I’ve been thinking about walls lately. Not the kind that divide nations or keep people out, but the smaller, older walls; the ones that mark boundaries between one field and another, between the tamed and the wild, between what we’ve claimed and what claims us.
There’s a stone wall near where I lived, ancient and crumbling, that runs along the edge of a churchyard. On one side: mowed grass, orderly headstones, the careful geometry of consecrated ground. On the other: meadow grass grows waist-high, thistles, the anarchic beauty of things left to themselves.
I watched a child walk along the top of it. Arms outstretched, heel-to-toe, completely concentrated. She couldn’t have been more than twelve. The wall is maybe eighteen inches wide—easy enough to walk, dangerous enough to matter.
What struck me wasn’t her balance. It was her face. She wasn’t trying to get from one side to the other. She was walking the wall itself. The in-between. The place that is neither here nor there.
We spend so much energy trying to get from one side to the other, don’t we? Trying to cross over, to arrive, to finally be the thing we’re becoming. We treat thresholds as obstacles—inconvenient gaps between where we are and where we want to be.
But what if the threshold is the point?
What if that narrow space between things—between childhood and adulthood, between one culture and another, between who we were and who we’re becoming—isn’t a gap to be crossed quickly, but a place to dwell?
The girl on the wall was completely present. Not rushing toward either side. Just walking. Just being exactly where she was.
I think about how often I’ve felt “between.” Between callings. Between loves. Between certainties. And how often I’ve interpreted that feeling as lostness rather than location.
But what if liminal isn’t another word for lost?
What if the spaces between the stone walls, the thresholds, the places where one thing becomes another; the places where God speaks most clearly? Not because the answers are there, but because in the in-between, we finally stop demanding answers long enough to listen.
The mystics knew this. They had a word for it: kenosis. Self-emptying. The spiritual practice of becoming nothing so you can be filled with Something Else.
The girl reached the end of the wall. Jumped down. Ran off across the meadow without looking back.
But for those few minutes, she’d inhabited a space most of us rush past. She’d been fully present to the between.
I’m learning—slowly, awkwardly—to do the same. To stop treating my in-between seasons as waiting rooms. To recognize them as sacred spaces in their own right.
To walk the wall with my arms outstretched.
To be, for a little while, precisely nowhere in particular.
And to discover that nowhere is exactly where I need to be.
Copyright 2025 Michael J. Cunningham OFS