Posted 669 days ago
Liminal Places and the Urban Camino
By Tim Mathis
The Celts have a concept that the MSA have been known to engage with: liminality, or the idea that in some locations the divide between God and creation is stretched thin. The Irish landscape, I’m told, is dotted with spots like this—with gifts and prayers left on outdoor altars at springs and grottos in the hopes that they’ll be received quickly by the divine, whose presence is felt nearby. I first heard the idea in a college course on Celtic Christianity, and it has always resonated. I feel, in fact, like I’ve run into a few liminal places myself—the rolling hills of the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, and the rugged, green coast of Southern Otago in New Zealand, among others.
For the last three years my wife and I have been living in The Big City, a place that country-bred me has historically considered to be free of the sort of natural beauty that makes God seem close. Even my clean, perfectly set city Seattle tends to strike me as more characterized by asphalt, urine stench and the distasteful icons of American excess than divine transcendence.
A few months ago though I decided that I was going to stop hating life in the city, and I started a discipline of taking walks that I like to call (as pretentiously as possible) Urban Caminos traveling by foot around the city in order to develop a spiritual connection with the environment where I now live. I was Camino-ing again today and realized that I have learned an important spiritual and political lesson through this discipline: that liminality is in the eye of the beholder. When you open your eyes intentionally, you find that the space is as thin between God and grit as between God and grandeur. God is revealed as clearly in the face of my neighbors—wealthy and homeless alike—as in the majesty of Mt. Rainier (which was behind the clouds today), and as much in the nihilistic bleating of the Seattle-born indie rock on my iPod as in the rhythms of Puget Sound, which I listened to while jotting out the outline for this post.
The concept of liminality is important, I think, in that it points us to the truth that God strikes out at us from within the context of creation rather than through ‘inbreaking’ from some existence outside of reality. It’s dangerous too though, to the extent that it encourages our tendency to localize and limit God and Truth to specific spaces in our experience, to the exclusion of others.
I’m happy to find that I’m finally seeing God in the place I live again, and assessing this place and its people their true value. Three years into life in The Big City, I’m finally convinced that it, too, is a liminal space.
Tim Mathis lives with his wife Angel on Capitol Hill in Seattle, and is currently aspiring to be an Episcopal priest, writer, and member of the Anglican Order of St. Stephen
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