"Life's Liminal Moments"

Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
May 23, 2010

Flower Communion Sunday is a tradition in Unitarian Universalist churches having been begun in 1923 by Norbert Capek in Czechoslovakia and brought to America by Maja Capek in 1940.  The Capeks wanted a symbolic ritual to bind people together and give concrete expression to the humanity-affirming principles of Unitarianism.   UU churches celebrate Flower Communion at different times of the year.  Since I have been here, we have been doing it at the end of May.  It is appropriate to do it at this time of year, when we still remember the first brave snowdrops, crocus, and daffodils of early spring; lately we’ve been enjoying the iris, peony, and coral bells of mid-spring, and we are anticipating the day lilies, hydrangea and black-eyed Susans of summer.  Now is a time to acknowledge the changing of the seasons.  I think we have seen the last of a cool, wet spring and we are about to feel a warm, damp summer.  We hold our Water Communion at our ingathering service in September - don’t forget to collect some water this summer, our Bread Communion just before Thanksgiving, and next year I think we may have a Chocolate Communion - yumm - more on that later.  So each of these has its own message, but each one also marks a point in our annual cycle.  Because we repeat them each year, they become familiar junctures of time and they create opportunities for us to reflect on the comings and goings of our lives.

The most celebrated point in time is the turning of the New Year.  We are all familiar with the idea we should take stock and make resolutions for improving our lives in the new year.  This tradition came about, because it’s most convenient to mark time and change based on a calendar year, but it is also tied to ancient mythology.  The word “Limina” means doorway.  January, named for the god Janus, is supposed to be a liminal time, a time when we are stepping through a doorway.  Janus was two-faced, not in the sense of being duplicitous, but he had two faces - one facing forward and one backward in time.  Liminal moments, when we have one foot on each side of a doorway, are times of great anticipation - of what life will be like on the other side of the doorway, and they are times of great danger.  Change, by necessity, means we have to let go of the old familiar safeguards and risk going into the unknown.  For theses reasons, we stop at the doorway, acknowledge that a transition is in process, and ask for and receive blessings and reassurances from our co-travelers.
You may not even recognize our communions as liminal moments, and most people don’t take New Year’s resolutions too seriously, but these times present us opportunities to take stock and prepare for the future.  It is much clearer to us that marriage, the birth of a child, the death of a loved one, are liminal moments.  changes brought on by these events force us to take stock of our lives.  We not only do this as individuals reflecting on the meaning of the changes for our personal lives, we do it with our families, congregations and other communities of which we are a part.  We do it in seriousness - because of the real challenges such life changes present, and we do it in celebration - of the accomplishments in our past and the bright possibilities in our future.
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I want to hold up this morning some of the many life transitions we don’t often honor with the full solemnity and whoopee that we should.  One is the loss or changing of a job, and another related one, moving homes.  It is obvious these are transitory times, and people going through them need others to acknowledge the changes and help them thru the doorway.  We celebrate birthdays, and make a big deal of the ones ending in zero - or hide from them.  I’m happy, mostly, to have my big 6-0 birthday behind me.  Young people know there are some very real transitions connected with the 16th, 18th, and 21st birthdays, but after that, what age related transitions do we celebrate?  We celebrate parenthood - not tied to any specific chronological age, but related to maturity that hopefully comes with parenthood.  I know first hand we should have a ritual for becoming an empty-nester; that was probably the hardest thing I have gone thru in decades - except maybe becoming a minister.  We celebrate retirement, but what about celebrating having achieved a state of wisdom or compassion that others should recognize?  Cece and I have helped with two “Cronings” in which a mature woman was ritually blessed and acknowledged as a sage, experienced, intuitive, and powerful person.

We recognized last week our young teens as having “Come of Age,” one of the most ancient communal rituals.  Our major goal for the children standing in the doorway of full participation in our church community is for them to study, reflect, discuss with their mentors and peers, write and articulate their own credo.  They spend the entire CoA year working on their credos.  That’s how seriously we and they take this transition.  I have supported the CoA program throughout the year and I had an opportunity to give feedback to the teens on their credos a few weeks ago, but I have to apologize to the congregation for not making it clear in advance of last Sunday that I couldn’t be here for the service itself.   Cece and I were taking part in a family life transition that we felt had to take priority.  Cece’s mother, Jean, is in advanced Alzheimer’s, and we think the end of her life might be very near.  Alzheimer’s is described to people not familiar with the disease as having three stages.  Jean has been in stage 3 for maybe 4 years now.  Those who have gone thru Alzheimer’s with a loved one know there are stages within each stage.  Each sub-stage involves more losses of function, and the disease can go on forever.  We just learned that there is yet another sub-stage, that of being near death, and it can last for a few weeks or a year - you really can’t know.  Every one of these losses brings grief, but it is very important to ritually acknowledge and yes, celebrate these transitions, too.

I talked to my daughter a couple of times this week about euthanizing one of her cats, Nettie, who had kidney and lung diseases about how she will help her 3 and 4 year old children with their loss.  They can only comprehend some of it at their age, but they need a way to understand what is happening, and they need a memory they can process at a later date.  Just taking time to say good-bye, making this time special, is  maybe enough for now.  When we go thru a ritual experience, we may or may not feel a “change” in ourselves right at that moment.  What we really need, is to create a story about our lives both before and after the liminal period.  The understanding we have about ourselves is critical to our well being, and it will take time to form and re-form in our minds in the days after something big happens in our lives.  Especially when we experience discontinuity in our lives after the loss of a job or a loved one, the way we interpret what happened and who we are is absolutely critical to our survival and eventual adjustment to our situation. The acknowledgement and celebration of a change is only one small part of that process, but it can be a very helpful in re-constructing our sense of self in the days that follow. Creating stories about our lives, “the stories we tell first ourselves and then to other people, the stories we use as lenses for interpreting experience as it comes along,” are what gives life meaning and what allow us to carry on.
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When we compose our life stories, liminal moments will be the milestones we remember, moments of change where we learned something new and became someone different than we were before.  We choose how to compose our stories and what they can mean for our lives.  Our lives are not composed of just one thing after another; they are composed by the meaning we make out of those things.  This poem, Map of the Journey in Progress by Victoria Safford, is a life story that leaves out all the details but includes what’s important:

Map of the Journey in Progress

Here is where I found my voice and chose to be brave.

Here's a place where I forgave someone, against my better
judgment, and I survived that, and unexpectedly, amazingly,
I became wiser.

Here's where I was once forgiven, was ready for once in my
life to receive forgiveness and to be transformed. And I sur-
vived that also. I lived to tell the tale.

This is the place where I said no, more loudly than I’d thought
I ever could, and everybody stared, but I said no loudly anyway,
because I knew it must be said, and those staring settled down
into harmless, ineffective grumbling, and over me they had no
power anymore.

Here's a time, and here's another, when I laid down my fear
and walked right on into it, right up to my neck into that
roiling water.
Here's where cruelty taught me something. And here's
where I was first astonished by gratuitous compassion and
knew it for the miracle it was, the requirement it is.  It was a
trembling time.

And here, much later, is where I returned the blessing, clum-
sily.  It wasn't hard, but I was unaccustomed. It cycled round,
and as best I could I sent it back on out, passed the gift along.

This circular motion, around and around, has no apparent end.

Here's a place, a murky puddle, where I have stumbled more
than once and fallen. I don't know' yet what to learn there.

On this site I was outraged and the rage sustains me still; it
clarifies my seeing.

And here's where something caught me -  a warm breeze in
late winter, birdsong in late summer.

Here's where I was told that something was wrong with my
eyes, that I sec the world strangely, and here's where I said,
"Yes, I know, I walk in beauty."

Here is where I began to look with my own eyes and listen
with my ears and sing my own song, shaky as it is.

Here is where, if by surgeon's knife, my heart was opened
up - and here, and here, and here, and here. These are the
landmarks of conversion.
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So today“It is most wise of us to combine flowers and children in a day of celebration, for flowers and children ever speak to us of wonders and glories yet to be, of hopes fulfilled if we tend our gardens and our homes with patience and wisdom and love.”