All that Liminal Space stuff… backdoors into back rooms with shady black shadows, Bacharach and Back Gammon. And that’s before you meet the stranger stuff. What goes on back there? And if there is no one else mooching about, how would one even know if there were goings on in the first place? I suppose that’s the modern meta appeal, a universal canvas for us to internally apply whatever on top of, unless you grew up playing video games in which case you will have already internally noted that liminal spaces are just the corridors down which the game loads its next section; interruptive and restrictive boxes to pass through en route elsewhere, anywhere. A Boss fight, perhaps. Exciting.
So that’s that cleared up for the record and current times. But you cannot escape them, those liminal quadrants, and sometimes you make them yourself. I have.
Welcome to Orthodox Crossing. Together, alone, and something which has come with a most unexpected appeal and learning; is anyone else down here with me, and does it even matter? As I say, those liminal spaces are canvases and in the end I just love a blank page to write something on. Anything.
Allow me to begin at the start and introduce Fr Panteleimon, my most generally immediate priest and the one who did say, John, why don’t you do some writing for our church?
‘I could do that,’ I said in return. ‘What though?’
‘What indeed, John? Why don’t you have a go and find out?’
And so here we are! Or here I am, and you must be too if you are intercepting this, but I don’t really know beyond the fact that it exists down the backrooms of Shrewsbury Orthodox website.
Alone together, perhaps.
Hello? Anyone?
No, I think it is just me…
Now, where were we?
Oh yes, by the good blessing of my priest I was set loose to build my own little bloggers backroom until it burrowed into corridors and I would begin to get an understanding of just what it is that I have getting up to back here. Fr didn’t give me a specific search item or term, just an off-you-go and an assured sense that if I was to encounter anything meaningful then I would know it sooner or later.
Well I think it just happened. I have realised where I am back here. I think I knew it to begin with, but then I must have forgotten that I was doing this for my own ends because I started talking like it wasn’t just me and I have just recently remembered again that it is. I know I came through the back entrance on my own, my own Orthodox Crossing entrance no less, then I just kept coming back to fill in and speak easy like I do whenever I am hanging out alone. Liminal Happy Hour.
But I have found or else remembered it, just like Fr thought, or close enough. A piece or peace of purpose, although which of those I have not yet deduced. They may come as a pair, they may be exclusive to one another, or they may only be signposts to some other space, one you can only reach by using a lift, and which until some future date I am then going to ignore because I do not get in lifts. When the time comes I will search for the adjacent stairway and use that instead. If this is my backroom then there’s going to be stairs where appropriate, I can tell you that, even though you are unlikely to be here, and I will not forget that I am all by my own again. Fool me once…
So, purpose. That’s why I am here, or that’s what I have found, and which is to say that despite my interests and efforts, I am not really a scholarly man about church; not a troglodyte in the brain cave, but not always interested, or else of the same interests. Different things stand out at different times to different people in their walk with the church, and I have just this year, after approaching twenty years of being a gardener, I have started to really appreciate roses. This is my current big thing between me and how nature expresses itself through God before and my experience therein.
Now don’t take me wrong, I have tended well over my clients roses for years. Dead heading, pruning, carefully weeding and tending soil about them while their thorns slice through my skin; I have left nothing on the table and despite one pernicious text message to Fr once where I said that I would never work with roses again, I have gotten on with it. But I never saw the beauty of them until recently, whence it appeared through beams of sunlight that some lofty key had unlocked the Level Up feature of my heart. I was doing the June dead heading of roses on Long Mountain recently and it was timely and lovely. Still licking the blood away afterwards like normal but that’s now fine too. They have recently begun populating my garden as well which is a turn of events that only God could fathom. Certainly Anna was surprised, and its not really a conversation setter after Divine Liturgy either. Different people for different interests, and I know my lane.
But back here, where its just me, possibly we, and whatever else is making those noises, it feels apropos of something that I am comfortable talking around. And that has begun to make me happy. We don’t all have to try and do the deep and meaningful stuff at church, but you might have to burrow your own corner to find a way to let it out if not.
Welcome to Orthodox Crossing. Now to be honest I have left it a bit long with all the preamble to get into it about roses, getting to know roses, being orthodox about roses… that would need a whole preamble of its own. Next time perhaps, if you ask nicely, and do actually exist here in the first place. For now I plan to luxuriate, which might sound like a swine in swill, and if you have been here before then this might be nothing new to you, but I just found out again.
So what now?
Just keep going, right, Fr?
God bless you out there,
JW Bowe