Thin Places

By Pastor Paul Gauche

Today I’m thinking about ‘Thin Places’ … as in that moment or those places where heaven and earth seem to touch.

Or at least come very, very close.

We experience this far more often than we know, but explaining it, trying to attach words to it is really the big challenge. But since I’m always up for a challenge let me give it a try.

Rooted deeply in the Celtic tradition, a ‘thin place’ is where the veil between what we would call heaven and what we know as earth is nearly transparent. It’s a place where we experience a deep sense of God’s presence in our everyday world. A ‘thin place’ then, is where, for just a brief moment the spiritual world and the natural world intersect right here, right now.

You get this, don’t you? It’s that moment when your 6 year-old granddaughter looks at you and says, “I love you.” And while she’s doing that she pantomimes; she points to herself, then makes the heart shape with your two sweet little hands, and then points to you.

It’s what you experience when you watch the sun rise up over a mountain range, or the sun set into the ocean.

It’s what happens inside of you when you walk into a bakery and smell the aroma of the fresh bread that just came out of the oven.

It’s what you experience when you put that first spoonful of tomato basil soup in your mouth and it makes you sit back and close your eyes as you swallow.

It’s what happens when you touch someone or someone touches you and you think to yourself, “this is absolutely heavenly, this is Divine…” because it is.

There are moments when we do feel God, Spirit, the Sacred, the Divine leaning into our world, leaning into us. When that happens we feel very connected to and “in tune” with God. This is more than a cognitive, intellectual knowing. It’s an experience of what we might call spirited knowing. It’s what we mean when we say that we’re feeling something ‘deep inside.’ This experience of a moment or a place where the physical and natural everyday world merges into a thin line is well rooted in biblical history. But it was the Celtic Christians who gave the descriptive phrase “thin place” to it.

It’s in this thin space that we might say something like “Wow”, “Whoa”, or “Amen”.

Or we’d more likely not say anything at all.

Paul Gauche is the Pastor of Life Transitions at Prince of Peace. His posts are part of his #100days50words project, where be blogs about a different word each day. You can follow his project on Instagram (@pgauche), or on his blog, Thriving Rhythms.