In between.

Like the last few moments of a sunset, September calls us to an in-between space.  The leaves begin to turn and the morning chill enters the air.  We're on the threshold of Fall, clutching a pumpkin spice latte while still wearing our flip flops, mowing the lawn in shorts while raking the first leaves.  We're in a liminal space.  And in this sacred September, I've become even more acutely aware of that space between.

Maybe you're smarter than me, but I sure had no idea what liminal space meant until reading a beautiful homily for the Epiphany last year written by Deacon James Knipper:  

"The word liminal comes from the Latin word which means threshold – the space between and betwixt. It is the time that “life as usual” doesn’t necessarily feel right any longer – that change is needed – but you are not sure what to replace it with. It is when you are between what was once your comfort zone and that sense of newness in your life. It is a time when we need to pause…to resist the temptation to simply push through or retreat…but to be still and to listen."

His description of that place of threshold sparked a recognition in me, and has kept me open to the possibility of these spaces in my own life. There's a particular beauty of the times in-between, the magic of uncertainty, the embrace of the feeling of being, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin would say, "in suspense and incomplete".  Those last few weeks and days before a new baby is born, as you're waiting to see who this little person is who will change your family forever.  The week before your high school graduation.  The search for a new job.  The wait for the test results. The last sunset of a beautiful vacation.  The first few weeks as husband and wife.  The night before the moving van comes. Each of these times calls to mind an expectancy and a sense of the unknown, and a "thin place" where God's presence can be felt if we only put aside the tendency to rush or push and be still and listen.

11 years ago this fall, I found out I was expecting Philip.  "What would being a mother be like?" I wondered for nine whole months.  After he was born, the question was answered in the way my life expanded and changed in ways I could have never anticipated, and time became a snowball rolling down the hill until I was simply carried away by the momentum of it all.  Daniel arrived less than 13 months later, a huge (both literally and figuratively) surprise that not only changed our family, but the trajectory of my entire life.  Although I went back to my career of teaching high school science after Phil was born, the arrival of Daniel brought with it the need to slow down and take on a new role as full-time homemaker.  I was reluctant to leave the identity of my career and considered the stay at home temporary until my return to the classroom, and I found myself there in a liminal space, uncertain in my new role while still knowing the change was necessary.  Over the past 10 years of being carried along by the snowball, I've gone from the familiar to the unknown all the way until the unknown transformed into its own brand of familiar.   Motherhood has gone from feeling as constrictive as a pair of low rise pre-pregnancy jeans to more like the comfort of some high-waisted maternity leggings.  It wasn't so much a shedding of my previous identity, but an incorporating of everything I had been as a teacher and daughter and wife and sister and friend  into the broadened expanse of this vocation.   

Beyond my worryings of if there would be enough love for them all, these four tiny people expanded my heart a million times over.  

Despite my concerns about my lack of training in this job, all of the things I had done seemingly prepared me for this moment.  

Who knew the high school drama club could come in handy with the endless pretend in those little years, where I was required to play everything from factory foreman to museum curator in elaborate little boy make-believes?  My summers as a camp director at the YMCA filled my playbook with all sorts of entertainment and first-aid knowledge, and my career as a teacher sure helped me out when my dining room table became an impromptu classroom for the nature wonderings of littles.   Even my sorority girl days came in handy, spending all that time in frat houses has been good preparation for what life with a husband and four boys was headed towards, and if my kids' bathroom still looks better than the bathroom at Harry's Chocolate Shop, I'm not doing so bad, right?

Deeper than that, though, upon entry into this space I was invited by my children onto a spiritual journey, one that was less the mountaintop moment I had imagined motherhood would be and more journey to the valley- humbling and self-emptying.  Despite my initial efforts to not "lose myself" in motherhood, to resist the messy discomfort of growth and stay my in control Jen-centered self, these kids eventually just broke me down and broke me open.  It might have been the day ants crawled out of my purse at church.  Motherhood allowed me to embrace my need for grace in a way I could have never done under my own power.  You see, before I had kids I thought I COULD and SHOULD do everything under my own power.  Don't get me wrong, I loved Jesus and I adored God and I prayed for the Holy Spirit to guide me with this person and that problem and the other thing, but outside of Mass and prayer group and devotion time, I sure lived the rest of my hours like it all depended on me.  In my mind the success or failure of every little thing was all up to my efforts- how hard I worked, the choices I made, the way I handled things, how hard I prayed.  Get it right, Jen, you only have one chance.  Only after realizing that there was no way that I could ever keep these four kids alive and grow them into competent adults on my own (I think the third child shattered that illusion), I went before Jesus, exhausted and covered in boogers and spit-up, mildly grumpy with my husband and sleep deprived to boot, with a layer of caffeine, concealer and smudgy-mascara over it all.  In this state I offered this whole hot mess up to the One who made her.

He was waiting.  He has, since then, consistently seemed more than happy to help.  It is a daily offering, a laying at His feet of all of the things I want to cling to tightly and control, the simple knowing that all I need to do is keep my eyes and heart open and follow and trust that has made all the difference.  Those things Paul said in the bible have become less flowery words to pin on Pinterest and more like a lifeline, a song, a love letter.  "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me."  He is greatest when I am weak?  It's not all about me?  Who knew.  I didn't.  I'm slowly learning.

Now I stand in the space where the most physically rigorous of these years of raising littles have all but closed behind me.  Wiping endless noses and tears and folding minuscule laundry and stumbling out of bed to put pacifiers back in babies' mouths have been replaced by the emotional rigor of shepherding four little souls out into the great big world and the new opportunities for humility that come along with that.  I'm in the space between the toddler and the teen years, at the threshold of the next part of my journey.  Noah starts kindergarten next August when Daniel turns 10- which will round out my decade of being a stay-at-home mom and open me up for the next adventure.  Now, I will always be their mom, and my heart and mind will still be captured by the daily tasks of raising these kids.  But, let's face it, without a baby on my hip or a tiny friend to buckle into a car seat on every errand, my hands will be a little more. . .free.

So, here in the liminal space of this Indiana September, my last as a stay-at-home mom to a preschooler, it seems to me that I need to live it as tenderly as I can.  Could it be over yet?  Every day with Noah seems now a little less like a pill to swallow as it did to me when motherhood was new and a little more like dark chocolate wrapped in shiny paper on my pillow. . .just sweet enough to be savored and a little guiltily a that. . .do I even deserve this sweet boy? Of course not.  And what will the next phase bring, when Noah gets on the bus next year and I cross the threshold with 8 hours to fill?

To answer I need only to look back at another liminal space in my life, the time right before I started my student teaching and prepared to graduate from Purdue.  This September, 16 years ago, I was making $200 a week developing film in the one hour photo lab of Kroger, living with my parents, eating Taco Bell daily and more or less waiting for my life to begin.  Little did I know that in a few weeks I would meet my supervising teacher, who would become a lifelong mentor and friend, that the school I was getting ready to student teach at would be the one where I would build my career, that the brand new RENEW group I had signed up for at church would launch a new phase in my faith journey, that in just a few months I would be at a Purdue football game and meet a handsome guy with sideburns and glasses and a big smile, and he would be my soulmate and we would get married and have four children together?!?!?  WHO COULD HAVE GUESSED I was going to meet the guy who would be carrying me over the threshold??!!!

 I certainly couldn't, leaning on the counter of the Kroger photo lab that September, bored out of my mind as the clocked ticked by.  God knew to be sure, but I was clueless.  

And looking back at how it all played out, I am more than sure He knows now.  What will be next for me, when this decade of quiet adventure is over?  What will I leave behind and what will I gain and how will he use me and how will it all go down?  I'm clueless but the faith side of that coin is living with the confidence that He knows.  He was here then, he's here now, he'll be here tomorrow.   Whatever I've been up to these past 10 years is surely the perfect preparation for the next phase of my life, God doesn't do it any other way.  I couldn't have planned the last few decades myself. . .the way he wove all that together?  Well played, Lord.  You're the champ.

This week, the memory of September 2001 lingers in my mind for other reasons as well, as it does in our collective memory as a nation.  Yesterday as we remembered the lives lost, our thoughts wandered to the fact that it can all change so quickly- on a beautiful September day or any day at that.  Thinking of those who lost their beloveds on September 11 calls us to live this life tenderly and gently when we can no matter what phase of life we are in.  What's next for us, we don't know.  What do we do, those of us living in the space between?  Where are we being called?  What's He preparing you for right now?  What does He have planned for me?  I'm thinking all we can do is pray to live this moment, the only one we are guaranteed, well.  To take the time to listen.  To stand on the threshold and look out to the journey ahead, praying He'll take us where we need to be.

"Lord, take me where You want me to go;

let me meet who You want me to meet;
tell me what You want me to say;
AND. . . keep me out Your way." 
x

Father Mychal Judge
NYC Fire Department Chaplain 
May 11, 1933-  September 11, 2001