Thin Places
As a student, I visited a chapel attached to a monastery in Normandy. The group I was with sang a simple acapella chorus. It felt ethereal, special, as if access to God had somehow been made closer. There was a sense of uniting with the thousands of others who would have sung in that building over centuries.
A couple of years later, I found myself in Baños de Agua Santa, Ecuador, and with the day free, I decided to hike up the steep trail in the mountainside, following the route of the Stations of the Cross. The panoramic views were incredible, high in the clouds, like a flavour or glimpse of heaven. Despite being on my own, the sensation of presence and the immediacy of something otherworldly was strong.
Celtic Christianity uses the language of ‘thin’ or ‘liminal’ spaces to describe these sorts of experiences. They evoke the sort of idea that you are on the threshold, where the distance between what we understand as the material and the spiritual or divine seeps away. Thin places can lead to profound religious experiences.
I have recently been involved in some discussions around this notion of thin places at Ocean Church. We have considered what qualities a location has that means it is a thin place. Some may have a history of worshippers being present. Others may contain a beauty, natural or man-made, evoking something that resonates in many people. Regardless of these characteristics, most of us would recognise that some places we have been to seem different or mystical somehow.
From my understanding of Celtic Christianity, there was less of a separation in their philosophy between the material and the spiritual, things of the earth and things of heaven. This can lead us to consider, what areas of our lives can we recast or create as thin places? If we reject the dualism of the sacred and the secular, we can intentionally look for God in more areas of our lives. In the quiet, in the everyday tasks, in our conversations, in the times when we are with our families or friends and choose to reframe the situation as, “I get to do this!” God is present and sometimes we need to open our eyes wider to see or attune our ears and hearts to listen.
Choice seems important. Thin places often seem to be experienced when you choose to climb the mountain, enter the building or intentionally open our souls to what is already there. What one choice today can we make to make an encounter, a task, a free ten minutes a thin place, taking us closer to that threshold where we can meet the divine?
