Reading: Burnt Norton (T.S. Eliot) – Read by Cynthia Phinney

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

Sermon: Lines & Circles: On the Limin – Rev. Eric Banner

In life, and in the world, there are the in-between places and times. We all experience them. The transitions between here and there, between back then and what’s coming. The new year is a time when many of us do the work of transitions, of shifting from one time in our life to another. And the temptation can come easily to be in a rush through it. To get from here to there just as efficiently and quickly as we can. Who wants to be in a car on the highway, when you can be with your best friends or your family sooner? Who wants to be between jobs and paychecks? Certainty is assuring, alluring, and comfortable. But this is a time a of year that reminds us that if we do not ask good questions, and then stay present to them long enough to let the answers emerge, through work, through patience, through observation, then we miss the chance to find out the things we didn’t even know we didn’t know, and discover what comes on the other side of the threshold.

That word, threshold, is many things. It is literally the piece at the bottom of the doorway, the point at which we travel from one space to another, inside to outside, or outside to in. And it is the modern word we use for what the Romans called a limen, a stone that stood in the gap between the house and the world, and had to be hard and durable because it was a point of so much transit, so much activity, so many steps on it, going to all the places they went. And, a threshold is a metaphorical space. A time when we are no longer one thing, and not yet another. This is where the word liminality comes from, in its own roundabout way.

Our use of the word liminal dates back just about a century or so, to a French ethnographer and folklorist named Arnold van Gennep. He’s most famous for his work on rites of passage, the ritual acts that transition people from being one thing to another, most notably children to adults. He broke the process down into three parts, or phases, the preliminary, the liminal, and the post-liminality. Two out of three new words catching on isn’t bad.

For some months now our staff here at church have been reading a book by the church consultant Susan Beaumont, “How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going – Leading in a Liminal Time.” The book came out in 2019, so just before the pandemic, but the insights remain worthy of our attention, as we, institutionally, and personally find ourselves in a time that is not what we once were, and not yet clear how the new mission and vision will make us into who we will one day be.

What Beaumont says about liminality also feels like a good reminder at this time of the turning of the year, when people are reflecting on what happened last year, and what they hope will be different in the new one. She’s writing about churches, but I think you’ll hear the personal in what she says –

“People often frame the liminal experience as organizational failure, believing it occurs because leaders aren’t doing what they are supposed to be doing, which is to keep followers happy and safe. People expect to move in a straight line from the old things to the new, and the waiting and confusion feels meaningless or counter-productive. An effective leader will teach people about the importance and value of a liminal season, why they are feeling the way they are feeling, and what they can do with their anxiety.”

Does that sound familiar? Have you ever found yourself saying “Don’t just stand there, do something?” As near as I can tell, part of the challenge is that we have all absorbed a faulty understanding of time, which I know sounds very wonky, but this is what I mean. Did you notice how she said “people expect to move in a straight line from the old things to the new?” For many thousands of years people understood time to be a thing that moved not in straight lines, but in circles. If you’ve ever seen a picture of the Aztec calendar, you know what I mean. It’s not a set of boxes and rows pointing inevitably into the future, it’s a round stone that the people used to track the movement through time as rhythms that repeat, year after year.

One of the pieces of our western heritage that I’ve had to learn to push back against is the assumption that the normal, natural way of being is to see life itself as a line that goes from birth to death, and maybe beyond, instead of seeing it as a circle, or even as a set of ever expanding spirals that revisit the things in the past again and again, though often, hopefully, with a new perspective that lets us see it in a deeper, richer way.

Liminal seasons in our lives are times of real change. Times when things aren’t settled. When we don’t know what to expect, and that is disconcerting for most of us. But if we dash forward in a straight line we miss the chance to pause on the threshold and ask questions that call on us to be present long enough to see what was always there, but we had dashed pass. The hallmark of a liminal time used well is not the anxiety, though that comes, too, it’s the questions that we ask when we see what we need to see, but hadn’t noticed.
First, however, we must pause on that threshold, at the still point of the turning world.
It’s part of what T.S. Eliot was speaking about in our reading this morning.

“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,”

I don’t know what particular thresholds you find yourself on, and whether they are really yours, or ones that someone else handed to you. We don’t all need to join a gym, or make a 10 step self-improvement plan. But it might be that if you take the time, you’ll notice the anxieties that are rising in you, your attachments that pull you along in ways that are no longer helpful, though maybe they once were. You might be feeling overwhelmed, trying to keep yourself doing more than you really can, or can anymore, or finding even mundane tasks hard to complete. Maybe you’re in a conflict with a loved one about whether to get back to what worked in the past and someone’s ideas about what might be the exciting new thing.

Whatever it is, you’re not alone. Many, maybe all of us, have been through these times, and though they don’t always align well with the cycles of the calendar, or the seasons, when we are too deeply torn between our attachments and our realities, it can be a time of sorrow and even depression. The Quaker writer Parker Palmer had that happen more than once in his life, and he’s written and spoken about it. One of the times he was struggling with depression he turned to a retreat center in Kentucky, to a spiritual director he had seen before, and trusted deeply with his situation. He was stuck in a threshold that hurt, and hurt deeply. While there he went for a walk down a country road, and saw something he had seen before, but it reminded him of something so important that he wrote a short poem about it, “Harrowing,” that he committed to memory for the rest of his days. He wrote:

“The plow has savaged this sweet field
Misshapen clods of earth kicked up
Rocks and twisted roots exposed to view
Last year’s growth demolished by the blade.

I have plowed my life this way
Turned over a whole history
Looking for the roots of what went wrong
Until my face is ravaged, furrowed, scarred.

Enough. The job is done.
Whatever’s been uprooted, let it be
Seedbed for the growing that’s to come.
I plowed to unearth last year’s reasons—

The farmer plows to plant a greening season.”

The fields are in a time between growing seasons now, and maybe you are, too. If so, you might ask yourself if you are truly lost in the wilderness of your life, or is it something else, a limen between two things, a time to ask question so that a greener season might be when you’ve finally crossed over into what is new. When the circle comes back round again, and you find yourself seeing what it was that you were meant to do in this year, this time.

Last week Birch shared a message with us about the important practice of letting go, of lightening your load of the burdens that you have in your pockets and the bags slung over your shoulder, things you maybe once needed and need no longer, or maybe never needed at all. To ask yourself the question of what it is that sparks joy for you, or for a loved one, that you need to hold on to for a while longer. This week I invite us all into the practice that comes after that preliminary time, after the preparation has been done, but before the end has come to a new place, a new balance, a new steadiness of belonging and expectation and understanding, to be on the limen of our lives.

The best way to use such a time is twofold. First, as Eliot reminded us, to be present in the moment, the still point, neither ascent nor decline, in just this moment, here and now. And then, to make room for the practice of asking real, open-ended questions that you not only do not know the answer to, questions to which you could not possibly know the answer to, at least not yet.

A decade ago Parker Palmer offered up the idea that rather than starting the year with resolutions, that he would instead carry into the new year a few good questions. Questions like –

How can I let go of my need for fixed answers in favor of aliveness?

What is my next challenge in daring to be human?

How can I open myself to the beauty of nature and human nature?

Who or what do I need to learn to love next? And next? And next?

What is the new creation that wants to be born in and through me?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. I don’t know them for myself, and I certainly don’t know the answers for you. But I know that there are answers, and if we all, you, me, the person sitting next to you, all of us, make room to live into questions like these, then we can begin to let the anxiety settle. We can notice the old ways attempting to arise again, and let them come, and go, in our hearts without believing that they need to be done again, or if we find that they do need to be done again, we can leave room to ask when and why and how we might circle back to them with new wisdom, new experience, new knowledge, new recognition. Old things pass away, and new things come into being, and this is the way of things for all beings, including us.

So, whether this is a season of liminality for you, or just the turning of the year, this is my encouragement to you. Ask good questions, gather good data, and look ahead to what is coming, but do not rush there. Let the circles and seasons live in and through you, that you might know the answers you need in the year to come.

So may it be.
Amen.