28 Timothy Carson On Becoming What We Can’t Yet Imagine (An Hermeneutic of Liminality)

My guest is Timothy Carson, curator of the Liminality Project. After retiring from full time pastoral ministry, Tim began to teach and write about liminality. He is the author of Liminal Reality and Transformational Power and editor of the anthology Neither Here nor There: The Many Voices of Liminality. And he’s working on a new collaborative book on practical theology and the development of a Biblical Hermeneutic of Liminality.Tim also ministers as a field guide, helping others transition through life's passages. As an Emotional Freedom Techniques Practitioner, he works with individuals who have experienced past trauma.In this episode, Tim casts a vision toward a Biblical hermeneutic of liminality and what insight it might provide for us as we walk through this time of social liminality.Quotes from this episode: "If anything, socially isolating in our homes should drive us to a new sense of what it means to stand in a solitary way before God. "“It’s a colossal mistake in this social liminality of this pandemic to say things like, “When we get back to the way it was before.” We don’t want to go back. We want to pass through the wilderness and go to a promised land. We want to move toward a new reality and take the insights and ways we’ve been reshaped into building a new reality, a new world, a new heaven and a new earth."Every time we attach to a false object and raise it to the level of the Ultimate, which is a form of idolatry, there’s a kind of tear in the soul because we’re attaching to something that can’t sustain us. It’s something false, something unreal, and yet we’re putting all our hope in it. And there’s a kind of death that takes place when we do that.""Part of the danger of wilderness in liminal space is what happens to our attachments. If we’ve lost anchors and structure, there’s the possibility that in liminal space, we attach incorrectly to the many false gods that we will worship. We will attach to the many illusions that will fall away."What is the gift of what we may become because of the liminal space? We look for the ways we might be transformed because of it. It would be a grand thing if people of faith would stop asking “When we can get back to church?” Which to me sounds like wanting to clamor back to Egypt. Wanting to clamor back to structure? What if God doesn’t want us to go back to structure? What if God doesn’t want us to go back to the way we were before? What might we become of us because of this?