Embracing Liminality with Brigid

hello from Ireland

“Legend has it that Brigid was born just before sunrise, in the twilight of early morning, in that time governed neither by the sun’s light nor the moon’s light, but by the two lights, the twi-light. It is also said that her mother gave birth to her neither within the house nor outside, but at the threshold of the dwelling…she occupies the liminal space between worlds.”

I read these words on the hour and a half bus ride from Kilkeel to Belfast, and they brought tears to my eyes.

“Brigid: the doorway between the pre-Christian an the Christian, the portal between the divine and the human, the relationship between humanity and the earth, and the luminous space between the womb of the universe ad what is trying to come into being.”

Dear community, I’ve thought of you so much on this trip to Northern Ireland, where I’m helping facilitate a retreat with a lovely group of people (including one of our own from the Liminality Journal community).

What I’ve just shared from John Philip Newell’s book Sacred Earth Sacred Soul is from a chapter about Brigid, one of Ireland’s most beloved saints. What brought tears to my eyes was reading about her journey not just into the world, but through it, how she held multiple identities, multitudes within herself with fire and light, and thus held the multitudes within others.

The ways we show up in the world, the stories we possess and choose to tell, ripple out from our bodies and our lives and into the lives of others.

The places and spaces of Northern Ireland hold so many stories, so many hopes and dreams from then murals on the walls of East and West Belfast to the farmlands of Kilkeel. And I think of us, gathering here, online, from across the world to celebrate words and a special way of living in the world, a way that is, at its core, entirely, sacredly, human.

What will liminality mean to us in the coming days, weeks, months? As we go deeper into Autumn, as we face an election in the US, as we watch war and genocide in the Middle East continue, as we rebuild after climate disasters, as all the unnamed places that never make it to the media are still finding their way?

If we learn anything from Brigid, we hold space in the here-but-not-yet, in our realities but our future dreams, in our humanity and relationship to the sacred earth.

So in the coming days, take time to honor your liminality.

Write about it, journal about it, breathe it, let it find its way through you. We need liminal space now more than ever, in a time when it’s so accessible to run to the polar extremes, to pin one another against walls, declaring we will never change, denying the deep sacredness in one another and ourselves.

Liminality reminds us that we find home in our sacred stories and in relationship to one another.

We find our way home together.

Onward.