This evening, during Vespers, we will gather in silence in the cloister outside our church. Candles will be lit, holy water poured and sprinkled, sweet incense will curl its way through the air enveloping our senses, the organ will play and we will process slowly and solemnly into the church.
Thus begins a holy time in our Church's year, a liminal time, a time when we enter into what the Celts call "a thin place", when the veil between heaven and earth is very thin. All Hallows Eve, All Saints Day and All Souls Day are the special days when we remember our dead. These are blessed days, days of celebration but also days of deep memory and connection. May we enter into this time, this "thin place" with stillness, reverence, reflection and gratitude (Source)
One of North America’s most well-known Bible scholars, Marcus Borg of Oregon State University, devotes a chapter to thin places in his best-selling book, The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith.
Playing down parapsychological understandings of thin places, Borg goes for a more naturalistic definition. He says thin places do not need to be strictly understood as times of year or geographical zones.
Instead,
he calls on people to understand thin places as a universal metaphor —
for any time when the human heart is truly opened to the sacred, to the
presence of spirit
Borg believes there is a non-material dimension of reality. Thus, he says, we always live in two worlds — and thin places are places where these worlds meet, where the veil between the two realms is momentarily lifted.
As a liberal Christian, Borg thinks of a thin place as an entryway into “the commonwealth of God,” within which he says “we can move and breathe and have our being.” However, for Borg, thin places are not restricted to Christians.
I appreciate the way Borg says thin places occur almost anytime people open themselves through a “sacrament of the sacred” — which includes music, meditation, religious worship, nature experience, dream work, reading of scripture, silence, poetry, story, art and singing. Even an inspiring conversation can be a thin place.
In other words, Borg helpfully teaches that no one has to restrict the exploration of thin places to festive times of year, such as Halloween or Ghost Festivals, or to exceptional places, like famous “holy” spots.
Instead, religious or not, we can consider ourselves in a thin place almost any time we suddenly find ourselves alive to wonder, reverence and compassion. (Source)
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