February, 2008
Posted by Administrator (holytrin) on Mar 26 2008 at 2:46 PM
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In my reading this week, I came across a phrase and concept I had not heard before: “thin places.”  It is an idea that comes to us from the Celts, the ancient peoples of Britain and Ireland.  They used this term for those places and times when it seems like the veneer of reality is a little thinner, where heaven is a little closer.  They called these “thin places” – places and times where heaven, where the holy, where the sacred is a little closer to our every-day world.

Reading about this idea, I started to think about thin places in our own lives.  In our Cottage Meetings, I heard several people talking about the old sanctuary and Sherman and Lindsey, and a hint of longing would creep into their voices.  In unconsciously poetic language, they would talk of missing the silence of the sanctuary, the immediate reverence that it invoked just in walking in.  It connected me to something else I read, by another author: “I have known places… that seem to seep the same feeling from their walls as I got from this place, as though the prayers and joy and pain and angel-wrestling of the people who had worshipped here had, in some fashion, sunk into the very fabric of the joint.”  Thin places.

Or I think about people I have known: people through whom grace and God’s love seemed to pour through.  It is like their skin is thinner, and the light that they have known and worshipped for so long peeks out through their pores.  When you’re around them, you can’t help but sense it: they’ve known and loved God so well, and have been so loved, that it’s like they’ve been overfilled, and that gift seeps out of them.  Thin places.

And all this thinking about thin places and being around these people – where it feels like it’s just a little easier to see and touch God – has me thinking.  Lent begins this month, 6 ½ weeks of a journey through shadow and light.  A time of thinking and reflecting and repenting, a journey that makes us uncomfortable because it reminds us of what we can’t – and leads us to the One who can and did.  Lent is a thin place.

And we have this great gift, this phenomenal opportunity and blessing to start dreaming of our own, new thin place – a new sanctuary, a place to inspire and focus our reverence for the One who has been so good to us.  We get to dream and vision and clip pictures and visit other churches and imagine.  What will our thin place be like?

And isn’t the concept of a “thin place” really what our congregational mission is about?  Isn’t it really our hope and dream and task as disciples?  To be a thin place – a place where people are drawn, not just because of what’s happening, but because they can sense that the One who their heart has been longing for is a little closer, and that this community, this group of flawed and beautiful and loving people, have had an authentic experience with Jesus that changed us forever.  We’re called, and we long to be, and we hope to be, and we are – a “thin place.”

What a blessing, what a challenge, what an opportunity, what a grace – to long for and work for and be given the gift of drawing closer to Jesus in this community.  May your journey through Lent and beyond be one of drawing ever closer to that One who changed your life.

-Pastor Tim