Easter
Liminal Space The tomb as liminal space: Some contemporary versions
By RICHARD ROHR
You are not here to verify, instruct yourself, inform
curiosity, or carry report. You are here to kneel. -- T.S. Eliot,
Little Gidding
Resurrection takes care of itself. Its getting people into
tombs thats hard. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, most contemporary
people, both liberals and conservatives, abhor boundaries.
I do too. They are an immediate assault on my intelligence, my
freedom to choose and make mistakes. Boundaries are an insult to this self that
we have all constructed. We, like Adam and Eve, have a certain compelling
urgency to eat of the apple that we should not eat. I believe this
apple eating is a necessary stage in the development of
consciousness (from ages 2 to 15), but when the search for diversion and
individual expression becomes a consistent avoiding of the tomb, I am convinced
that the self becomes scattered, ungrounded, addictive, and finally unfree.
Classic initiation rites say that the candidate must be led into
some sort of boundaried tomb. Apparently we dont really know
what life is until we know what death is. You cant experience rebirth
until you have somehow died. We Americans think we are an exception to this
pattern, and we create a totally new and unfounded spirituality of constant and
false resurrections. Much of our problem today is that we lack authoritative
guides through the mysteries and, even worse, we no longer even believe that
there is a perennial pattern through which we can be guided.
That amounts to a loss of faith in the central, essential mystery
of Christian faith: the paschal mystery. It was the core of all four gospels
and the heart of Pauls preaching, and yet we now consider it
questionable. The great traditions clearly teach that we cant have a life
of ascent unless it is balanced and taught by descent. We cant have the
joy and freedom of resurrection without some learned limitations, some
necessary failures and some tombs that we must pass through. This takes natural
and daily forms. It is not necessarily dramatic at all.
I grew up, for example, with a whole set of limits and boundaries
to my little imperial ego, in my natural family in conservative Kansas, in my
early church training, and in formation for priesthood and religious life. The
older I got, more and more of it appeared arbitrary, cultural, accidental and,
in some cases, even wrong. The Franciscans educated me in the good humanistic,
liberal traditions of the Christian West. I soon knew how to discern, and I
could rightly eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil
without danger or even guilt.
Good tomb, good resurrection
I knew how to obey laws when helpful, necessary or commanded
by God. As Paul would say, the law had served its function well as a
babysitter or guardian (Galatians 3:24), but now that the
time has come, we are no longer under that guardian. It was one of the
first tombs that I resurrected from. It was a good tomb and a good
resurrection.
The call to freedom and resurrection in the second half of life is
the scary one, both for ourselves and for our capacity to guide the next
generation. We dont know how to lead people until we have lived the
perennial pattern ourselves -- and come out the other side -- more dead and
more alive at the same time.
Elders were normally considered people in the second half of life,
or, even better, the last third. You can only lead people if you yourself have
been there. Those who have emerged from the tomb know something that you
cant know in any other way, something absolutely essential. And you only
know it by hindsight. The risen Christ, as the gospels go to great lengths to
illustrate, is a different Christ and yet in continuity with Jesus
according to the flesh. Clear continuity and yet absolute
disjunction: This is the paradox of the paschal mystery. Death and life seem to
be correlatives at the deepest level.
This dilemma affects almost every church issue on the practical
and pastoral level today. Your perspective depends on what generation of
Catholics you grew up in. We pre-baby boomers usually got loads of boundaries
and are either still reacting against them or totally trapped inside them. The
baby boomers, therefore, were given little positive mentoring in regard to
containment or identity, and totally swung the pendulum in the opposite
direction.
Start with boundaries
Now Generation X and their younger brothers and sisters are
totally unguided, and often too self-absorbed to even know it. And both of the
generations ahead of them are in a poor position to exercise healthy and clear
guidance. The liberals abdicate authority because power is somehow inherently
bad, and then the conservatives overdo it to compensate for the culture and
church that seems out of control.
The result is that few know how to creatively initiate and mentor
the next generation of believers, much less live the paschal mystery
themselves. There is an essential sequencing between authority and freedom,
between boundaries and knowing how and when to move beyond boundaries, between
tombs and resurrections.
Walter Brueggemann, in one of his brilliant scriptural analyses,
says that he believes the sequence of the Biblical revelation reveals the
healthy development of human consciousness: Torah, Prophets, Wisdom -- in that
order. First law, then critique, then synthesis. Paul says the same thing in
his tortured cry to the Romans and Galatians. You cannot begin with critique,
you cannot start with anti-structure, you cannot let go of boundaries until you
have some boundaries that you are happily ensconced inside of. Then you can
react, refine and renew. It does not work the other way around.
The healthiest people I meet all over the world are people who
began with a strong sense of tradition, containment and identity. It is the
healthy path. Ask Maria Montessori, ask therapists, teachers, and vocational
counselors, ask anyone who works with people that they can rely upon.
You need to know the rules before you can break the rules.
Or as the Dalai Lama put it, Learn the law very well so you
will know how to disobey it properly. Pure genius, in my opinion, but a
genius that normally only comes to you by the second half of life. This is much
of the practical problem, because we in the second half of life have to form
those in the first. By then, the structures have a secondary value for us
personally.
Do you see the problem? I dont know the way out of it
myself, except the regaining of lived inner authority by the elders themselves.
Then you know how to build the bridge between law and freedom.
So what does this have to do with Lent and its Easter conclusion?
I think the Easter joy that many Christians know they are supposed
to sing about in this season is often artificial, or worse, not even expected.
Unless Lent -- and our early life -- has been a mature spiritual container,
unless someone has been stewarding the boundaries, there is no
tomb to break out of, there is little new to break into beyond some
verbal acclamations about Christ is risen, he is truly risen! But
usually we are not risen with him.
By and large, we no longer understand ritual process, the cauldron
of suffering, and how the boundaries have to be kept hot for the
stew to cook. I predict that so-called conservative people and traditional
groups are going to finally win the tide of history -- if they stay on the full
path. For some reason, they tend to know how to keep the stew hot. They tend to
create structures that last and that draw forth enduring commitment. They
steward boundaries fairly well. They call forth a kind of respect, especially
from the young and from the earnest. We others largely talk to ourselves and to
people who already think like us. We beat dead horses to useless death.
Groups that keep clear expectations, customs and practices that
they all observe are the ones that gather and form the next generation -- in
every generation. On the other hand, groups that say in effect, Its
all up to you, You figure it out, Just be true to
yourself are perceived as not taking themselves seriously, or not having
anything that demands inherent respect. They basically self-destruct.
There is nothing to cooperate with and participate in. We have
wrongly told young people they could play the prophet and pretend to wisdom
before they had paid any dues to anybody, any other, any past or any future
except their own. Surely a recipe for narcissism and for social disaster. Not a
hot stew that anybody would want to eat.
On a most practical level, I am saying that things like being on
time, being there with the group when convenient and inconvenient, bowing
and genuflecting, doing the disciplines whatever they might be, showing
respect and reverence for the ritual and the place, an earnest spirit that goes
the extra mile. These are not small and arbitrary things, but the way that you
keep the boundaries of sacred space -- and keep them hot for transformation.
This is not a theological thing as much as it is a psychological and spiritual
thing that the ancients profoundly understood and we no longer do.
No longer bothering to bow
I know Catholics who will happily take off their shoes, do a full
body bow when entering the Zendo, sit in a perfectly erect prayer posture for
hours and accept correction for slouching. Yet they will no longer bother to
bow when they enter their own Catholic church -- and who will not accept
challenge on it either. Such Buddhism will inspire a kind of transformation and
a next generation of dedicated people, while such Catholicism is an
embarrassment both to the party involved and to any fervent observer. They know
we are not serious about ourselves, and will rightly not take us seriously
either.
Healthy transformative religion is always earnest, willing and
ready to be awestruck.
We are all waiting for a new Easter in Western Christianity, and I
have no doubt that we will have it. But we must have it together or we will not
have it at all. Maybe this confusing time is a descent into a common tomb. We
cannot do this alone by private and cosmetic piety. We need to do something
good together, something we are proud of together, something that we can
happily invite others into, something that we can hand on to the next
generation as a true alternative.
We need to die together, and I think we are. My generation has had
its time on the stage. Whatever time we have left must be for those who are
entering into a much more complex period of history. We do not need to hand on
our hang-ups to them, but we do need to hand on our wisdom. That is what it
means to be an elder and a generative adult.
Our transformed pain can now become a most excellent runway toward
the Real Life, and for those coming after us.
Franciscan Fr. Richard Rohr is a popular retreat master,
speaker, writer and the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in
Albuquerque, N.M. This is the seventh and last in a series.
National Catholic Reporter, March 15,
2002
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