There are moments where I become keenly aware that I’m not just body and mind, I’m spirit too. Moments where something deep in me connects with something much, much bigger. It feels like…

Deep Awe.

Irrepressible Hope.

Illogical Peace.

Quiet Love.

The Celts had a great description for these places – they called them ‘thin’. As in, the divide between natural and supernatural seems thinner than what we normally experience. For those celtic seekers, ‘thin places’ were locations. For me, these moments are strongest as I…

 

Stand beside death-beds, as loved ones slip from life to death.

Birth my children into this world.

Lay awake in the dark of the night, asking questions about life and purpose and meaning.

 

How often do we rail against these moments? We fight death, we fear birth and we do our damndest to make sure we’re too busy, or too drunk, or too social in the hope we can ignore what’s happening under the surface of our skin.

But the noumena calls out loudest in these moments, grabs our face with both hands and forces us to look at the spiritualness of our humanity. These moments arrest us and remind us that there is more. And we are more. And this life is not all. And death is not all.

 

For a Christian, it isn’t enough to visit thin places a few times in a calendar year, ignoring the relationship between physical & spiritual the rest of the time (I’m looking at you, Sundays and Christmas and Easter)

For a Christian, the invitation is extended to us to live every single day thin. We are called to, daily, visit the thinnest place of all – the foot of the cross.

 

Here we can plumb the depths of true, fierce love.

Here we can surrender the smallness of ‘me’ into the immensity of Him.

Here we can experience life as a divine collision of heaven and earth.

 

Two questions for us all to consider…

Firstly, what helps you get to a thin place? The ocean? Singing at church? Star gazing? Meditation?

And, when was the last time you allowed yourself to truly pause, sink in and visit your thin place?