“Neither Here Nor There” – December 10th, 2023

Rev. Sophia Lyons preaching, with Djalai Babazadeh, Charlyn Bethell and Guy Urban.
It’s hard to embrace the wait and stillness that the Advent Season asks of us. Some of us might even feel panicked at the thought of it. This Sunday let’s consider the spiritual challenges and blessings of this liminal time of year. What might they teach us about ourselves, and our community? 

Reading: “Is My Soul Asleep?” by Antonio Machado:

Is my soul asleep?
Have those beehives that work
in the night stopped? And the water –
Wheel of thought, is it
going around now, cups
empty, carrying only shadows?

No, my soul is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches
far-off things, and listens
at the shores of the great silence.

You may find it surprising to know that, as a child of the 80’s, I loved video games. And my parents forbid video games in the house–despite my incessant whining about wanting an Atari or Playstation. So, I used to secretly ride my little blue Schwinn bicycle to the video store on the corner with my best friend and neighbor Rosie, and we’d play Pac-Man on the store’s arcade machine for hours. Here my poor parents thought that we were out getting fresh air and exercise…

Back in 2001, at my now-husband and I’s first Christmas together, he thought it would be cute to finally buy me that Playstation video game console. And he bought me all my favorite 80’s games to go with it. Sweet right? That poor man had no idea what kind of Pandora’s Box he’d just opened. What he didn’t know about me then, is that I’m like an angry, irrational dog with a bone when it comes to games. I am not proud of this.

It took about two months for Jason to have to stage a five-alarm intervention which began with, “we can’t go on like this.” It was only a few months later that I was asking friends to please take the Playstation–keep it. I had lost control of myself.

As I prepared for this season of Advent in the ways I do: pulling my favorite books about the season off my shelves and reading through them, one of them in particular brought these memories back. It’s called “The Art of Stillness” by Pico Iyer, where he writes: “The idea of [stillness] is as universal as the law of gravity; that’s why wise souls from every tradition have spoken of it.” And he quotes the 17^th century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, “All the unhappiness of men arises from one simple fact: that they cannot sit quietly in their chamber.’…or” Iyer goes on to note, “as they sometimes say around Kyoto, ‘Don’t just do something. Sit there.”

And this passage suddenly blast me back to my season of maniacal video game playing, and, specifically, the game that was the catalyst for Jason’s we can’t go on like this. It wasn’t from the stack of my tried and true 80’s favorites but was, rather, a new game–released in the year 2000–that Jason, having gotten a shining recommendation from the video game salesperson, also purchased for me: The Sims. Anyone know that one?

The Sims is a social simulation game. Made up of people, called Sims, living their little Sim lives out in houses and other domestic settings. And the point of this maddening game is for you, the player, to oversee and manage their lives: from housework, to care of children, to being the children, to getting ready for work, to personal care. It’s what gamers call “open-ended gameplay” meaning that players set their own objectives and pace. The goal? You want your Sims to survive and, even better, thrive in some way. Achieve some kind of balance. And there are a myriad ways for this to happen-you decide! And despite YOU being able to control their decisions and manage their little Sim lives, they also have an intelligence of their own. Sometimes they go rogue on you. For example, a Sim who has just enough time to eat and shower before the carpool comes–things you’ve instructed them to do–may decide to just sit down and stare mindlessly at the floor. Or stop dead in their tracks and look out the window. If you don’t notice this happening, because you have other Sims to tend to, chaos can ensue…You have to keep an eye on your Sims.

24/7.

And one of the main contributors to the chaos is the Sims pesky need for rest and stillness and sleep. Sims come with energy bars that either slowly or rapidly get depleted depending on what you ask them to do. If you don’t sit them down or lay them down, they will literally collapse on the floor, or fall and hurt themselves. God forbid you have them in the swimming pool with low energy bars, they might just drown. Your game is over if you kill a Sim.

I’ll simply round this story out by telling you that the 24/7 care of my Sims, and my utter exhaustion and anxiety at keeping an eye on them, was what prompted me to unload the Playstation. Alas, the Sims most valiantly bested me.

Fascinating, this game. Right? Want to hear something even more fascinating? The Sims is one of the bestselling video games of all time. My favorite bit of acclaim for it is this: “Do not miss! Run do not walk. And set aside lots of time.” I delight in turning to pop culture, things that ‘go viral’, crazes and wild fads, to give me cues about who we–the great WE as people–are, and what are deepest longings are. A collective pulse.

We could find several nuggets of wisdom about who we are when we consider The Sims success. For today, in this season of Advent, I want to home in on the stopping and sitting still part. For despite all the instruction and mandates from almighty ME, those Sims would continue to change their minds and exercise their right to stillness and rest.

Now you know that I could preach about rest and Sabbath for the rest of my days and be a happy pastor. This is actually not one of those sermons. Although, friends, I always pray that you and I know rest as a blessed, liberating birthright–one that is worth fighting for, for ourselves and for others.

This morning, I would like us all to consider the quality of stillness that asks us to be ‘neither here nor there’ or what the Advent season calls the sacred and mysterious …wait. The thing those darn Sims kept asking for. And I rarely wanted to give it to them.

Holy wait, ‘neither here nor there’ is what is called Liminality; Limen meaning a threshold–like the one you cross in a doorway. And most often they define life’s rites of passage, sometimes ritualized, but most often not: marriages, births, moving out of your parents’ house as a young person, midlife, retirement, death and loss. These are all life’s liminal times. You are still who you were, but you aren’t. You are embodying a new way of being and aren’t fully that either. You are betwixt and between. Both and neither.

These liminal states of life and being are strange and, yes, disorienting. Time feels suspended. And we must look for those wisdom teachings that tell us about life’s ebbs and flows; and about change; and in-between-ness; and about slowing down and sitting still when it’s time to wait in the neither here nor there.

It is no coincidence, my dear friends, that the two most holy times of a Christian liturgical calendar are Advent, leading up to Christmas, and Lent, leading up to Easter. One makes way for birth, the other death. Both mark a series of weeks where the mandate is what? To slow down. To prepare. To rest. To wait. Lined up, by design, with the ancient pagan calendar days that precede the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. Both of these wheel turnings honor the liminality of seasonal change–from fall to winter and from winter to spring. These don’t just happen. You are in both seasons, you are in neither, you sway back and forth between each. These threshold times, which mirror Nature’s own Mysterious Wonder, instruct us to find meaning in the betwixt and between, the neither here nor there, so that we might shed and grow. Be transformed, as our Sacred Earth and its creatures are.

The great Franciscan priest and teacher Richard Rohr talks about liminality this way: “…Get there often and stay as long as you can by whatever means possible. It’s the realm where God can best get at us because our false certitudes are finally out of the way. This is the sacred space where the old world is able to fall apart, and a bigger world is revealed. If we don’t encounter liminal space in our lives, we start idealizing normalcy. The threshold is God’s waiting room. Here we are taught openness and patience as we come to expect an appointment with the divine Doctor.” Preach Father Rohr!

We are in a liminal time of the year, yes. We are also in a time of liminality, as Matt Meyer talked about last week, as a religion, and as a civilization. This is known as being in a “liminal epoch.” I don’t think any one of us would argue this. The continuity of tradition, how we live together, what we thought we knew, is all being disrupted and yes, even dying. And the uncertainty about the future is so very present to us. Who are we becoming? Where are we going? We don’t know. And this not knowing is, at times, wonderful, for we trust that good and timely transformation is on the horizon–and it is extraordinarily anxiety producing. And we’re for sure NOT GREAT at standing still in the neither here nor there space. Some of us feel so bereft about the way it used to be that we find ourselves having a hard time letting go. Others want to blot out all that has passed and never go back. Some of us feel so impatient and anxious about sitting in the unknown that we want to speed ahead–clock out plans to get out of the waiting place.

We, the collective we, are not so dissimilar from the Israelites lost in the wilderness: alternating between begging Moses to go back to the comforts of Egypt–who cares if we were slaves, we at least had a routine that we were used to–and also demanding to know how quickly they might move forward. Like kids in the car on the road trip–are we there yet? Are we there yet? They had to spend 40 years in that liminal lost place, so that they could move forward. That’s the wisdom teaching in the Hebrew Bible. Oh, and it is still applicable.

The great church consultant, Susan Beaumont, wrote in her book “How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going”: “Church is full of liminal experiences–seasons where something has ended, but a new thing has not yet begun. Seasons where watching and waiting can be difficult, overplanning can be futile, and it simply isn’t helpful to pretend that we understand what happens next. Liminal seasons are challenging, disorienting and unsettling. We strive to move forward with purpose and certainty. Instead we feel as though we are trudging through mud…And yet!!! These seasons are also exciting and innovative. The promise of a new beginning unleashes creative energy, potential and passion.” She says that “all truly great innovations are incubated in liminality.”

I believe this to my core. That all truly great innovations–personal and in community–are incubated in liminality.

But we must be wise. We must still ourselves, despite its spiritual challenges, despite our anxieties, and we must, like the Israelites, or the Sims players, put our faith in the life-giving wait.

In the weeks ahead, you will be inundated with the complete opposite of what this season is really about. And I sense it is why so many find it all so exhausting–because it is unnatural. You will be told to speed up, buy and consume, be everything for everybody, fill your schedules up to the brim because it’s time to celebrate and be merry! Blast the lights, crank the music and do and do and do…But friends, choose carefully what you pay attention to, and what you heed. Don’t let young Sophia get control of the joystick and instruct you to never stop. Resist. Go rogue. Lest you collapse.

Upon careful inspection, this season is also trying to teach you about slow and still and silence and wait and prepare. Nature is giving us this instruction. Our pagan ancestors are whispering this to us. And this church, rooted in ancient Christian wisdom, is also showing us how to cultivate stillness at this blessed neither here nor there place, which we call Advent and Winter Solstice. Take it.

Let’s return to our poet’s threshold prayer. For that is what it is, a threshold prayer. The stunning Antonio Machado:

Is my soul asleep?
Have those beehives that work
in the night stopped? And the water –
Wheel of thought, is it
going around now, cups
empty, carrying only shadows?

No, my soul is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches
far-off things, and listens
at the shores of the great silence.

May we all gather close these days, be those People Who Look East, as we in this church, still ourselves and watch for far-off things; listen and rest at the shores of the great silence, together. Always, always together. That is my prayer for us all this Advent season.

May it be so and amen.

Let’s sing. People Look East…#226