Liminal Competence: An Original Construct for Sustainable Threshold-Dwelling in Ongoing Loss

Healthcare chaplains and clinicians increasingly encounter patients whose losses do not conclude: those in palliative trajectories, persons with progressive neurological disease, dementia caregivers, displaced persons, and incarcerated individuals. This article is a conceptual contribution that derives its construct from interdisciplinary literature rather than from new empirical data. The dominant resolution paradigm in grief theory—which treats mourning as a problem to be resolved through stages, tasks, or reconstructed meaning—is structurally inadequate for these contexts because no terminus is available. The article extends Victor Turner’s anthropological theory of permanent liminality into contemporary medical and psychosocial contexts and introduces the construct of liminal competence: the set of cultivable capacities that enable sustainable dwelling at thresholds that do not close. Liminal competence comprises four interrelated dimensions—ambiguity tolerance, oscillation flexibility, communitas access, and liminal meaning-making—each grounded in established interdisciplinary scholarship from anthropology, phenomenology, contemplative studies, and grief science. The construct addresses a gap in liminal theory by distinguishing sustainable from entrapping permanent liminality, and it is differentiated from adjacent constructs such as resilience and psychological flexibility. Applications are developed across palliative trajectories, chronic progressive illness and dementia, and displacement and incarceration. The article concludes with limitations regarding Western-centric framing, the absence of empirical validation, and the boundary between liminal competence and the redress of structural injustice that produces ongoing loss.