"Thin Places Should Point to Full Lives"

In the Celtic spiritual tradition, a “thin place” describes the line that divides the holy from the ordinary, a place where the veil between the physical world and the eternal lifts or is so very thin that it seems that one might even step right on through. I visited the island of Iona some years ago, just off the western coast of the Scottish mainland, and immediately realized why so many people over the centuries have thought of Iona as a “thin place.” Maybe it had something to do with the location only a mile off the mainland; maybe it had something to do with the rugged, tree-less landscape; maybe it had something to do with the old abbey, now restored, or the ancient Celtic crosses; maybe it had something to do with its history, with Martyr’s Bay, the strand where the monks had been slaughtered by ravening Vikings. But it just felt that you were nearer the divine there….

            “Were you scared in Vietnam?” Jenny asked Forrest. “Yes. Well, I-I don’t know. Sometimes it would stop raining long enough for the stars to come out…and then it was nice. It was like just before the sun goes to bed down on the bayou. There was always a million sparkles on the water . . . like that mountain lake. It was so clear, Jenny, it looked like there were two skies one on top of the other. And then in the desert, when the sun comes up, I couldn’t tell where heaven stopped and the earth began. It’s so beautiful.” From Forrest Gump, the movie.

These thin place moments can be brief, but they can stay with us for a life-time. In her poem titled “That Day”, the 20th century American author Denise Levertov describes a transcendent moment in a young girl’s life that stayed with her until the day she died.

Across a lake in Switzerland, fifty years ago,

light was jousting with long lances, fencing with

broadswords

back and forth among cloudy peaks and foothills.

We watched from a small pavilion, my mother and I,

enthralled.

And then, behold, a shaft, a column,

a defined body, not of light but of silver rain,

formed and set out from the distant shore, leaving behind

the silent feints and thrusts, and advanced

unswervingly, at a steady pace,

toward us.

I knew this! I’d seen it! Not the sensation

of déjà vu: it was Blake’s inkwash vision,

‘The Spirit of God Moving Upon the Face of the Waters’!

The column steadily came on

across the lake toward us; on each side of it,

there was no rain. We rose to our feet, breathless–

and then it reached us, took us

into its veil of silver, wrapped us in finest weave of wet,

and we laughed for joy, astonished.

Those “thin place” moments can stay with you. Some of you have shared such moments with me.

There was the woman, brought up here in West Barnstable in a family who were members of the strict Finnish Apostolic Lutheran Church. No drinking, no dancing, on Sundays, no work and no play. God, she was told, was always watching, always judging. And then one day, out alone on a field, a voice came to her, and with it a warmth she had never felt before, calling out her name, and saying, “I love you and always will.” That moment changed her life, she told me, and stayed with her all her days.

There was the member here who had served in the army during the Second World War. He was an aide to a general, and one of his duties involved hand-delivering messages at times when radio communications were out. During the Battle of the Bulge he was given a dispatch to deliver, and so jumped into a jeep and headed off through the forest towards his destination. He came to a cross-roads, and the direct route entailed taking the left fork. But a voice came, he said, a voice he had never heard before, saying no, take the other way, the roundabout way. He did, and later discovered that a German Panzer unit had been laying in wait along his intended route. He believed that he had been spared by divine intervention, and said it changed his life, causing him to change his career path after the war, and so becoming one of New Jersey’s leading experts on helping mainstream into society children once warehoused under the label “retarded.”

There are those of you, particularly men, who have told me about the miracle of child-birth, about how after those months and all that struggle on the mother’s part suddenly a new life was in your arms, and more than that, how you felt surrounded by a heavenly presence in a way you had not experienced before.

And then there are those of you who have spoken at being at the bedside of a dying relative, a parent, a spouse, and how you were surprised that instead of it being the horrific, terrifying experience you had anticipated, it was instead a holy time, days and hours you will ever be grateful for having had, its own kind of thin space.

Mindie Burgoyne writes,

“Thin places are ports in the storm of life, where pilgrims can move closer to the God they seek, where one leaves that which is familiar and journeys into the Divine Presence. They are stopping places where men and women are given pause to wonder about what lies beyond the mundane rituals, the grief, trials and boredom of our day-to-day life.”

The three disciples with Jesus on the mountaintop find themselves in a “thin place” experience. Jesus is seemingly transformed, becoming dazzling white, and two of the giants of their faith, Moses and Elijah, appear next to him, and then to top it all off a voice comes from a cloud saying “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him.”

Peter does what just about anyone of us would want to do as well – he wants to capture the moment, to hold onto it, to not let it go. It is like not wanting to wake up from a wonderful dream. So he proposes that they build three tents, one for each of Moses, Elijah, and Jesus, so that they might remain there – and the few disciples with them. But Jesus will have none of that – he has work to do, and it lies ahead of him down in Jerusalem; and those who would follow him, they had work to do as well, down in the nitty-gritty of a suffering world groaning for salvation. The message is clear – there is no short-cut to glory for Jesus or for those who would follow him, and thin place visions are not ends in and of themselves, but doorways to renewed mission. More even than milestones on the journey of faith, they are instead guideposts, pointing the way ahead to a greater fullness and meaning of life.

Our challenge here is two-fold.

The first is to be present to those thin place moments that are given us. They can be anywhere, you don’t have to go to Iona or to a mountaintop – although it may help if, like those disciples long ago, we can be intentional about seeking out a sacred apart from the hustle and bustle of the everyday,  to open ourselves to the possibility of meeting God there. For example, come to worship together, hoping and maybe even expecting to encounter God in the words, music, community, silence and spirit here. But those thin place moments can be anywhere – out in nature, in the hospital room, in the embrace of a loved one, in your face reflected in a mirror. (But probably not on the golf course, at least not on Sunday morning!)

Our second challenge is to take those “aha” moments and let them change us. To understand that while these moments are to be cherished, even treasured for a lifetime, they are not given as an end in themselves, but to call us forward in new directions; to call us forward in paths that will take us not away from the world and its complexity and its needs and its suffering, but towards and through the world and our brothers and sisters which fill it.  

Thin places, my friends, should lead to full lives. Amen.