Liminal...

To be marginal in one's society is not, emphatically not, to withdraw as some would charge. It is to be motivated and led by values and commitments different from and often contrary to the mainstream... New vision is always what any society most needs, and the edges of society have always been the most likely place for it to emerge. To generate something new, one must be listening to voices other than the loud voices of mass society.

If we have read our Bibles, we will know to look and listen for the new word God wants to speak to us on the edges of things rather than at the center of wealth and power. To be on the margins, therefore, is to put ourselves in a position to watch, to listen, and to become engaged in a new way... Part of being on the margins is new association with the people who have been made marginal. The gospel tells us that it is among "the least of these" where we find Jesus.

Jim Wallis, The Call to Conversion, with thanks to Inward/Outward

I think this sense of living "on the margins", this sense that God's new word will be found out on the edges of things, is deeply embedded in the core of what it means to be a Franciscan. St. Francis himself lived all his life on the margins; his influence may have extended even in his own time to the centre of the Church's political existence, but his life was lived far away, in the poor streets and villages around Assisi, on the empty slopes of La Verna.

My own Franciscan journey so far has been much more a process of discovering reasons and precedents for the things I have all my life sensed and longed for, rather than a matter of learning texts or rules. I have since I was very young had an instinctive nervousness of success, of being at the centre, where it was all happening. Oh, like most kids, I thought I wanted fame and recognition; but any time I have looked like getting close, something far deeper in me has recoiled. I used not to understand it, but as I have grown older I have come to see this not as a negative shying away from the limelight, but as a positive longing for hiddenness, a positive sense that I was called to the margins, that I was only whole and in God's purpose out of the edge of things.

I even love liminal places for themselves: shorelines, the place where the sky meets the plain, horizons of every kind. The very word, borderline, resonates with something at the deepest level of what I am.

If I could make any kind of appeal or message out of this, it would simply be to look into yourself for the things that call to you, that cry out in your heart in the night: the odd reactions you have to things, the strange and often counter-cultural preferences that would shape your life if only you'd let them; and look for God's call in those things. For myself, this has been a truer discernment than any of the more conventional varieties, which all too often have lead me down blind alleys, and into dead ends!