Tuesday in the Octave of Easter, April 19, 2022
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
I have seen the Lord
I’m learning from my mothers about margin, and about reflection, and about Kairos time. First from Angelina, my mother, who passed away on November 10 at age 99, after having spent months and even years in quiet consideration of the people and memories and values of her life. And now from Dorothy, Margaret’s mom, who will be 99 herself in December, and who is also settling into the margin, quietly listening to the chords struck deep inside her heart by her own memories and people and values in her life.
Both of them love Jesus. Both of them listen for the Holy Spirit, although it’s not always what they say but what they do that convinces us of that.
And I’m learning from my friend Kenny, who has cancer and half didn’t expect to be celebrating Easter again this year, who reads a reflection on liminal time each year on Holy Saturday before he attends the Easter Vigil at his church in Geneva, Illinois. He read it again this year.
Limen is the Latin word for threshold. A “liminal space” is the crucial in-between time – when everything actually happens and yet nothing appears to be happening.
In Japanese the word “ma” means the space between two sounds. This is a liminal space. And when Jesus died, there was a day between his crucifixion on Friday and the resurrection on Sunday. There had to be a Saturday! This was when “everything was actually happening,” and we couldn’t see it, we couldn’t mess it up by getting all excited … we simply had to wait.
The same thing happened after Jesus ascended into heaven. He told his disciples to wait for the Holy Spirit. Ten days later, the liminal space was over and the tongues of fire changed everything for those disciples. Jesus also said he would be returning again before the people around him died, before they passed away. That liminal space is still going on.
There is already … and the not yet … and in between we sometimes call the “present,” but we just as well call it the space between the sounds, or the liminal space. When I think of it like that I am not impatient and I don’t second guess God. “There is no hurry” becomes more than a mantra for me; it is TRUE!
Margin just appears when I see the world like this. Kenny’s meditation again:
The Sabbath rest was the pivotal day for the Jews, and even the dead body of Jesus rests on Saturday, waiting for God to do whatever God plans to do. It is our great act of trust and surrender, both together. A new “creation ex nihilo” is about to happen, after the necessary “handing over time,” when soul and spirit rejoin with body. Sometimes we call this “grief work.” Time is in connivance with eternity and Eternity does not play outside its own rules.
Let’s go together to the tomb, standing there with Mary, so does not realize she is at the end of her grief. She has spent the Sabbath in silence and stillness, now she weeps her heart out. And then there is much commotion.
The angels guarding Jesus’ empty burial clothes asked, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She answered and turned around and saw the gardener who asked, “Who are you looking for?”
But this is not the gardener, no not at all! It was Jesus.
And Jesus said to her, “Mary!”
Jesus gave her instructions, as he had many times in their life together. This was truly her Master, and she ran to do his bidding.
She ran and told the disciples, “I have seen the Lord!”
I think of so many ways to spend my days. My “rule of life” is simple: read, write, listen, pray every day. When I see my time as liminal, between when I receive the gift of birth and await the gift of rebirth into heaven, what else is there to do but simply say, and shout, and whisper, and weep, and exult: “I have seen the Lord!”
Acts 2, Psalm 33, Psalm 118, John 20
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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