Advent as a Philosophy of Belonging: Home as The Liminal Space Between Heaven and Earth

In his book A Philosophy of Belonging, scholar James Greenaway explores the idea of home.

He notes two ways of looking at the idea of home:

1. Home as an enclosure against the world, or an enclosure in which we retreat from the world

2. Home as a threshhold into the world, or a place in which we are able to step out into the world.

It could very well be that home requires holding both of these ideas together, and even in tension. In this sense he borrows language from his homeland (Ireland) in speaking of home in terms of the concept of “metaxu,” or an inbetween/liminal space in which these two truths are able to be accessed. For Greenaway, home is essential to this core human need to belong. This is what these two ideas of home give birth to when seen in relationship to our participation in this space.

He describes belonging like this series of outwardly concentric circles where we keep expanding our “sphere of belonging” further and further outwards from the center. Or to use the essential divisions in his book, presence on one hand (enclosure) and communion on the other (threshhold).

I’ve been thinking about this on the first Sunday of Advent. What does it mean to be at home in this world and to simltaneously find ourselves longing for another. At the heart of Advent is this notion of waiting. In a tradition sense Advent is born from this notion of waiting in this inbetween space between a world into which Jesus has come and the world in which Jesus promises to return. It is, in this sense, about the ways in which the story of Israel, caught up as it becomes into the story of the Christ-child, informs our own anticipation of a second advent today. We are entering into a patterned way of life and way of being.

And what is the dominant motif that informs the story of Israel? Exile. This sense in which we find this conversation between home on one side (Jerusalem) and the world on the other (an Israel that has been assimilated into the nations). That Jesus’ home becomes the threshhold of the spirits movement into the world sits at the heart of our own way of seeing the places in which we live. To belong somwhere is to always be standing on the threshhold of that anticipated movement of the spirit out into the world. We do not contain the Christ-child into our enclosures, for as relevant and as necessary as our built traditions are to our sense of belonging somewhere. To do so is to miss Jesus altogether, and thus to have our protected and preserved sense of belonging uprooted by the world breaking in from the outiside. To see this enclosure as a threshhold is to see the way in which Jesus is at work in the world.

This, I think is an important aspect of the Christmas celebration. In creating and building a home in our enclosed section of the world around Jesus, we can then learn what it means to anticipate Christ’s act of bringing heaven (His home) to earth.