I get that. Whether or not we admit it to anyone, ourselves included, we all need to find some time and some space that will allow us to become reacquainted with ourselves all over again. If we are fortunate, we become reacquainted with something more – something beyond ourselves. A few years ago (more or less) I was doing some reading on the spirituality of the Celtic people. It’s a fascinating study and I have so much more to learn. One wonderful concept that I encountered, though, is something called The Thin Place.
What in the world is The Thin Place? Sounds like a code name for Nutrisystem, but that’s not it. The Thin Place has been around for a very long time. Celtic Christians in the areas of Ireland, Scotland and Wales more than a thousand years ago expressed their faith in ways that are a bit unfamiliar to most of us. Unfamiliar they may be, still they call to a deep and abiding need inside many of us – the need for something more in our lives, something more than the kind of superficial spirituality and lukewarm commitment that often characterize what passes for faith today.
In the Celtic worldview, there were places where this world and the realm of the spiritual come close together. George McLeod said: “It is a thin place where only tissue paper separates the material from the spiritual.” The Rev. Mel Schlacter of Trinity Episcopal Church in Iowa City does a good job of explaining the concept. He says this: “In Celtic thought, a so-called Thin Place was a transition zone: where earth meets sky on a mountaintop; where land meets ocean at the coast, or better yet on an island; where the wilderness meets domestic land as at the edge of a moor, or where things beneath the earth come to the surface at a holy well. Thin Places carried power. They were places of encounter with the Divine.” Sounds a lot like a Moses and the burning bush event!
I found a brief but beautiful account of a person’s seeking of a Thin Place by a woman named Mary Wolf. She says that “… it may be that there are some places, like some chords in music, that evoke something spiritual in people, as the smell of burning leaves can bring back childhood to many of us; and that some places have more of that power than others.”
Wolf goes on to say something particularly thought provoking. She says that maybe we can work on becoming ourselves the thinnest places we can manage to be. “Not in the sense of meagerness, as fashion models are thin…but thin in the sense of transparency; being as full as we can of the love of God and leaking it like crazy.” She likens it to having a highly permeable spiritual membrane.
The problem is that because of our own nature, we often take only a sip of the living water when we really want to gulp. We each have our areas of indifference or cruelty, being sometimes spiteful and self-serving. We don’t love the First Love nearly as often or as well as we should or as we would like.
Thin Places are places of calling. They offer us the gift of grace and become lodged deep in our inmost self. Being in the Thin Place, or being Thin Place People gives us a taste of what Love is supposed to be. After that, nothing is really the same ever again.
When is the last time we’ve been to a Thin Place? When is the last time we became one? Neither one just happens. We have to seek out the kind of thinness and transparency that allows us to encounter and then to exude the presence of God. When others look at us they see the presence of the Holy in our faces. That’s really what it’s all about when we put away all the bureaucratic structure and release our baggage of material constraints, emotional armor and self-centeredness.
One final quote from Schlacter: “Thin Places are the destinations of pilgrimage, and the journey can be just as well through the heart as over land and sea.”
After all is said and done, the Thin Place is where we need to go and who we need to be.
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