be flung open and we’d be on our knees before all these brightly wrapped marvels, tumbling in anticipation and delight.
And if you were lucky, there was at least one special present, one that you couldn’t guess. You’d hold it and shake it and turn it, and you’d wonder. I would unwrap this present slowly, not looking, not wanting to catch a glimpse of a label on the box and guess the secret before the wondrous moment of unveiling. Savouring the edge of possibility. Tasting the wonder, the miracle of this gift that could be – anything! Could be the very thing I longed for, which I could not name myself, which I had wanted and waited for, without knowing it, all my life. Could this be It?
Here, now, in this moment I was on the threshold, I was touching the hem. Was this how the woman in the Gospel felt when she touched Jesus’ garment, hoping to be made well (Luke 8: 43-48)?
Eventually, inevitably, the present was unwrapped. Immediately, something wondrous was lost. This was not It. And yet… there was that moment, that luminous moment when everything was possible. Such a moment! Even today something in me rises to meet it, wide-eyed and open-hearted.
Why do adults so love Christmas time, so often reflecting that ‘it’s just not the same without children’? I believe that the sweetness of this remembered childhood moment lingers. Something in us all is still waiting, still longing, still hoping. Just to be here again on this threshold is delight, as we see, shining in the eyes of children, our own wonder and hope. Perhaps this year!
We are all children, waiting on the threshold for the Wonder to show itself. We are all haunted by longing.
Do you remember your first orgasm? I remember mine. I didn’t really know what it was. I was used to the excitement and pleasure of arousal, but this was completely new and unexpected. I remember very clearly saying to myself that it felt in that moment as if everything I had ever wanted had been given to me. Everything. Not this and that, but the Essence. It. I had tasted that for which I longed. In that brief splinter of time all was ecstatically complete, fulfilled.
Yet, even as it burst into my life it was gone. Of course I soon learned I could taste this delight again and again, and despite the turmoil, chaos and guilt that came to accompany it, the purity and power of that moment of ecstasy remained. It fired my longing and undid both my own plans and the dictates of a repressed and frightened Church. Again and again I would stand on the threshold and, unlike the Christmas present, this did not disappoint. Here, however fleetingly, I crossed the threshold and tasted the wonder. Yet, like Christmas, it too was gone in the very moment of its sweetest delight.
Do you remember your first taste of spiritual joy? As a boy I had been very religious, loving ritual, prayer and ‘holy things’. However, when I was about fourteen, something new broke into my life. One day when I was spending a lonely lunchtime in the school chapel trying some simple methods of prayer that I had read about, I had a sudden sense of immediate, mirror-like contact with the One to whom I prayed. It was simple (no visions or lights or anything) and it was intoxicating, like drinking at a fountain of joy. For several months this continued, especially after Holy Communion when I alternately felt as if I were flying as high as the ceiling, or as if I were about to burst from joy. God only knows what my schoolmates, bored by the daily liturgy, must have thought as I closed my eyes and drank from this hidden spring.
Again, I was on the threshold, again tasting It. Yet It withdrew. Soon the spring dried up, went underground and my prayer became plain and dry. However, I had known what it was to have my heart on fire and I would never be satisfied until it consumed me completely.
The liminal moment
These three sacred moments: the gift giving of Christmas, sexual awakening and spiritual awakening, can be called ‘liminal’ experiences. Limen is the Latin word for ‘threshold’, and it refers in a special way to the threshold of the temple: an entrance, a barrier, a meeting place between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’, between the ‘divine’ and the ‘human’, between my ‘deepest self’ and my ordinary ‘daily self’. In liminal states we taste a level of awareness beyond the rational, analytical and image-making mind, sometimes even tasting the deepest centre of self that opens into Absolute Mystery, that ground of our being where ‘God’s Spirit with her own Being is effective’.1
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1 Meister Eckhart, quoted in M Fox, Original blessing, Bear and Co., New Mexico, 1983, p. 132.
These liminal experiences cannot truly be controlled by the individual, by Church or by society. They take us beyond. And that is the point. They are profoundly free and freeing, shaking up all the structures of the self and unmistakably asserting the sovereign freedom of God in the heart and soul of every person. All are called to ecstasy.
The liminal experience comes in many ways and with many textures – I have mentioned only three. In this essay I wish to talk specifically about two: the spiritual and the sexual.
It is especially in these two areas that society and the Church set out to claim, construct, sanction and control the liminal experience. This happens primarily through the structures of marriage and of official religious ritual. Some experiences, some pathways into the Mystery, become hallowed, celebrated, enshrined, even made mandatory, while others are forbidden, condemned, denied and even demonised. Some people and their experiences are ‘in’, and other people and their experiences are ‘out’. However, true liminal experiences cannot be legislated for or legislated against. Indeed, in them a deep freedom and truth is discovered, a touchstone by which to test the preaching and posturing of the institutions themselves, if we have the integrity and the courage.
All the same, it is not simply malice and power that lead society and the Church to try to control and issue caveats around these experiences. That which is tasted in them, whether it comes through prayer, sex, nature, drugs, dance or ritual is intensely powerful, even overwhelming. Wisdom, prudence and guidance are essential in the drinking of this water, as a little taste of it goes a long way. We all know, I suspect, the seductive tendency to seek the thrill of the liminal moment again and again at the expense of ‘ordinary’ life, relationships and commitments, ultimately forfeiting the true transformation to which the liminal moment itself points, as we shall see.
But first, if we are to be human, to be free, it is essential that we become profoundly open and deeply attentive to our own liminal experiences, and especially in the areas of our sexuality and in our prayer. There can be no true spirituality or growth without this. The ‘Wisdom of the Ages’ is vital, but we must live our own lives, live from our own deepest centre, which is sensed and glimpsed in these moments. We must embrace them even as we are embraced in them. Better, we must embrace not the liminal moment itself, nor its context (church, sex, dance, drugs, nature, etc.), but rather we must embrace that which the liminal moment reveals to us: that Mystery, that essence, which we taste and surrender to, inarticulate and inarticulable, utterly free. We must embrace and drink deeply of the Mystery whenever and wherever and however and in whomsoever it reveals itself. Laws must not stop us.
Elsewhere I have referred to this as ‘telling the truth’, first to ourselves.2 Let us drink deeply, letting the ‘chips’ of social, religious and personal structures fall where they may in that moment. We who are ourselves ‘on the edge’, whose spiritual and sexual experiences are so routinely condemned and denied, can we have the courage to ‘drink of the truth’ and to proclaim it to others, witnessing to the freedom of the Spirit who will not be articulated, legislated or controlled, who ‘blows wherever she wills’ (John 3:8)? Here is a truly prophetic, truly revolutionary, truly human vocation!
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2 See my video course The erotic contemplative:the spiritual journey of the gay/lesbian Christian, vol. 1, Erospirit Research Institute, Oakland CA, 1994.
What then of the wisdom and prudence I spoke of earlier? And what of the inevitable, all too immediate moment when the tasting, the embracing, the showing is gone, and we either tumble deliciously in its wake like dolphins behind a ship, or feel the chaos and emptiness it has stirred up in our stagnant pond of a life? What then?