Father
Richard Rohr is a Franciscan based in Albuquerque, New Mexico – and if you ask
him about the church he says he lives on the edge of the inside. Some of us know that territory quite well
these days… the edge of the inside. We
have done lots of things in the church and there have been some good and
meaningful times. But somehow in the
process, even just in our thoughts, we have moved centrifugally towards the
edge where we find we are seeing some new things. And that is Fr Richard’s first point on the subject of living liminally. Limen in Latin is the doorway, the
line between inside and outside, the threshold.
Inside we may be warm, housed, fed and sheltered, even feel safe. On the boundary it gets different. Inside we belong, and there are familiar patterns
and rituals. But also, inside, there are
things we don’t see so clearly, a lot that we miss by being inside, even get
wrong – as Isaiah the Hebrew prophet put it long ago, the people listen but
don’t comprehend, look but don’t understand.[1] That is a hazard of belonging, whether it is
belonging enthusiastically to a church, or to the American people, or any sort
of fervent nationalism… a political party it may be, or a charmed family circle
or tribe, or any cosy culture… Rosemary Clooney put it succinctly:
Am I not seein’ things too clear
Am I just too far gone (in) to hear
Is it all goin’ in one ear and out the other
Moving
to the margins however, we may find freer air, we may look back and start to recognise
the system’s idolatries, says Fr Richard, its lies, its shadow side – in trendy
sporting metaphor, the playing field opens up for us. And so it is that from ancient times prophets,
mystics, some of our best theologians, not to mention many ordinary folk, have
found… ourselves coming to the edge of the inside, declining now to be co-opted
by any system. There are, Fr Richard
points out, what he calls softer forms of this, like people who are not
entranced by TV “infotainment”, people who decline to be trendy, who moderate
their income and possessions, people who make prayer a part of their lives,
people who place themselves in risky situations for the greater good. It is ironic that we must go to the edge,
often, to find the centre. And it is a
fact that, on the boundaries it becomes easier to see and respond to Jesus and
to the Word of God.
In
John’s Gospel, Jesus depicts himself as the Door, the Gate of the Sheepfold. He does mean initially that he is the way in…
indeed he may have meant he is the only way in.
But then it says… he leads them out.[2] His flock go in and out and find pasture. We can venture beyond the sheepfold because,
it says, we know his voice. Jesus
may indeed be in the tabernacle, but at the boundaries and beyond, out in the
desert, amid strife and hardship, among the marginalised, in places where, in
Rudyard Kipling’s rugged words, there ain’t no ten commandments, we can
hear and recognise the voice of the shepherd, and know to whom we belong.
So,
now we will have a little series on Living Liminally… and I am hoping for the wisdom
of others who, like me, have been doing this already for some time.
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