I came across two articles written in
2012, and a blog, that reflect on the notion of thin places. It arises out of
Celtic spirituality in Scotland. I understand that in instead of thinking of
heaven and earth as at opposite ends, the Celts believed they were about three
feet apart. Sometimes, they thought, that distance was even smaller --small
enough for those on Earth to get a glimpse of the glory of heaven. The Celts
believed that Iona is a place where people could feel that thinness and
experience the kind of revelations and feelings that one might have when so
close to the holy. They believed that was true of other places as well, usually
places far away from the crowd and wrapped in both mist and mystery.
The Isle of Iona in Scotland is a
tiny, windswept place in the western Hebrides off the western coast of
Scotland. It is a skinny little island, only about 3.5 miles long and 1.5 miles
wide, but it has become the destination of hundreds of people each year who
brave a long journey involving trains, boats, busses to get there. It is a
quiet place. Only about one hundred people there. You might have even seen
Celtic crosses, and the island has a large one. I discovered that no matter how
thin a place it might be, when it comes to the weather, Suzanne and I would not
want to go. It seems that the rain and wind off the North Sea can drive right
through you, no matter what type of gear you have. In any case, the monks who
live there welcome visitors from all over the world, searching for something
missing in their souls.
The famous 20th century Trappist
monk Thomas Merton once wrote that thin places are even more prevalent than the
ancient Celts believed, but we just do not see them.
"Life is simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely
transparent, and God is shining through it all the time ... if we abandon
ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes ... the only thing
is that we don't (let ourselves) see it." - Pennington, M. Basil, A Retreat With Thomas Merton, Element,
Rockport, MA 1988.
Perhaps the greatest problem in the
thin-place metaphor, apart from its lack of biblical support, is the worldview
it assumes and the implications that flow from this worldview. A thin place is,
by definition, an exception to the rule. Moreover, the rule states that this
world and the heavenly world are separated by a thick barrier. God is on the
other side of the barrier, mostly separate from the world, except for unusually
thin places in which he makes himself known. This worldview is common, but it
is not biblical. Scripture teaches us to see God as much more involved in this
world than the thin place metaphor assumes.[1]
Jürgen Moltmann said in God in Creation (Chapter 7) that one of
the places he thought Karl Barth got it wrong as that heaven and earth are not
dualities. He prefers to think of the Father creating “heaven and earth” as
affirmed in the creed is a way of saying that earth opens up to heaven. The earth,
in a sense, has an upward drift toward God. In the context of this reflection,
earth may have more thin places, it may have more traces of the divine as
Moltmann put it, than we acknowledge.
Preacher Philips Brooks experienced
his own thin place in Christmas week of 1865.
After an early dinner,
we took our horses and rode to Bethlehem. It was only about two hours when we
came to the town, situated on an eastern ridge of a range of hills, surrounded
by its terraced gardens. It is a good-looking town, better built than any other
we have seen in Palestine. ... Before dark, we rode out of town to the field
where they say the shepherds saw the star. It is a fenced piece of ground with
a cave in it (all the Holy Places are caves here), in which, strangely enough,
they put the shepherds. The story is absurd, but somewhere in those fields we
rode through where the shepherds must have been. ... As we passed, the
shepherds were still "keeping watch over their flocks or leading them home
to fold."
Several years later Brooks sat down to pen a hymn about the
experience. The result is the beloved carol "O Little Town of
Bethlehem," a moving meditation on the power of place to inspire
believers. Truly, it felt to Brooks -- both at the time, and as he wrote about
it later -- that "the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee
tonight."
Emerson, Susan. "Appreciating thin places."
Gloucester Times, June 3, 2010.
http://www.gloucestertimes.com/lifestyle/x1910025572/Appreciating-thin-places.
Viewed June 7, 2012.
Weiner, Eric. "Where heaven and Earth come
closer." The New York Times, March 11, 2012, 10.
[1]
--Mark Roberts, "Thin Places," a 2012 blog entry on patheos.com.
patheos.com/blogs/markdroberts/series/thin-places. Retrieved June 19, 2012.
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