Living in Limbo

Life in the Midst of Uncertainty

Donald Capps, Nathan Carlin

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781608995226
  9781498212731
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621890942
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Limbo has traditionally been viewed as a place between heaven, on the one hand, and purgatory and hell, on the other, to which the patriarchs, who lived under the old law, and babies who died before being baptized into the Christian faith have been consigned. Like purgatory, it is a dark place but not deprived of grace. Now that the Roman Catholic Church has declared that limbo is not an official church teaching, the idea of limbo has been freed from ecclesiastical constraints and available for reflection on the human condition on this side of the grave. Living in Limbo by Donald Capps and Nathan Carlin focuses on the acute limbo situations that are an integral part of human life, including the vicissitudes of growing up, of forming committed relationships, of finding employment and staying employed, of undergoing life-threatening illnesses, and of experiencing dislocation and doubt. Using cases and examples of real-life persons, the book identifies the forms of distress likely to occur throughout the duration of the limbo experience, and it also identifies the internal and external resources that individuals draw upon as they cope with the stresses and uncertainties of living in limbo. Drawing on the traditional view, especially reflected in Christian art, that Christ descends into limbo to comfort and liberate its occupants, Living in Limbo comes down on the side of hope versus despair. In reading about other limbo dwellers, readers will meet themselves-or someone they love and care about-and will be encouraged by the very fact that they are not alone. Although it is not a pleasant place to be, limbo is not a place of solitary confinement, and one derives strength and resilience from the presence of the others.

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Early Limbo

As we saw in the introduction, the Roman Catholic Church has recently disavowed the idea that infants who have died before being baptized spend eternity in Limbo. This very disavowal, however, invites us to consider whether infants experience acute limbo situations. In other words, does the limbo experience reach back to the very beginnings of life? We think the answer to this question is a resounding yes.

The Hungry Baby

Consider the fact that when babies get hungry, they cannot simply walk to the refrigerator, open the door, get some food, and gobble it down. No, they need to wait for someone, usually their mothers, to come and feed them. But what if mother is delayed? What if she does not hear her little baby cry out for food or is in the middle of some other task that, at this moment, takes precedence? So the baby waits. If the wait is just a matter of a few seconds or a minute, the baby may not get fussy. But extend the wait to several minutes, and the frustration builds and crankiness ensues. Extend it a few more minutes and the baby may begin to feel neglected or even abandoned. In other words, it doesn’t take much for the baby to transition from the limbo of an “intermediate, indeterminate state” to the limbo of “a place or condition of confinement, neglect, or oblivion.”

Emotionally, the infant goes from waiting, during which the baby has a mental image of mother’s appearance; to anticipating, during which the baby has a strong visceral sense of her presence; to pining, during which the baby has an equally strong visceral sense of her absence. This visceral sense of her absence may be so strong that the baby cannot stop crying even after mother appears. She may need to say, “You can stop crying now; I’m here, and everything is all right.” If mother’s absence is very much prolonged, the emotional state of the baby may progress from pining to hopelessness, during which the infant has a strong visceral sense that she will never come. Then, the baby’s cries of pain may give way to hopeless sighs. Hope, after all, has its basis in the belief that one’s desire for the other to come is reciprocated by the other’s desire to come.1

The Punished Child

As babies get older, they may do things that dampen their mother’s desire to come to them. For example, for no apparent reason, they may bite the breast that feeds them, an act that invites their mother’s disapproval. As they become toddlers and develop the capacity to use their arms and legs, they are capable of doing other things that warrant their parents’ disapproval. So another limbo situation appears on the horizon—the limbo of parental punishment.

Aimee Semple McPherson, the popular evangelist of the 1920s, tells about such a limbo experience in her personal memoir:

Like all other restless youngsters, I was constantly getting into dilemmas and difficulties. After similar outrages to the dignity of my household, I would be banished to my room and told that in exactly one-half an hour I would be spanked. I was thoroughly familiar with those whippings. They were not gentle love pats, and my parents never stopped till I was a thoroughly chastised girl. The time of waiting for the footsteps on the stairs, the opening of the door, and the descending palm was the worst of all. On one such occasion I was looking wildly about for a way out of the dilemma. No earthly recourse was nigh. Taught as I was about heavenly intervention, I thought of prayer. Dropping to my knees on the side of my bed, I began to pray, loudly, earnestly. “Oh, God, don’t let mama whip me! Oh God, dear, kind, sweet God, don’t let mama spank me!”2

Notice that, for Aimee, the limbo situation was worse than the punishment she received. Considering the fact that the punishment itself was harsh and uncompromising, this tells us a lot about the limbo situation. As she waited for the footsteps on the stairs, the opening of the door, and the descending palm, she looked “wildly about for a way out.” Because there was no escape hatch, she resorted to prayer in hopes of “heavenly intervention.” But the “dear, kind, sweet God” either did not try to intervene, or this kind and sweet God was simply no match for her strong and determined mama. Her sense of being in a situation in which she was deprived of divine grace suggests that limbo was no mere “intermediate, indeterminate state” for her. Rather, it was “a place or condition of confinement, neglect, or oblivion.”

Shamed at School

Aimee’s bedroom, the place where she slept, got dressed in the morning, read books, and played games, became limbo—the setting, perhaps, of shrieks of pain, but more important, of hopeless sighs. Here’s a true story that illustrates how the classroom may also become a limbo place.

Tom, who was born in 1934, was in kindergarten when Franklin Roosevelt was seeking an unprecedented third term as President of the United States. Many Americans thought he was guilty of hubris. After all, George Washington had refused to run for a third term because he didn’t want anyone to think that he had aspirations to become a king. Americans who felt this way supported his opponent, Wendell Willkie. The day after the election, Tom’s teacher asked the children whose parents voted for President Roosevelt to raise their hands. Tom raised his hand. The teacher said to Tom, “I know your parents and they voted for Willkie.” Tom felt humiliated—not only because his parents voted for the losing candidate, but also because his teacher had suggested that he had, in effect, tried to deceive her and the other children. Perhaps her intentions were good—using his attempt to be identified with those children whose parents had voted for the winner to underscore the importance of always being truthful. But the fact that he recently told this story to one of the authors indicates that the experience was one in which he has not forgotten the day he spent in limbo—the place where its occupants do not shriek in pain but emit hopeless sighs.

Another example of a child’s being consigned to limbo by the remark of another is presented in the personal memoir of Barbara J. Scot. Barbara’s father committed suicide one night when she was eight years old. He had left her mother and their family of two children several years earlier and was living with another woman when he took his life. Her mother saw no reason why Barbara and her brother shouldn’t go to school the next day, because, after all, it wasn’t as if he had been living with them. But before Barbara left for school her mother said to her, “Your father is dead. He died last night. God wanted it that way because he was not a happy man. He will be happier with God. Ella Clark [her father’s cousin] called me now in case I would want to keep you home from school because other children might say something to you. There is no reason to stay home, because you never knew him. If anything is said, say you never knew him. Do you understand?”3

During class that morning nothing was said. But during lunch Barbara had an interaction with several girls (Bonnie Smith, Janet White, and Nancy McDowell) in which something was said—words that induced an acute limbo situation for Barbara. Barbara had walked with Bonnie to the Masonic temple where the children had lunch. Bonnie’s parents were divorced. Janet, whose father had been killed in the war, was a few feet ahead of them. This meant that there was something better about Janet’s father than Bonnie’s and her own. At lunch she and Nancy sat across from one another, on either side of Miss Nelson, who had not been informed of Barbara’s father’s death. As the girls waited for the boys to finish eating, Barbara began to hum softly. Nancy looked at her sharply and said: “Barbara, I wouldn’t be singing if my daddy killed himself.” All conversation at the table stopped. Barbara stared hard at her plate. Miss Nelson looked at her, then said, “Children, line up, it’s time to go.” But Barbara couldn’t move. She sat with her head bowed in shame. The other children left. Then Miss Nelson was suddenly back, kneeling beside her. “Barbara,” she asked, “did your father die?” Barbara didn’t know what to say, but as Miss Nelson put her arm around Barbara’s shoulder, she said, “I never knew him,” and then began, uncontrollably, to cry.4

Like Tom, Barbara felt exposed by the insensitive remark of another person. Also like Tom, she found herself suddenly alone and abandoned. Limbo experiences come in many different forms, but the sense of being alone and abandoned is one of its most common features. In Barbara’s case, however, a sensitive teacher entered the limbo to which her classmate’s comment had consigned her, and the teacher’s presence helped her to feel a little less alone, a little less abandoned.

Waiting to Be Called On

Here’s another story about how, for children, school can become a limbo place. It was told to one of us by a friend. Ten-year-old Virginia dreaded being called upon to read in class. As she waited for her turn, she calculated what paragraph would be hers to read and read it over and over again. When her time to read arrived, she stood by her desk and began the first sentence, but the page she was reading from became blurry. The teacher asked her, what was the problem? She replied that there were a lot of black spots on the page. This response was greeted with laughter from the other children. The teacher suggested that she sit down and asked the next child to read the paragraph. Virginia’s confidence outside the classroom—in the hallways, on the playground where she excelled in sports and enjoyed casual banter with the other kids—abandoned her in this moment, and anxiety took over.

Virginia was unaware at the time that hers was not a unique experience. Had she known, she might not have felt quite so alone and quite so ashamed of her poor performance. In his personal memoirs, Clifford Beers tells about his humiliation as a student at Yale College in 1895.5 He was in a German recitation class when “it seemed as if my nerves had snapped, like so many minute bands of rubber stretched beyond their elastic limit.” If he had had the courage to leave class, he would have done so. Instead, he sat as if paralyzed until the class was dismissed. For the remainder of the term, he avoided recitation class and somehow managed to pass his examinations. As the next term got underway, he informed his professors of his feelings of dread at the prospect of reciting in class, and they treated him with consideration, assuring him that they would not call on him. But even though his professors never seemed to doubt the genuineness of his excuse, it was no easy matter to keep them convinced for almost two-thirds of his college course. Furthermore, he was unable to demonstrate to the professors and the other students that he knew the material: “My inability to recite was not due usually to any lack of preparation. However well prepared I might be, the moment I was called upon, a mingling of a thousand disconcerting sensations, and the distinct thought that at last the dread attack was at hand, would suddenly intervene and deprive me of all but the power to say, ‘Not prepared.’ Weeks would pass without any record being placed opposite my name than a zero, or a blank indicating that I had not been called upon at all.”

Virginia’s limbo experience was relatively infrequent. Fortunately, her being asked to read in front of the whole class did not happen very often. But Clifford’s limbo situation lasted longer because recitation was the very purpose of the class, and he was required to take recitation classes throughout his college career. As he entered the recitation class each day that it met, he was the only student who sat through the hour without uttering a word, and this went on for two-thirds of his college years—a long time to have to live with his distress of not being able to recite, of worrying that his professors would suspect him of taking advantage of their grace, of knowing that the other students resented the fact that he was receiving special treatment. This was much more than the limbo of an intermediate, indeterminate state. In recitation class at least, he was in a place of oblivion, a condition of being physically present but having absolutely nothing to show for it—a man of zeroes and blanks. No wonder, then, that he concludes his account of his college years with this comment: “A man’s college days, collectively, are usually his happiest. Most of mine were not happy.” He congratulates himself, however, for realizing his “chief ambition,” which was “to win my diploma within the prescribed time.”6

An Unhappy Birthday

We informed a very good friend of ours (we’ll call him Alvin) that we were writing a book about “living in limbo” and explained to him a little about what it means to live in limbo for a brief or extended period of time. We asked Alvin if he had any personal experiences from his childhood or adolescence to share with us that we could use in our book. This is what Alvin wrote:

I eagerly anticipated my thirteenth birthday. There was a particular video game that I really wanted—in fact, it was the only thing for which I asked. It cost about $30, the going rate for a new video game in the early 1990s. I knew where my mother hid my birthday gifts. It was where she also hid my Christmas gifts: in the Christmas tree box in the basement. During the weeks leading up to my birthday, I would check the box from time to time to see what gifts were there. There were clothes, religious things, such as a plaque with my name and Bible verse on it, deodorants and cologne, and a toy or two—but no game. I was convinced, though, that I was getting the game, partly because this was the only thing I had asked for, and partly because I wanted it so badly. On the day of my birthday, my mother let me open my presents as soon as I returned from school. It was just the two of us because my father was still at work. I tore through all the gift-wrappings, looking for the game. But it was not there. And because I had seen all of these presents in the box in the basement, there was no surprise at all. Disappointed because the game was not there and unappreciative because there was no surprise, I said to my mother, “No video game?” Her face filled with anger, ...

Table of contents

• Living in Limbo
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Early Limbo
• Chapter 2: Relational Limbo
• Chapter 3: Work-Related Limbo
• Chapter 4: Illness-Related Limbo
• Chapter 5: The Limbo of Dislocation and Doubt
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index