Thin Places Within and Without

 Today, my thoughts turn to Celtic Christianity which has appealed to me from time to time on the edges of my spiritual life.  At times I regret that I do not pay attention to it more regularly and more deeply.  However, whenever I come across explorations of it, I am reminded of its deep resonance which I feel within.

Perhaps it is appropriate that it is on the edges – liminal – to my spiritual life, as Celtic Spirituality is very much about being on the borders and edges.  It speaks about the thin places in our lives. both physically and spiritually, where the boundaries between our physical life and our spiritual life are not so firm and clear.  I have experienced thin places from time to time and am always grateful when they occur.

For me, the other great strength of Celtic Spirituality is the appreciation it brings to everyday things in life being grounded in the natural world.  It recognizes and embraces that God is in the everyday things of life and seems to have a prayer for just about every activity that you might engage in.  I adapted a Celtic prayer for students for a prayer that I use before a spiritual direction meeting:

Celtic Prayer for Spiritual Direction 

Bless this time, in the name of the Three who are over us.

Bless this time, in the name of the One who guides us.

Open our eyes to see how our lives

Can reflect something of You.

Aid us in understanding Your will

With our hearts as well as our minds

Give us the wisdom to discern Your intention for us;

The strength to follow the path You prepare for us;

And Your comfort on the journey You offer to us.

Amen  

People are probably most familiar with Celtic Spirituality through the hymn known as St. Patrick’s Breastplate or a Deer’s Cry: 

I bind unto myself today
the strong name of the Trinity
by invocation of the same,
the Three in One and One in Three.

I won’t repeat all the many verses here.  Versions can be found on the internet.  Here is one most appropriately performed in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Ireland, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWdZ13cH5lU

The part which resonates most with me, but is not included in many versions, has the bridge which connects the verses binding us to God with the understanding that Christ which binds us to God is within me and in all things and in all times:

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ to seek me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me;
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ sustaining all who love me,
Christ uniting friend and stranger!

I invite you to look out for those thin places on your journey.

 

The Thin Places in Your Life

I have been thinking about “Thin Places” for a while.  The idea of a Thin Place is one that first came to my awareness some years ago when I was first introduced to Celtic Spirituality.  One definition of Thin Places that I found on the internet is, “A place where the boundary between heaven and earth is especially thin. It’s a place where we can sense the divine more readily.” 

I was reintroduced to the concept recently when I attended a workshop held at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London Ontario in May.  The idea of thin places was central to one of the presentations given by Rt. Rev. Barry Clarke who is the retired Bishop of Montreal and currently the interim Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral.  In the workshop he was leading he asked the participants where their thin places are.  My response was “on the beach near our cottage in Prince Edward Island.  Actually that was not completely true.  There are many places here in P.E.I., including the beach (appropriately named Back Beach), that are my thin places. 

Although it is part of Celtic Spirituality, it is a part of anyone’s Spirituality whether it is formally Celtic or not.  My Thin Places include the Apple Farm Community where I go for retreats.  Apple Farm, in Three Rivers Michigan is a community founded by Helen Luke who wrote wonderful essays exploring biblical and classical themes and reveals deep spiritual wisdom contained in them. Her magnum opus is Dark Wood to White Rose which explores the wisdom in Dante’s Divine Comedy.  Helen chose the location of Apple Farm as it was for her a Thin Place as it has become for me. 

For a place to be a Thin Place does not mean that it is paradise and that life will not intrude when you are there.  Since arriving at our cottage at the beginning of June, life has intruded in different way.  The weather has been less than perfect with only a few days that would be considered a ‘beach day’. Lorna is particularly frustrated that her gardens are not doing much with the cool weather.  We have also had a few mishaps such as having to replace the glass in the door of the wood stove and I have had to deal with squirrels invading by Bunkie which is my thin place within a larger thin place where I can retreat to do much of my writing.   It is my small corner as the children’s hymn says:

Jesus bids us shine with a clear, pure light,
Like a little candle burning in the night;
In this world of darkness so we must shine,
You in your small corner, and I in mine.

The idea of a Thin Place is more than just a sense of being closer to God than usual—although that is very valuable.  It is a place where we can begin to question our perception of the world.  We can begin to see that there is more to life than our small corners where we believe we are safe and comfortable.  We can begin to question our assumptions of how the world is ordered, our understanding of God’s will, and even our understanding of God.  Richard Rohr addressed this in a recent Daily Meditation:

We keep praying that our illusions will fall away. God erodes them from many sides, hoping they will fall. But we often remain trapped in what we call normalcy—"the way things are." Life then revolves around problem-solving, fixing, explaining, and taking sides with winners and losers. It can be a pretty circular and even nonsensical existence.

To get out of this unending cycle, we have to allow ourselves to be drawn into sacred space, into liminality. All transformation takes place here. We have to allow ourselves to be drawn out of "business as usual" and remain patiently on the "threshold" (limen, in Latin) where we are betwixt and between the familiar and the completely unknown… There alone is our old world left behind, while we are not yet sure of the new existence. That's a good space where genuine newness can begin. 

Do you have a Thin Place?  I would be interested in hearing what yours is.  Blessings.

Lord Give Me Patience

I was planning to write about the concepts of ‘thin places’ which is one particularly in Celtic Spirituality.  However, I ran into a challenge this morning with my computer and spent most of the morning trying to figure out how to get my computer display back to normal.  All of a sudden completely spontaneously various apps in the internet were displayed in what I can call a manner which were not to my liking  (taking out the expletives from my reaction).  My gmail appeared in tiny text as did other displays on the internet.  The more I tried to correct it and reset my computer back to the original settings the worse it go.  At one point Huffington Post which is one of my main sources for news appeared on the only half of the screen (it was the right half which was ironic form a site that is generally not right wing in its perspective.  I tried various things like restarting my electronic companion which didn’t help and googling for help was of limited help as the print was too small to read easily.  I finally got a helpful hint to zoom the screen display by using control +.  This worked and everything seems to be fine—until next time when things happen seemingly spontaneously (of course it could never be my fault). 

I any case, once things seemed to be back to normal I then checked out the recent Daily Meditations from Richard Rohr to get caught up thinking this would be a least something productive I could do.  The first one I looked at dealt with patience.  Well not being one to pass up an occurrence of synchronicity I decided to pass on the message on practicing patience.  For those of you not familiar with the concept of synchronicity, it is a concept which was explored and developed by Carl Jung which simply put is a significant coincidence.  If two or more things happen that seem to have no direct connection but are related in a meaningful way they may have happened for a reason.  In any case I was, to put it mildly, impatient with the events around the behaviour of my computer and I received a message about practicing patience.  Below is the message about practicing patience: 

Brother Joseph Schmidt writes of a time when Thérèse of Lisieux counseled someone who was impatient with her own impatience:

 Thérèse was asking the sister . . . Can you be willing to be patient with yourself until God gives you the grace to be patient with the sisters? Can you accept and love yourself and not become your own adversary? Can you bear serenely the distress and personal trial of knowing that you have the weakness of impatience? Success in virtue is not the point. Love--love of the sisters in their weakness and love of yourself in your inadequacy--that, Thérèse was trying to say, is the point.

 So I invite you to practice patience. It surely does take practice, and God will no doubt allow you many opportunities to learn. When you are in a hurry or impatient for some particular outcome, first observe the sensation in your body. Notice what this impatience feels like, where it shows up--for example, your jaw, neck, chest, or gut. Be present to the feeling. Slowly expand your awareness to include what your senses are taking in from the outside world--what you see, touch, smell, or taste. Be present to this moment. Let the reality of both your impatience and the outer reality be as they are, without your attachment to them. It is what it is. And all is grace.

My God give me the patience to practice patience.  Blessings