Spiritual Care in the 21st Century – Chapter 5 excerpt

Among the different interventions with which helping professionals support persons in crisis or need, the facilitation of rituals is often unique to chaplains. Many rituals have been developed throughout history in spiritual communities and, depending on the needs and spiritual-religious identity of the careseeker, chaplains frequently rely on these traditional forms of comfort and support. As the role of religion changes and familiarity with traditional rituals becomes less common, chaplains may also modify traditional rituals or create new rituals (as we see in the case study here) to help careseekers express their feelings, facilitate community, invite transformation, and provide stability and grounding. Chaplains often meet careseekers in “high stakes” moments, in life-and-death and boundary situations or in times of transition. Liminality or liminal spaces are terms that capture the “in-betweenness” of these moments. Liminal spaces are points on the map of life that are in between normalcy as we have known it and what life will become. Sometimes liminal spaces are physical spaces—like a hospital room—and sometimes they are spaces of time, as in the case of the time between the death of a loved one and the funeral. Either way, they can lead to transition, changing boundaries, new thresholds and meanings. They have the potential to allow us to acknowledge circumstances from which might emerge new possibilities that can simultaneously feel promising and out of our control.

Trauma and the liminal

Trauma often instantiates liminal experiences, as do times of public and private grief and loss, career or educational transitions, moving from one home to another, and joy. When people experience any of these events, they may feel as if they are in an in-between state of existence that can call forth a not-knowing, a lack of orientation, and a sense of being caught in between longing for what life used to be and the possibilities of hope for the future. Experiences of liminality can be especially challenging when we do not desire or request to enter them. When trauma, illness, dying, death, displacement, or isolation are forced into our experience—especially but not exclusively when it is unexpected—then individuals may find that they are not only in a liminal space or a liminal time but that they inhabit a liminal self that seems mystified and foreign. Nothing is as it once was, including the individual.

Liminality at the social level

While individuals can perceive themselves to be in a liminal state, societies can also exist in that same state of in-betweenness. This may be particularly apparent during times when the culture is experiencing trauma and systemic difficulties, and when it feels as if the stability that might have been culturally assumed in the past is no longer present. In such times, individuals often experience the effects of systemic liminality. Systemic liminality can be particularly challenging to navigate, as it means that people cannot rely upon society as a source of stability. For instance, the events of September 11, 2001 created a public crisis that caused the United States to enter as a country into a collective liminal space. many chaplains volunteered at Ground Zero in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, providing care to first responders. As the magnitude and death toll of the tragedy mounted, chaplains initiated rituals of public mourning and supported public symbols memorializing those who had died. Another example of chaplains offering their skills during a time of collective liminality would be those who provided spiritual care—including end of life rituals—to patients, families, and medical health professionals during the COVID-19 crisis.