Liminality as explained by Victor and Edith Turner in their book, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, is a unique term that defines the transition and potentiality, the "going to be" and "what may be." It is a special state of being--being in between two distinct phases or places. An example would be standing in a doorway between a separate room and a hall way. When standing there, you are neither in the hall way nor in the room. You are in a unique, special circumstance, being between two dimensions. At that moment a person is experiencing liminality, one has the potential of proceeding into the room or stepping into the hall way.
All sites of pilgrimage have this in common: they are believed to be places where miracles once happened, still happen, and may happen again. For this reason, pilgrimage was and still is the great liminal experience of religious life. The journey is the liminal phase that is in between from where you were as a person before embarking the journey and at the end of the journey, after the "'transformative' effect of approaching the final altar or the holy grotto at the end of the way" (Turner 11).
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