Lost in Liminality
Lost in Liminality
by Keith Sellers
Liminality is an existence between two states, destinations, or stages of existence. Perhaps a pre-teen is not really a young child, but not quite yet an adolescent. We may be traveling from one airport to another that is so far away that we must stopover at another city before arriving at our final destination. While we wait to board the second flight we may be overcome by feelings of anxiety, frustration, or impatience, but at least we know where we came from and where we're going. In our current state of humanity, we're not sure anymore where we have come from, nor where we are now. The only thing that is certain is that we don’t know where we'll end up! While we believe that we have a nearly unlimited number of possibilities and freedom to pursue whatever we please, we feel lost in our liminality. Here on planet earth, we live in a state that exists between heaven and hell, between blessing and curse. Our lostness creates an ominous sense of hopelessness and spiritual nausea.
In 1893 Norwegian painter Edvard Munch created a now famous piece called The Scream. This iconic work which appeared in four versions, as painting and pastel, shows a person holding the sides of his face with both hands as the setting sun's rays create blood red hues. Munch wrote about his feelings that inspired this work,
One evening I was walking out on a hilly path near Kristiana-- with two comrades. It was a time when life had ripped my soul open. The sun was going down-- had dipped in flames below the horizon. It was like a flaming sword of blood slicing through the concave of heaven.[i]
In his journal notes Munch claims that he audibly heard the scream in nature.[ii] According to J. Gill Holland, the place of the figure in the painting was near a slaughterhouse and a mental institution that overlooked the fjord in Kristiana, now called Oslo. Passersby could actually hear the cries of the unfortunate occupants of these buildings.[iii] As a five-year old, Munch lost his mother to tuberculosis, and then later as a teenager his sister died. In the face of such painful loss, his father struggled with bouts of depression. Munch's Scream strikes a chord in the heart of everyone who has ever felt such inner turmoil. It is the scream of both nature and the human heart.
Art historian and curator Jill Lloyd who works at the National Gallery of Oslo commented in a BBC piece about the meaning of Munch’s Scream,
It presents man cut loose from all the certainties that had comforted him up until that point in the 19th Century: there is no God now, no tradition, no habits or customs – just poor man in a moment of existential crisis, facing a universe he doesn’t understand and can only relate to in a feeling of panic.[iv]
Over 125 years later in our chaotic era, we feel as if we are in a very similar existential crisis. We may sense that all of our foundations for life have been torn away. Many Scream-based memes and emojis appear in digital media help us express this common angst. Lloyd explains Munch’s contemporary relevance, “That may sound very negative, but that is the modern state. This is what distinguishes modern man from post-Renaissance history up until that moment: this feeling that we have lost all the anchors that bind us to the world.”[v] Where do we rediscover the lost anchors that reconnect us to our world? We may not audibly scream or outwardly gesture panic like the figure in Munch’s art, but we may likely feel that same frustrating hopelessness.
We who live in an era of post-postmodernity are facing an intensely fluid world. We don't know who we are and how to proceed forward. We now live in the world that Nietzsche's madman predicted,
"Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him ---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing?[vi]
In the West we jettisoned the foundations of our Judeo-Christian roots to embrace our own rationality and idealism. The Industrial Revolution gave us more advantage over space and time so that we can more accurately predict arrival times and costs relating to global travel. Our bodies can go more places faster, but our souls are lost in a liminality between unknown realms. We believed that our modern quest for certainty was going to produce a new and better world without dependence on any deities. As almost every sphere of knowledge increased, we imagined that we could predict, control, and guide our lives according to our liking.
We hoped that we could make a better planet through our technology and international alliances, however, World War II and the demise of Western colonialism woke us up to the failures and frailty of human progress. Some of us still doggedly believe that we're still moving forward. While we certainly have progressed in technology, our ability to resolve our ongoing crises is surely in question. Eventually, many of us wearied of modernity’s naive realism, so we yielded our facts and boundaries to a gross subjectivism and radical individualism. At a young age many of us heard from our parents and teachers, "You can be whatever you want to be!" When we grew up, we were punched on the jaw by the hard hook of reality that we never saw coming. As educated people of the West who have experienced more creature comforts than any civilization which ever lived before us, we are now staggering back and forth between two naive paradigms of thinking— modernity’s naive realism and post-modernity’s naive idealism. The Book of Genesis and the Bible as a whole provide a more realistic worldview and a relational realism that help us rediscover who we were meant to be in our relationships with God, other people, and the creation. The Bible’s message is simultaneously realistic and inspirational, hopeful and frightening, guilt-inducing and spiritually cathartic. It challenges our cognitive assumptions, our emotions, our established habits, and whatever behavioral norms we may have invented. The Bible still speaks to humanity no matter what stage or condition may characterize us.
ENDNOTES
[i] Munch, Edvard, J Gill Holland ed., The Private Journals of Edvard Munch: We Are Flames Which Pour Out of the Earth (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), section 34, Kindle Loc. 1147.
[ii] Munch, Edvard, Kindle Loc. 1157.
[iii] Munch, Edvard, "Introduction," Kindle Loc. 88.
[iv] Alistair Sooke, “What is the Meaning of The Scream?” From BBC Culture, March 3, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160303-what-is-the-meaning-of-the-scream.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trsl Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 181.