about each of those who as people of faith have stood on this threshold is that they never claimed to have something that no one else could have, each of these folk said that the experience of bridging gaps was something that anyone can and should do.

So people who call themselves people of faith and people who identify also in any way shape or form as queer need to live a life that bridges a gap that has been created by people. We are called to live our lives as people called to exist in the liminal world of the Sacred and the Queer.