We live in a world that is both rich with images, and also corrupted by them. And there never was a time when this was not the case.

The interior life of the most sensory deprived desert hermit, is no less assaulted by vivid images than is the life of the most video addicted teenager.

We are inclined to blame technology, and the rampant commercial exploitation of the visual media for the corruption. But, in fact, there is no hiding place for any human being.

From the dreams of night, to the fantasies of the day, public or private, there is no escaping the images.

We are richly gifted with the miracle of sight, in all its various configurations, but we are haunted by it too. It sometimes takes us to places we would rather not go. Visitations of the past, and apprehensions of the future; nightmares and embarassing titillation's; sobering realities, and moments of transcendent beauty.

There is in Jerusalem a place that embraces most of these disturbing visual possibilities. It is Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum.

To call this place a ”museum” is, I suspect, a conscious irony. For all the photographs, for all the depictions of death, there is nothing that is not made actively plain in that place. The whole museum is like an elegy in images. The past is brought to a terrible new life through all those whose own future was never realised.

So much profound sadness. The place is filled with the ghostly murmuring of all those, whose final images in life, were brutal and terrifying. Not for them relief in the sight of beautiful things and loving carers.

But there is a greater sadness to be found in an underground cavern at Yad Vashem.

Here is the Children’s Memorial honouring the one-and-a-half million children murdered in the holocaust.

A downward spiralling path leads into the Memorial, and through a door one enters a world of disorienting darkness.

A raised walkway crosses the cavern, lit only by candles which are reflected in mirrors carefully placed so as to promote a sense that you have stepped into the centre of a dark universe, lit only by the candle-starlight.

As you stand and wonder, large photographs of children are momentarily illuminated - hundreds of them - and a sonorous voices intones the name of each child, their age and their country of origin. Behind all of this a mournful cello plays quietly on.

I carry around with me in my head a library of those images, and the sensations they provoked. Yad Vashem is not a museum that you enter, look and leave. It is always with you. Images planted so that you will never forget.

“I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name ( a “Yod Vashem” )....” says the Lord, in Isaiah [ Is 56:5 ] “......I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.”

And so it is. God has done this thing and, in it has taken us to a “liminal” place. A threshold. A razorback ridge where we find ourselves teetering on the edge of both the profoundly mundane, and the mysterious spiritual reality of the Kingdom of God.

Oh how the phrase slips easily from the lips! The Kingdom of God! The Kingdom of God! We have so often ravaged its mysterious reality by approaching it as a subject only for theological exegesis.

There is a world which both is, and is not, this world with which we are so familiar. It is very important that we learn its ways, and probe its reality, for it is what we were made for, and in the knowledge of which alone we will find, as it were, the “courage to be”.

Do you know those moments when you seem to be looking in on the world from a remote vantage point, and wondering at its great complexity and beauty;

Do you sometimes meet the “ beggar at the gate” and know in them -if only for an instant - not fear, but a profound sense of fellowship.

Do you know the table at which you break bread with your family and friends as a friend itself, and one that gave its life for all your pleasure, shaped to your desire.

All of these moments, when we suddenly and briefly glimpse the fullness and the generosity of God, over against the many more moments when we seem to live in a trance of forgetfullness.

Well, this is the threshold we inhabit, the “liminal” space. Always pregnant with the possibility of the most intimate encounter with God.

And when that moment comes, as it so frequently and secretly does for all of us, we are startled at its arrival, and look about us, dimly apprehending that we have for a moment, in an instant of faith, discovered, as the writer to the Hebrews puts it, “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” [ Heb 11:1 ]

So what impedes the persistence in us of these extraordinary moments?

Perhaps, “we cannot,” as T.S.Eliot sagely observed, “bear very much reality”. At least not of the spiritual kind!

We set boundaries, so that we will not be suprised into a deeper experience of life with God in God’s kingdom. This is all about the protection of self, as we see it. In fact, it is the reverse.

William Barclay relates a comment about one “Edith”, a self-centred young lady, of whom it was said: “ Edith lived in a little world, bounded on the North, South, East and West by Edith!” It is too small a kingdom. So, often, are the ones we settle for.

If we feel that the Church that we have known and loved seems to be failing; gradually slipping away into an irrelevant remnant that is pitied and pilloried rather than cherished and encouraged, then we must know in our grief, the geater grief of God, who provides us with such abundant resource for life, only to find that we, so often decide to go our own way; preferring the dark side of the the threshold, to the side that will lead through unaccustomed places, into life that is fuller than we can possibly imagine.

The trouble is we have little language for this experience when we encounter it, and when we find some faltering responses, they so often seem a little “dotty”. So we shy-off revealing the joyful moment even to our closest friends.

The people of God need to discover a little more confidence, and this will only come as we recognise just where we stand.

And, again, it is on the threshold that we stand, the liminal space.

This is the place that Jesus inhabited with the greatest of ease. All his reported teaching and conversation - so often foreign to us, even a little “dotty” you might say - all of these things confirm this.

So, if we hesitate at the threshold, anticipating entry into a land whose language is strange to us, we must know that our first faltering steps will be taken in good company. For Jesus is himself the “assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”.

We do not fail as a Church through lack of godly effort in practical matters, we fail most often because we fail to apprehend how profoundly spiritual and mysterious is the journey to which we are called.

There are a billion voices that will chatter us to death if they can, and yet long for us to speak to them in ways that will give them real life. Is there not a crecendo of desperation to be heard almost everywhere we look?

At Yod Vashem, a million and a half children call out to us in a very different way, and they do so in what might “dottily” be called the language of the angels.

They long to be heard, not as the tragic dead, so much as mentors in the ways of God. They, too, stand with us in the liminal place, urging us over the threshold.

May God give us enough will and sufficient courage to embrace all of this strangeness and to learn its language. A lot depends on it. Perhaps everything!