Is My Faith on the Edge?

Lorenzo Monaco, Man of Sorrows (1415), Wikimedia Commons

The word “liminal” comes from the Latin word for “threshold”. Liminality denotes a time of seeming ambiguity during a period of transition from one situation to another. The word has gained a degree of importance in a number of disciplines.

In anthropology, the French folklorist Arnold van Gennep used the term to speak of a time slice during particular cultural rituals when one’s identity, communal belonging or direction and purpose in life become somewhat suspended, even though the purpose of the ritual is to facilitate a radical transformation from one state to another.

This ambiguity is important to consider, since it is reflected quite powerfully in various works of Christian art. One of the most striking is The Man of Sorrows by Lorenzo Monaco. The image is one of the post-crucified Christ. His hands (though not depicted in the rendition above) and side evince the holes of the nails and lance. The skin is the kind of green you would sooner see on a zombie than the Son of God. His head is sagging and there is even the slightest evidence of a broken neck.

The Jesus depicted in this image is quite dead. The man of sorrows depicted here is “sorrowful even unto death” (Matt 26:38).

In gazing at the dead Christ, however, one small detail may escape the viewer. Christ is also standing.

This means that the folding of Christ’s arms over his body is not the result of a death pose. Christ is keeping his arms folded, using his own locomotive power. The Christ depicted in this image then, is not one of conclusive, all-encompassing death, but one that is at the liminal stage as Christ processes from death to life. This is why Monaco’s image of the Man of Sorrows is sometimes referred to as The Resurrection.

Christians can gain much from a reflection on Christ’s liminality. This is especially so for those Christians who, now long after the celebration of Eastertide, feel anything but a sharing in Christ’s resurrection. When the sharing of the resurrection seems so far away, there may be the temptation for me to conclude that either the resurrection will never be a personal reality, or that God is resurrecting me only to a degree, only to prepare me for the next round of personal crucifixion.

Whilst much of the Christian’s life may feel like a perpetual state of liminality, Monaco’s painting reminds us powerfully of Paul’s assurance to the Christians of Rome. The experience of ambiguity is not permanent. It is but a phase and a prelude to a process of renewing all aspects of our life, even our bodily and material existence (Rom 8:11). The cry for help to the Lord by Isaiah “restore me to health and make me live”, is not a futile request that disappears in to a spiritual echo-chamber.

The resurrection assures us that below our immediate experience of continued anguish or ambiguity, is a wave of life that will one day flood one’s valley of the shadow of death. This new life will restore all aspects of an old life that for now seems at best dormant.

In the meantime, Christians live in this liminality, waiting for the fulfilment of God’s promise, and trusting that our ability to endure this ambiguity and not giving into despair is in and of itself the beginning of God’s intervention.

The tension of the Christian life is not just caused by a living at the threshold between heaven and earth. Within earthly existence itself, the Christian will always be standing at a threshold, straddling between the death of the old self, and the new and transformed life in a resurrected and glorified Christ.

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