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Phil Allen, Jr. is a Ph.D. candidate at Fuller Theological Seminary where he is a Pannell Center for Black Church Studies Fellow. He is the founder of the non-profit Racial Solidarity Project and author of Open Wounds: A Story of Racial Tragedy, Trauma, and Redemption (Fortress Press 2021) and The Prophetic Lens: The Camera and Black Moral Agency From MLK to Darnella Frazier (Fortress Press 2022).

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I remember well the textbooks in school that informed me and my classmates of American history. If those books and their respective authors and editors were to tell it, American history is one beautiful progression in democracy (with its “flaws” of course) that has been inclusive of all and affords equal opportunity for everyone to the “American Dream.” If those textbooks had their way, Black history was a mere footnote in history with token mentions of figures such as Frederick Douglass, Harriett Tubman, and Martin Luther King, Jr.  

I was fed a steady educational diet of white paternalism, white benevolence, white innovation, and even white godliness despite the reality of Native genocide by European explorers, 246 years of enslaving Africans, Jim Crow segregation laws along with that era’s record of lynching Black bodies—over 6,700 documented and thousands more undocumented, and Japanese incarceration camps. Like many others, I had internalized this messaging that conflicted with what I had been exposed to at home and at church.

In my home I knew about the great Black poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. I was drawn to the brilliance of Benjamin Banneker, architect of the city design of Washington D.C. I was enamored by how activist Ida B. Wells fought courageously against the lynching of Black people. Even later, I was enamored by the stories (slave narratives) of enslaved Black men and women who used their bodies to set an example for protest and resistance that we witness today. Henry “Box” Brown, a formerly enslaved Black man, who literally mailed himself to freedom by hiding inside of a wooden crate destined for the North. Harriett Jacobs hid herself in a small room in a White woman’s home for seven years until her master stopped looking for her and she could eventually escape to freedom.

These are the stories that are also internalized, but at times their legitimacy was questioned because of the hegemonic hold white-controlled narratives held on my educational journey. The same hegemony is evident in my theological journey. I was taught (even in Black churches) to worship an “ideologically photoshopped” European Jesus who was ethnically Jewish from the region of Palestine and who was ontologically Black (poor, a refugee, from the margins of society, and falsely accused and executed). I have lived between the histories of White and Black folks, between hegemonic and marginalized perspectives, and between assumed superiority and assigned inferiority—neither with any roots in reality.

Recently, I had an intense conversation with a man who had mentored me for sixteen years. He began to share social and political perspectives I did not know he held. They were triggering for me, to say the least. I have never in sixteen years disagreed with him, certainly not passionately. This time I was compelled to share views that differed theologically and politically, as well as historical perspectives than his. Inevitably, race(ism) became a central topic and this was the point of no return. He spent most of his time trying to distance himself from sounding racist but he was  unwilling to enter the “in-between” space with me. He was much more comfortable with his binary approach to the historical narratives and political viewpoints. He echoed the lessons taught to me by those textbooks that executed the selective erasure of history from People of Color and he continued to accentuate the Anglo presentation of America (what he called a “sheep nation,” a reference to Matthew 25 and the narrative of God judging and separating nations as a shepherd separates sheep [righteous] from goats [condemned]).

He fought to protect his fragmented understanding of the gospel (personal salvation) while I invited him to visit the integrated gospel (salvation and justice, personal and collective) that I believe Jesus preached. Whether secular or religious, I have had to live in the tension of seemingly conflicting histories that should be in conversation with one another. This liminal space is necessary if for no other reason than to hold hegemonic narratives accountable to the whole truth, including the aspects of history that are incriminating to the group/class in power.   

He decided he did not like the “contentious” conversations (two) we had over the weekend. He ended our mentoring relationship. While this saddened me, I found this to be a common response by some “friends” of mine who vigilantly guard their vision and version of American history, to simply cut off the conversation at best or the relationship at worst. Living in-between histories can be a painful reality. Living in-between lies or half-truths and reality is disorienting and lonely. Yet, it is in this space where there can be so much revelation. In between histories one can winnow falsehood from truth and lead individuals and the masses to a more healing and life-giving understanding of where we came from so that where we are headed is not a repetition of the underbelly of history but its glimpses of promise.

Living in this space is not necessarily a perpetual state of tension. This space holds as much of a capacity to reorient one’s vision and worldview as it does to disorient. Unstable terrain, while it is uncertain ground to stand on, has the capacity to strengthen muscles that ironically atrophy because of steady ground. Truth offers steady ground, but in terms of historical narratives, accounts from the margins must be in conversation with, and challenge dominant accounts of history. It has the capacity to draw people into solidaric expressions of community as much as it can divide communities. Through a certain lens, it is the tension of this space and the factors that create it that give opportunities for seeking an alternative consciousness to cross over the threshold into an authentic community unafraid of the good, bad, and the ugly of its own narrative. 

Mary Farrell is a retired professor of English literature at the Universitat Jaume I, Castellon, Spain. She is a poet and essayist whose main research includes American literature, silence in communication, and cultural studies. Her many publications include an essay on liminality and film in “The Art of Liminality,” in The Liminal Loop: Astonishing Stories of Discovery and Hope (2022).

The Peripatetic Rites of Passage of Peter. W. Nesselroth, (1935-2020) Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, University of Toronto

Much of what I include here is from his autobiographical essay “So much depends on a bad earache.”

At five years old Nessie escaped with his parents from Berlin to Antwerp, Belgium then to Brussels where at seven he was finally separated from them. Until he was nine, he moved from place to place, from language to language, from religion to religion. The strangeness for him began when, in 1944 Nazis took his father, who looked at him and shook his hand: “I knew this was a very dramatic interaction, but I didn´t know what was happening at the time. And I was still in pain from my earache.”

He says at one point that “Lady Luck in the form of an earache was his patroness.” To separate him from his parents the Nazi policy allowed him to be sent to a The Jewish Hospital for Children where his otitis was treated. As a very young wandering Jew he lived in a series of liminal zones. Two non-Jewish wives to Jewish husbands visited him; then just walked out of the hospital with him. An older lady took him along with a small child, and paid people-smugglers to get to Switzerland. He was then sent to a Swiss foster family. With them he worked in the fields. There at nine he learned to read and write in French.

In the meantime, his mother was given the job of accountant for the inventory of stolen Jewish possessions. Her skills, plus her contribution to the black-market run in the Auschwitz, saved her life. At the end of the war in 1945, she was sent back to Brussels. There the Red Cross helped her to unite with her son. Finally in 1950, when Nessie was fifteen both he and his mother were able to settle in New York.                                                                                                                                                       

Nessie had been helped by Catholics, Protestants and non-religious people. In turn he took on different religions until his Bar Mitzvah in New York. He moved from German, his home language, to Flemish and French, finally to English. He says: “My wandering-Jew years have given me an aura of cosmopolitanism and a sense of gallows humor.” He viewed those years, those liminal years, as “…a curse stemming from the evangelist Mathew’s account given in Chapter 27 in Verse 24 when Pilate says: “I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it.” And in Verse 25: “Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.” (Bible, King James Version, Regency, Thomas Nelson Publishers)

FOR A NEW BEGINNING

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,

Where your thoughts never think to wander,

This beginning has been quietly forming,

Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,

Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,

Noticing how you willed yourself on,

Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety

And the gray promises that sameness whispered,

Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,

Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,

And out you stepped onto new ground,

Your eyes young again with energy and dream,

A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear

You can trust the promise of this opening;

Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning

That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;

Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;

Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,

For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

JOHN O’DONOHUE

From his book, To Bless the Space Between Us

I participate in a joint program with Ukraine and the United States that trains and certifies Ukrainian mental health professionals to address the vast trauma of war and its aftermath. The certificate program includes extensive teaching, learning, training, and supervision. American and Ukrainian mental health academics and professionals act as teachers and mentors. This takes place over Zoom, with the eight hour time difference. A translator is always present translating from Ukrainian to English and back again.

With increasing Russian missile attacks on civilian targets and infrastructure, utilities are always uncertain. Power blackouts are frequent. Wifi service is often interrupted. For example, in the case of my regular translator who lives Kiev, the electricity was out in her apartment building this week. To find Wifi service for our meeting, she drove to a nearby service station to find a signal. When that didn’t work, she cruised in her car until finding a community Wifi. Her car is her office, equipped with laptop and auxiliary batteries. More than once she has Zoomed in from a parking garage outside a hospital.

I work regularly with a supervisee in the program, and yesterday the electricity was out in his office, so he had to drive to a metro station to catch Wifi to Zoom in for a meeting, then back to his office to meet with a first-time client in the darkened offices. When we Zoomed in the evening, he was back at his apartment, that did have electricity at the moment. He said that utility crews are exercising super-human effort to get everything back online after attacks. “Imagine,” he said, “we are a European country in the 21st century and we are actually uncertain if we will have electricity, heat, water.”

These counselors deal with all of the garden variety mental health challenges anyone would see anywhere, and all of the trauma that accompanies war: fear of attack, separation from family, deaths and losses, relocations, and deprivations. Like chaplains serving in the front lines of the military ministering to their troops, or mental health workers in the midst of a disaster, these persons are in the midst of crisis, chaos, suffering, and vast uncertainty. And yet they stay. They serve. With resolve.

These are liminal guides, serving in extreme liminal circumstances, among a collective of persons experiencing complex social liminality.

My role, minor as it is, involves walking along side a liminal guide who is liminal himself. In addition to whatever insight might be shared, I am striving most to stand in solidarity, walk alongside, share the common humanity, to dwell in the land of deep darkness until the light shines. Kyrie Eleison. Господи помилуй

The Liminal Scholarship of $500 will be awarded to the winner of a 700-1000 word essay on some aspect of liminality found in the short story “The Stretch Motel” in S.K Kruse’s Tales from the Liminal. Students must be enrolled in an undergraduate program in an accredited university for the 2023-24 academic year.

The submission deadline is January 31, 2023. The award date is May 31, 2023.

For full details, a link to the short story, and the online registration form, click here.