I recently read Carmen Joy Imes’s Bearing God’s Name, an accessible, albeit somewhat academic meditation on the giving of the Law at Mount Sinai. This is just my sort of thing, both meditative and intellectual, biblical and gentle. During the course of the book, Imes reiterates a simple idea: that liminal (or in-between) spaces are disorienting. Most of us probably know this instinctively, but we all need to hear someone else say it every once in a while. Anyone who has ever had children or pets has at some point insisted: “Inside or outside but choose one!” As a child, we sang a song about The Grand ol’ Duke of York leading his troops, over and over like Sisyphus, up the hill and down: “And when you’re up, you’re up. And when you’re down, you’re down. And when you’re only halfway up you’re neither up nor down.”

Halfway is the definition of a liminal space, neither here nor there. Are you, or are you not? In or out? Imes meditates on the Hebrew people at the foot of the Mountain, already saved but still wandering, not yet arrived in the land of promise. They are in a 40-year liminal space. Freed from bondage but not safe. They look backward to their homes in Egypt because they do not yet know how to look forward to their homes in the Promised Land.

Imes also considers liminal spaces in our own human journey, most notably pregnancy, a time of already and not-yet motherhood. Pregnancy loss, she remarks, is a somewhat permanent liminal space; a child has been called into being but is never known or held. A mother has been created but she has not become a mom in the eyes of the world.

Imes is an Old Testament scholar; one of my mentors, Rod Whitacre, was a New Testament scholar who also faithfully taught his students the mystery of the liminal space—which he called the “already and not yet”—in the Gospel narrative. Already Jesus has come and saved us, but in this renewed creation in which we find ourselves, the land of promise has not yet come in full. All of creation is in a liminal space, and liminal spaces are naturally disorienting. This is, in part, why St. Paul tells us that “all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” (Romans 8:22, NIV)

In liminal spaces there are no clear answers. We make little gambles on the future; we do not know the full outcome of past decisions and actions. Good political solutions are often terrible faith solutions. No one knows what will happen next. When we read the paper, engage in the political process, encounter the vulnerable, and wonder if we are helping or hurting them in responding to their need, we confront our liminality.  And for most of us liminality is a day-to-day source of anxiety, because we do not truly know what is the best way forward, or how a given chapter of the story will end.

Nonetheless, faith also is the product of our liminality.  Faith, after all, is not necessary in the Kingdom of God. Faith is for the liminal, the not knowing, the questioning times. There is a saying floating around the internet: “It will all work out okay in the end. If it is not okay, it is not the end.” As trite as that sounds, it is also a small window on faith in the liminal spaces. The journey, even if it is difficult, must go on to its appointed end, and if the end is the Kingdom of God, then anything short of that is not the end. We are not a people abandoned in the wilderness; we do not dwell like shadows in the liminal spaces. Until the divine purpose of our being is fulfilled, it is not okay, and it is not the end. The curse of Sisyphus, after all, is that his struggle was pointless and had no end or fulfillment.

Perhaps this is a little too philosophical and tedious for some of us, but it is a simple hope for us all, that as we wander alone in our own desert, there is an end for which we are made. In the meantime, our liminality is normal, anxiety is common to us all, and the grace of God is sufficient to bring us home. In an apprehensive and often aimless age, sometimes the best thing we can say is that we, too, are groaning just like everyone else along the way.