Limbo Lessons

Put our time in confinement to good use

I can’t remember when I first heard the word limbo. Not the dance where you get low and try to clear the pole, but the waystation, the in-between place, where souls are consigned.

Limbo is associated with Catholicism, but was never official doctrine. It was a softening of the teaching of the philosopher Augustine, who believed that infants who died without being baptized would go to hell.

Instead, the church said, such children would end up in limbo, where they would experience no sensory pain, but also would never be able to see God. In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI effectively did away with limbo, replacing it with the “prayerful hope” that unbaptized babies would reach heaven.

Limbo comes from the Latin limbus, meaning edge or boundary. Beyond its religious meaning, limbo is defined as “a place of confinement”; “a state of uncertainty”. Sound familiar?

Like the passengers on the plane that crashed in “Lost”, we are now stuck in a collective limbo, so together and yet so alone, facing some hard lessons. If we don’t learn them, we’ll either perish or keep landing right back here, wishing, wondering, waiting for Godot.

What are these hard lessons? I’m no scholar, but I do know what it means to fiddle while Rome burns. I recognize that you cannot be this greedy, selfish, neglectful, entitled, and generally clueless for this long and expect there to be no consequences.