Liminal Living

I woke up in the night, my pillow wet with tears shed in my dream. And in that liminal moment between sleep and waking, I felt the shift of time between the unseen river that runs through my unconscious and the exposed everyday self seen and known by others. Liminal moments, the small slice of time between shifts in time is a holy sacred often unacknowledged sacrament. When one something stops and another something begins... the moment between a baby’s birth and its first crying breath, dreaming to waking, life to death, the moment your youngest child leaves home, the sliver of time between the last sight of the setting sun and dusk, the shift in the liturgical seasons, the moment you step outside your front door after a hard winter and smell the damp warm breath of spring... is a call to lay down your cares for a moment and be present to the Holy One who lives there.
Earth’s crammed with heaven
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,-
The rest sit around and pick blackberries.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Keep me from just picking blackberries today, Lord. Help me see the burning bushes, feel when your presence sets my soul afire, know your sustaining loving care as I live the liminal moments of this day. Amen.

Thanks to Lake Shore Baptist Church and their online newsletter that never fails to provide light for the journey... and to Jim Nogalski, a member of Lake Shore, whose program of original music entitled Liminal Light set me to thinking