Thin Places
Last Saturday the five residents of Trinity House and I had a retreat together. It’s an important part of how we begin a new year of intentional community at Trinity House, the house next door to the church at 5 Harvard Avenue. Our theme for the retreat was ‘Spiritual Health’. Not only did we tend to our own spiritual health by spending a beautiful first day of fall in the Gatineau hills, but we also talked about spiritual health and its various components.
We talked about connecting with the divine, we talked about questions of meaning and purpose. But the component of spiritual health that seemed to resonate the most strongly with us on that particular day, the aspect that generated the most conversation and reflection, was when we talked about our experiences of awe and wonder.
When do you experience awe and wonder in your life? Who do you talk to about it? And how do those experiences shape you?
In our first reading from Genesis, Jacob has an experience of awe and wonder. It’s not what we’re expecting. It’s not what he expected, it rarely is. Jacob is on the run. He has just swindled his brother Esau out of the family inheritance, and Esau is in a murderous mood, vowing to kill his brother. So mom Rebekah intervenes and warns Jacob, tells him to flee, to escape across the Judean desert to Haran, Rebekah’s brother’s home, far away, where he can, hopefully, wait out Esau’s wrath.
That’s where we meet Jacob in today’s reading. A swindler, alone, on the run, despondent, in the wilderness. “He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down. And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And the Lord stood beside him.”
And when Jacob awoke from his sleep he said “How awesome is this place!”
The ancient Celts had a name for places like this, those unexpected places where heaven and earth seem to touch. They called them thin places. “Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter.”[i] In the poetry of scripture, these are the places where you can see the angels of God ascending and descending. The places where God shows up.
It is a constant theme in our scriptures, God showing up. God showed up for Moses in the burning bush, for Jacob as he slept in the desert, for Isaiah in the temple, for Jesus at his baptism, for Nathanael as he prayed under a fig tree, for Paul on the road to Damascus. Most of the time, this divine showing up catches people by surprise and creates an experience of awe and wonder. It can be disruptive. It can change us. And it doesn’t just happen to good people, after all, both Jacob and Paul were clearly on the other side of the ledger when they experienced their thin places.
This shouldn’t surprise us. The God who is revealed to us in Jesus is not a God who is distant, but a God who is close, who draws near to us, a God who is with us, who cares for us, all of us. “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go,” God tells Jacob in his dream. The God who is made known to us in Jesus is not a God who is passive, but a God who is active, who cares, who blesses us, who reveals himself to us. A God whom we can experience, in thin places.
Where are your thin places? When were the moments in your life where the distance between heaven and earth collapsed and you were able to catch a glimpse of the divine, or perhaps simply felt something that was beyond your normal experience? Often these are liminal experiences, where we find ourselves on the threshold between what we know and what we don’t.
They’re easy to miss. Many of us lead busy lives. We tend to be oriented towards the practical, the urgent, the concrete. Sometimes people like me lament that these moments where heaven and earth touch seem to be few and far between. But when I reflect on that, I think that maybe it’s because when God does speak, when the Spirit of God does act in our lives, we often miss it. We aren’t paying attention, we don’t have the time, we walk right past the burning bush rather than turning aside. We haven’t developed the spiritual vision that enable us to be attentive to God in our midst.
The good news for us here is that there are spiritual practices and disciplines that are available to us, practices that have been formed and shaped by our tradition and that are offered to us for our spiritual growth, that can help us to become more attentive to the divine around us. The most important and foundational of these practices is prayer, in its many forms. But there’s more. A second practice is the one that really resonated with our group at our Trinity House retreat, and that is, to pay attention to our experiences of awe and wonder, and to talk about what happened. Poor Jacob, in the days following his thin place experience, Jacob had no one with him in the desert to talk about how awesome it was, but eventually, he did tell his story, and we’re still telling it to this day.
You know these stories. There are the famous ones, the examples in scripture that I mentioned, Martin Luther King Jr’s kitchen table experience, St. Francis in the church of San Damiano – but I’m more interested in your stories.
I believe that there are many thin places, places and moments, where we can be deeply aware of the presence of God in our ordinary, daily lives.
For me one of the thin places that I recall most vividly was on the corner of Division and Princess Street in Kingston in the fall of 1981. I was in second year at Queen’s and I was riding my bike to class as I did pretty much every morning. On that particular morning, there was a red light when I got to Princess Street and so I stopped. And in that moment, as I sat on my bike with one foot on the ground for balance, the sun seemed to turn golden, and I had a wonderful sensation of warmth, and an overwhelming feeling that God was with me and for that moment which may have lasted a second but seemed to last much longer, I knew, I just knew that all was well.
If you have ever read the poetry of Mary Oliver, you’ll know that she is a poet who is well-tuned to her experiences of awe and wonder. She has this advice for us, offered in her poem Sometimes:
Instructions for Living a Life
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
Where are your thin places? When were, when are the moments in your life when the distance between heaven and earth seems even shorter than usual? The moments that we can reflect on later, and say with Jacob, “surely the Lord is in this place – and I didn’t know it!” How awesome is that?
And who are you going to tell?
Amen.
Homily. St. Michael & All Angels. September 29 2024
Readings: Genesis 28.10-17; Psalm 103.19-22; Revelation 12.7-12; John 1.47-51
Image by Yeowatzup, Creative Commons
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