Betwixt and Between
Think of this election as the extension of a collective rite of passage into which we were plunged with the pandemic.
A rite of passage is a three-part experience that grows us from one stage of human development to another. Being separated, by life event or ritual, from the world we knew; thrown into a difficult, even traumatizing transition; reincorporated back into community with new perspective is exactly what we’re facing together.
Rites of passage only “work” when we allow the middle transition part to take us liminal—the space between no longer and not yet, the willingness to embrace the disorientation we feel on the threshold between worlds and beliefs. We’re there right now. The world we knew before the pandemic, social unrest, divisive elections, is gone. A new world is coming, and that scares us. But liminality only “works,” whether from cancer, divorce, pandemic, elections, when we let loss and ambiguity help us release hard judgments, see ourselves and others again behind the positions we hold for power and control.
On the eve of the liminality of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln stunned the nation by beating three bitter rivals on his way to winning the presidency. What he did next was even more stunning. He appointed all three of those rivals to his cabinet, seeing them as strong, essential men that the country needed to survive the coming war. His ability to stand on the threshold, see past his truth to his rivals’ truth, his rivals’ ability to accept his hand, built stronger leadership and eventually fast friendship between the four men. In his second inaugural address, he pointed that liminal ability South, “With malice toward none and charity for all…let us bind up the nation’s wounds…achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace…”
The bitterness over this election shows we haven’t yet gone liminal.
Life itself is the liminal transition between birth and death, but the personal and collective transitions life continually presents mark our passage along the way. We imagine we get wiser as we get older. Some of us just get older.
The conscious betweenness of liminality is the difference.
