Thin Places (Part I)
A thin place, according to the ancients, was the small space between heaven and Earth, and if you could find such a space, you were indeed blessed. Was — is — Bethlehem such a place?
The Isle of Iona in Scotland is a tiny, windswept place in the western Hebrides off the western coast of Scotland. It’s a skinny little island, only about 3.5 miles long and 1.5 miles wide, but it’s the destination of hundreds of people each year who brave a long journey involving trains, boats, busses for and more boats to get there.
At first glance it’s hard for people to tell what the big deal is. Sure, it’s a quiet place where you can get away from the sounds of civilization. Only about a hundred people live on the island, given its remote location. And while it’s a beautiful place with emerald green grass, old stone buildings, and a landscape dotted with sheep that far outnumber the people, it’s also a place where the rain and wind off the North Sea can drive right through you no matter how good your rain gear might be.
And yet, there’s something mystical about this place — the place where Saint Columba landed sometime in the sixth century to establish a monastic community, having fled his native Ireland. The old, 12th-century abbey that still stands on the east side of the isle acts as a sentinel of the island’s past. It was there the monks welcomed many visitors who came to the island, searching for something missing in their souls. They were people who knew the early reputation of the place as what the native Celts called a “thin place.”
Christmas, a thin place
Unlike so many Westerners who think that heaven is some place far away and far removed from Earth, the Celts believed that heaven and Earth were really 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 was (and still is by many) 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 famous 20th century Trappist monk Thomas Merton once wrote that thin places are even more prevalent than the ancient Celts believed, but we just don’t see them. “Life is simple,” he wrote. “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.” We miss those glimpses of the kingdom of God, breaking in on the earth, which is ironic given the fact that Jesus taught us to pray that we might see the kingdom come “on earth as it is in heaven.”
Perhaps one of the most significant thin places and thin spaces we miss on a regular basis is the celebration of Christmas. In the midst of all the last-minute preparations for Christmas Eve tomorrow night and Christmas morning soon after, we can be caught up in thinking that this is just another Christmas season with the same traditions and myriad obligations (most of them self-imposed) that require all of our attention. We can miss the fact that Christmas really calls us to consider the thinnest place the world has ever seen — not an island, but a manger; and not a feeling, but a person in whom heaven and Earth both fully dwell.
~Mark Roberts, “Thin Places,” a 2012 blog entry on patheos.com, retrieved in Homiletics, November/December 2012, Volume 24, Number 6
