Feb.
1, 2004
It
is an ancient belief in Ireland that wells and caves are sacred places. Known in Celtic spirituality as “thin
places” between the mortal world above, these holes in the earth provide the channels by which fairies, leprechauns
and even demons can come out to be among us.
They are also the places where mortals like ourselves are most likely to
travel to the other world, deep into mother earth. The stories of heroes from Hercules in Greek myth to the Norse
hero Balewolf, each travel to the underworld to rescue a woman, the feminine
energy necessary to life on earth, through these thin places.
In every spiritual tradition there is an
understanding of these thin places of the soul where we can have access to the
divine. In the Hebrew bible, almost
every spiritual encounter with a man and a woman happens at a well. Jacob finds Rebecca; Jesus converts the
Samaritan woman at the well, near the access to the divine. Even our own tradition recognizes thin
places. Henry David Thoreau during his
sojourn at Walden Pond wrote of this magical pond that “earth’s eye looked into
the beholder measuring the depth of its own nature.” I know that some of you have experienced the Divine in this
way. The tender beauty of a misty
morning in the forest, the splendor of a rosy dawn stretching her fingers
towards the day, the awe of bright green pine trees against a stark blue sky.
But not all these thin places are actual
places. “A thin place is anywhere our
hearts are opened,” writes Marcus Borg.
“They are places where the boundary between the two levels becomes very
soft, porous, permeable. Thin places
are places where the veil momentarily lifts and we behold (the “ahaah of The
Divine”)….all around us and in us”. (Borg’s The
Heart of Christianity, 2003)
Thin places are those moments of clarity
beset by the deepest emotions we can feel.
In our class on esoteric Christianity we have been exploring some of
these thin places. From the earliest
days of the movement there were those who claimed that there was no need for
priests or intermediaries to experience the Divine because the Divine was all
around us. Such a transparency is at
the heart of every religious tradition; the Buddha taught that the heart of his
teaching rested in each of us like a Lotus waiting to bloom, Jesus proclaimed
that the kingdom of God was all around us yet we do not see, the Sufi mystics
of Islam taught that we are in fact God already, the great Jewish prophet
Isaiah called this infusive spirit a coal of God upon our lips. Thomas Merton, the great Trappist Monk
wrote:
“Life
is this simple. We are living in a
world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shinning through us all the
time. This is not just a fable or a
nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God, forget
ourselves, we see it… But, of course,
for most of us, myself included, it is hard to see these thin places, much less
travel through them. How can we set
aside the worries of our lives, the very real concerns of money, relationships,
stresses and strains and “be” one with the Divine. Fine we might say for a monk sitting alone without a care in the
world but hardly possible for the rest of us ‘dirt dwellers’. I believe that in order to sense and travel
through these thin places towards what we may not know, we must see our world
in a different ways. Its not that our
world changes but we change how we see our world.
This process of transformation begins with
our imagination. I am reminded here of
the words of Einstein I used last week “Imagination is more powerful than
knowledge.” What did he mean by
that? What he meant was that knowledge
follows where our imagination begins. And we will see those thin places when we
let our imagination take us where we will let it. Remember, the spiritual journey is not rocket science, we aren’t here to prove anything,
just to help see the Holy and be transformed in the practice.
Imagination
changes the way we look at our world.
Remember the last time you had a tragedy in your life. I can remember losing my last business. Despite 16-hour days and selling door to
door, the bills coupled with my divorce and a pretty bad drinking problem left
me completely lost. For months I
watched, it seemed helplessly at the time, as my business, like my life, was
slipping into bankruptcy. We I finally
did file and put my assets up for auction I remembered thinking “this is
it..the end.” I couldn’t see how this
would lead anywhere.
Had I used my imagination I could have started
to see, much sooner, how such a moment was a thin place. As it was, I was helped along the way. A good friend of mine, a truck driver by
nature and a recovering alcoholic by history, scooped my sorry soul up and took
me on a truck driving road trip. We saw
the expanse of the prairie, ate terribly bad food, laughed (he even let me
drive the rig for a bit) and as the miles melted away I put my life into
perspective. It was a moment of thin
place, a moment of grace. Coincidences
that led me on to other opportunities; my time in a American Baptist Church
that first turned me towards ministry, meeting someone there who knew someone
on the East Coast who hired me sight unseen, who then knew someone else who
connected me with Francis, who, as her own deeply spiritual self, opened up in
me a call to this vocation of ministry.
Looking back on it now, it all began with that thin place of my failure
and a guide to set me on my way.
The journey through the thin places of our
lives begins when we let our imaginations explain the so-called coincidences of
our lives. While I can’t tell you what
the mystery of the universe is, I do know that each and everyone of you is a
part of something much greater than our day to day lives suggest. Remember that tragedy. What happened next? How did your live change because of it? The Chinese ideogram for tragedy is crisis
and opportunity. More often than not
those tragic moments are thin places to the Divine. Pay attention to them.
I hold that there are no
coincidences, just openings to your destiny.
This is not to say you don’t have a choice here. But realize that you are presented choices
for a reason. The question is: will it
be your fear of what might happen that holds you back or your imagination that
a thin place is before you that guides you forward? “Two roads diverged in yellow wood” writes the often quoted
Robert Frost “and I, I took the one less traveled by and that made all the
difference.
Like any journey we are, I believe,
constantly travelling through these thin places. They are not always easy to see.
We have to balance out our sense of reason (the cost/benefit analysis of
the soul) with the inclination of our hearts.
You need both, along with a healthy imagination, to realize that
everything, yes, everything, happens to us for a reason. It is up to us to imagine the reasons and
then have the courage to travel through those thin places to a new place.
Thomas Khun, a German philosopher, referred
to these new ways of looking at the world as “paradigm shifts”. There have been many such shifts in the
history of humanity; from seeing ourselves at the mercy of capricious gods to
understanding the forces of nature, from seeing the body as place of spirits
and humors to a living, working organism, from telling our stories through art
and spoken words to the left brained dominance of the written word, from magic
to science to something new. I believe
we are in the midst of another such shift in our very worldview now. Long dominated by the faculty of reason, we
are beginning to sense that there is another kind of knowledge available to us,
which may someday even compliment our reasonable abilities and I call this
“spiritual reality”. I, and certainly
many others, are sensing that we have an emerging talent to see the world
differently; not with ourselves so much subject to the winds of fate, but
learning some deeply embedded lesson with the fate that can actually guide us
if we see it as something other than what is happening to us. This is a paradigm shift of potentially
tremendous proportions, one in which we see our lives as embedded with lessons
and opportunities for growth and not lives that must be simply survived.
The mystics of old suggest that there may
even be a larger purpose to our collective existence beyond what we see
now. They suggest that we are actually
in the process of remembering in these coming generations what we already know
in our souls. Some calls this
remembering the God within. Some say
these thin places are only the way home.
Recently one of my colleagues reminded me
that we can only approach this possibility if we are able to engage our sense
of awe (remember this is one of the prerequisites to be an enchanted agnostic)
and humility that we might actually learn something new when we let our
imaginations take over.
Perhaps we are, after all, only remembering
who we already are. I close with the
story of the little girl who, upon the arrival of her baby brother, insisted
that she spend some time alone with him.
Her parent agreed but listened in on the baby monitor as she closed the
door and walked over to his bed. After
a minute of silence, she said asked quite firmly: “Tell me about God, I have
almost forgotten.” Perhaps ours will be
such a journey of remembering as well, through the thin places of the
spirit. Amen.