الحمد لل

"Alhamdulillah!"

LIMINALITY: from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold."  LIMINALITY: from Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv.  LIMINALITY: today's word on the way home. 

My good friend David Wellman reminds me that liminality refers to an experience of ambiguity or disorientation in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status, but have not yet completed the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete.  Liminality has to do, then, with boundary-crossings, transgression, life in the borderlands.  And I like to think that liminality is a major dimension of the spiritual journey/discipline of sacrifice, death and resurrection.  

In many ways, the whole sabbatical experience is one of profound liminality.  I've chosen to leave behind, for seven weeks, a notion of myself, and a notion of my work, even a notion of my vocation in the world.  This wasn't out of any angst or serious doubt; but it was a choice to step into the borderlands, to lose myself in a new rhythm and reality.  For a little while.  It's a bit like Jesus in the wilderness for forty days, looking beasts in the eye, and wrestling with temptations, and rejoicing in the full moon and sweet cadence of hours and days.  It's also like those disciples on the wild and stormy sea, crossing from one side to another, evolving a sense of ministry and inclusion.  Liminality implies turbulence, and turbulence sometimes turns towards serenity.  Sometimes.

I believe I've experienced all these things, all these emotions, all these dimensions--over the past seven weeks.  Hiking the great rocks of Meteora in central Greece.  Sitting in the dark cave of John's apocalypse on the island of Patmos.  Praying with Muslim brothers in Turkey and Nazareth.  Walking the ancient stones of Ephesus.  So many boundaries to explore, ideas to consider, prayers to embrace.  And a fair share of liminality.  Indeed.

Last night, I prayed with my hosts, Ghassan and Abed Alsalaam Manasra, and their closest Sufi disciples in Nazareth.  We prayed.  We discussed the scriptures.  And my six friends carefully and generously shared with me their faith, their tradition.  Quite innocently (I thought) I told them how moved I was, in the Manasra home, to hear الحمد لل (alhamdulillah) so often and so joyously spoken.  By all generations.  In all kinds of circumstances.  I know that it means "Thanks and praise to God!"--and I know that the Prophet Mohammed instructed Muslims to keep it close to the heart and speak it often and generously.  But I truly have been moved by the spirit in which it's used in the Manasra home: it's something like sheer joy, and the deepest gratitude.

Thursday Night Gathering

Ghassan brightened immediately.  And my question prompted one of the most profound teachings I've heard in a long time.  I'm sure I can't do it justice here.  But he told me that, three months back, when his mother died after a difficult and trying illness, 'alhamdulillah' were the first words on his father's lips.  And his father was devastated.  Still is.  But his conviction--that God is great and merciful, that everything that comes from God indeed returns to God--was unshaken.  Even in his grief, especially in his grief.  "We are taught," said Ghassan, "to say 'alhamdulillah' in moments of joy and great gratitude.  But we are taught that it's even more important, even more holy to say 'alhamdulillah' in the moment of our annihilation."  It took me a moment to register the word: annihilation.  It's such a provocative word, such a potent one.   

Ghassan must have noticed my eyes.  Because he repeated himself:  "We are taught that it's even more important, even more holy to say 'alhamdulillah' in the moment of our annihilation."  When we return to nothingness, to our original form, to God's consciousness, he went on to say, that is when we praise God most wonderfully and know God most clearly.  All that comes from God returns to God.  Alhamdulillah.  

I have so much reflection yet to do.  It seems to me, it feels to me that this is where Ghassan's fearlessness is born.  In faith.  In gratitude.  In the profound awareness of God, in his being, in his non-being, in his body and soul, in his annihilation.  I guess my old friend Paul of Tarsus might add: "And nothing in all creation can separate us from the Love of God."  

Out here in the wilderness of liminality, words make a difference.  One does not live by bread alone.  So I keep this one close, on a long, long, long flight home.  Alhamdulillah!  

On the Manasra Refrigerator