LITMIR.BIZ

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uniforms, given rifles, and forced to live in an unnatural community. For a period the boys have no family or friends, just each other and a few older men as guides, so new relations must be built, without status or class. This is an in-between time when you give up the old and prepare to take on the new, get ready to become something, someone you have not been before. It is a time given to begin the processional from the known to the unknown. And it is a time to consider what it will be like to be a man. A honeymoon is a very palpable liminal time in which we stop being an individual and become a mini-community.

      There are liminal places (boundaries, no-man’s-lands, crossroads, land’s ends, mountain tops, seashores, river banks, artesian springs, sacred worship places, cemeteries), and liminal spaces (two-dimensional plots of land, one-dimensional pathways and ley-lines, zero-dimensional omphalos [translate: navel] and axis mundi [translate: axis of the earth] the dream time (i.e., of Australian aboriginals), and liminal times (the New Year, equinoxes and solstices, birthdays and anniversaries, dusk and dawn, initiations, waking from sleep, “Once-upon-a-time” [of faerie tales]), and liminal events (births, marriages, deaths, life-changing happenings), and liminal journeys (pilgrimages, retreats, dyserts, sabbaticals), and even liminal living (persons of lameness or disabilities, babies born with cauls, hermits, tramps, priests and monastics and such, contrarians, fools). Liminal is stepping from the known to whatever lies beyond.

      God is very close, very present, very accessible in liminals. Or perhaps, inversely, it is we who are, can be, more open to God in liminals. When I came down the stairs and discovered Suzy cold and dead, God clasped me tightly in Her embrace.

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      Maundy Thursday, 2008—Thoughts

      We stand, we kneel, we sit, we sing together, we listen to the priest and to the choir, we recite in unison memorized ancient pieces, we read others aloud together, we speak responsively back to a reader. Liturgy is multi-sensual: splotches of colors, beautiful brocades, the sight and smell of candles (and in some other churches, the luscious, choking smell of incense rolling up in clouds), the sounds of the organ and piano and on occasion other instruments played with deep devotion, of voices singing, speaking, chanting, the taste of fish food wafers and wine, the warmth and smells and sensuousness of gathered bodies. And in the midst of all that we imagine we are speaking to God.

      What does it mean tonight? This Maundy Thursday? We commemorate and symbolically enact the last meal Jesus had with his disciples. Tomorrow on our liturgical clock he will die! But this is tonight. And we try to live it out by commemorating the eating of that last meal, a Passover meal, the betrayer fleeing the room, the ragtag procession to Gethsemane, their sleeping vigil, his pleading “Take away this cup from me!” with gobs of bloody sweat, the clanging and chinking noises of steel weapons as the soldiers work into the park to take him, his surrender, him led away to trial, the faithful followers’s stark terror of flight, scared shitless, running for their very lives. We commemorate. Tonight.

      So tonight we gather as it is darkening, to go through the regular, familiar liturgy with only minor variations. The music is darker this night, heavier, to try to capture the mood of that last supper. Or perhaps to capture our own moods as we think forward to the gruesome execution tomorrow morning, as though we might be there. The rest of the liturgy is not so very unlike the way we celebrate it every other day. Until we get to the end. And then, in silence, they strip the altar. Take away every piece of color, every bit of shiny metal, every candle and bit of light. They veil the cross. They remove every moveable thing that makes this space look and feel liturgically lived in. While we watch, in silence, listening to the awkward noises. Noting the slight disorganizedness. And finally we leave in silence, sombered, as the place is darkened and some one lonely person prepares to spend hours here in this darkened, empty, spooky space, vigilling. In some places there is an unnerving variation, we wash each others’s feet! Because he did it. In other places there is one additional piece; after they have stripped the altar, and everything else they can, they wash the altar, as we silently watch, not with soapy water to make it clean, but with wine and water to ritually purify it, to make it ready for the sacrifice. And what does all that mean?

      This is the circle of standing stones that I have chosen for myself and which seems to have chosen me as well. So tonight I have to ask, “What does it mean? What is it about? What, beyond the obvious and the stated, is going on here? Why do we bother to do it? What is its power, for us? What are we here to commemorate? To do? Does it make ANY difference whatsoever?”

      Eucharist (making thanks) is always about community about this community of the faithful (whoever they happen to be). In this very symbolic, very stylized meal we celebrate our community, we enact our chosen community, we reinforce and solidify this community we each have chosen for ourselves and for each other, this community that is for us the living body of the risen Christ. And as this community gathers we imagine that the Christ is present in every person who joins the circle, and in the gathered circle itself. Christ is here. Now. At this very moment! Or so we imagine.

      But what is different about this night is that tonight we celebrate not just the community, but the community disassembled, torn apart, shredded, scared witless and running for our very lives. Community shattered. Obliterated! And what would it be like without community? That is the metaphor this evening. And what does the metaphor point toward? What truth, what reality beyond the limen does it open out for us?

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      The Imaginal

      Several months ago I stumbled across the notion of the imaginal I recall not where. I Googled it and came up with three articles, which, I must confess, is all I’ve read on the topic. But I must also confess that the notion fascinates me, and I suspect it is one, if not the primary, gateway into the world of mysticism. Briefly the notion is this: that the faculty of the imagination enables us to enter, be in relation to, communicate with, be educated by non-physical cosmologies which are every bit as real as the physical/material world in which we live this material life. The articles I read, one by Dr. Gerald Epstein, a psychiatrist who uses the imaginal in his practice, and two by Henri Corbin, an interpreter of Arabic and Persian texts (perhaps an authority on Shi’a, Islamic mysticism, certainly conversant with it) introduced me to a strange new world.

      The imaginal is very difficult for me; I am very much dedicated, both by psychological make-up and by ingrained training, to the left-brain, rational, linear kind of mental life. My personality type (INTP in Myers-Briggs) is such that if something is not logical, then it is nonsense. But the imaginal is the mental life of the right-brain. And I think I may have missed something potentially very significant for my life. I will not pretend that I understand this term “imaginal.” I only know it seems to make sense to me.

      Evidently we of the western world have been trapped and held captive by René Descartes (1596-1650) when he proclaimed, “I think, therefore I am!” (though I was taught in Philosophy 101 “Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum”). And ever since we have locked ourselves into a thought system in which the linear, the logical, the left-brain is dominant, and right-brain processes are largely discarded as dealing with unrealities. In the West it is thinking alone that is important and worthy of being worked with (and it must be logical, linear thinking, dealing with the empirical, the hard-data stuff of this material life). “Imagining” and “imaging” are considered illogical, irrational, non-linear and therefore fictitious, unreal, and not useful. We bear this burden of logicality, perhaps to our souls’s detriment and ill-health, and maybe even death. In consequence we have carefully learned that our imagination is the gateway to fantasy, fiction, the unreal, “made-up stuff,” but not possibly to anything in any sense real or worthy of serious consideration, certainly nothing that should influence our lives.

      I’m told that most of the peopled world do not feel so limited. In Eastern cultures they proclaim existence by saying simply, “I am,” (i.e., not compelled to prefix it with a condition of rationality). That includes the imaginal as well as the logical. And that, in turn, opens worlds hidden from us Westerners by our insistence of logicality. In particular the Chinese, Tibetan Buddhist and Islamic (Shi’a) cultures are open to and make much use of the imaginal. Epstein suggests that linear (left-hemisphere) thought processes deal primarily with factuality and the past, and cannot effectively cope with

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