To every thing there is a season

And a time to every purpose under heaven

Ecclesiates 3:1

I’ve always liked the liminal, the places or times that are not quite one thing or another.  Dusk, as the light of the day lingers while darkness gathers, the seashore where water and land exchange places, graveyards, where the living and the dead coexist. As a northern European my inner world is mediated through seasonality, although the four seasons are, in reality, characterised by many in-between stages. At this point in the year, while so much around us still speaks of winter, we can easily discern spring. In the cold air we can pause and feel the warmth of the sun; from the bare branches the catkins hang, dangling in expectation of pollination; from the barely waking earth the aconites glow, their golden flowers surrounded by their green ruffs, which, as Sister John Bosco explained to me, was the reason they were once called ‘choirboys’. 

This season, in its midway point between the deep sleep of winter and the reemergence of growth, seems to me such a strong metaphor for our earthly existence, as we seek to grow into the full light of God’s creation. Our lives are so full of ambiguity: wisdom and folly, innocence and culpability, kindness and coldness. We exist in the in-betweenness of all that makes us human.  Our time on earth is in-between our time in God’s existence, but our lives are a reality in God’s love.  Life can be hidden in a simulacrum of death, but it is there, beating steadily. Just as the ground around us is pregnant with new life and the spirit pervades everywhere, I believe that life is never lost, gone, disregarded, unfulfilled.  It is there in the spaces in-between where we so often fail to see it, but where God is present and binds up all into one.