Sorry, No Encores This Side

August 2016.  I’ll be participating in a show this spring called ‘Crossing the Line:  Women of the Anabaptist Traditions Encounter Borders and Boundaries’.  The boundaries to be examined exist between public and private spaces, church/community and ‘the world’, sexualities and gender self-identities, race, ethnicity and class, religious and theological belief systems or expressions of transnational experience.  All this at the Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia.  I‘m surprised and pleased to be invited.  Surprised because I’ve not been an active member of the community during most of my adult life.  Pleased because this is my original tradition and I had little sense of its interest in examining the crossing of lines. Or in women.

The phrase ‘crossing boundaries’ is used often.  This is not surprising if Tjeu van Knippenberg, retired professor of pastoral theology is correct in suggesting that ‘boundaries are the symbol for the ambivalence of existence itself’.  In forming the dividing line between two areas, they act as protection, separating the strange from the familiar.  They’re also a challenge, inviting exploration. 

I’ve read boundaries are in trouble these days.  Are blurred and in danger of being dissolved.  In some instances they’re now referred to as wide grey lines.  Does that mean there’s no more either/or?  Just both/and?  

My dream is slippery. All surface and edges. The babies unmanageable, impossible to hang onto and sliding toward the edges.  I reach for the one, lose her.  Lose them all.  Suddenly I’m just hanging on, eventually losing myself and falling down to the street.  Immediately I get a whiff of freedom, only then acknowledging my status as a prisoner, and in the circus of all places.  I run through narrow crowded streets and come upon women collecting goods for the thrift shop.  I join them, hoping to escape notice of the circus police, but pushing my cart into the thrift shop I am horrified to discover it’s a front for the nightmare I thought I’d left behind.

In dreams boundaries are blurred.  Permeable.  Death, for the Greeks, is like this.  I read somewhere that if they’ve paid up, they get across the river no problem.  Otherwise they’re left to wander the river banks for 100 years.  On occasion and whether or not money changes hands they’re sent home.  Actually I only know of one Greek who experienced this.  Apparently Christians have had a few returnees as well.

I know of one Episcopalian who has little patience with this sort of talk.  The writer, Joan Didion, can speak only in terms of here or there, breathing or not breathing.  In ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ she admits to being obsessed with pinning down the exact moment of her husband’s death.  Wants to know…was he still alive when the paramedics took him down the elevator, when they arrived at the hospital?  Was he already dead in their apartment?  And what time would that have been?  Finally she realizes that he was never not quite dead after his collapse into the dinner plate.

I’m all for boundaries.  A bit of push back.  Some things exist only because of boundaries.  I tend toward the wide grey lines though.  If I have a choice, that is.  The 49 days between death and rebirth.  100 years on the river banks.  Some breathing and some holding of breath.

This spring I’ll be shipping my art across the Canadian/US border, breaking new ground.  And while the art moves toward new and strange horizons, I’ll be waiting on the banks, no doubt pacing.