Thin places

Thin places.  Not on my body, you may be thinking, and you would be right, except for my very narrow feet, too narrow for most shoes.  No, not on my body but haphazardly throughout my life, I experience thin places, times in my life when I have eyes to see God’s hand.  I never knew what to call these moments, coincidences, or miracles (minor or otherwise) until I, along with other Disciples’ women, stepped into the realm of the ordinary being extraordinary at the annual spiritual writing retreat the past two summers.  And it was this newfound awareness that led me to read the memoir Thin Places by Mary E. DeMuth.  Let me share a few paragraphs from the opening chapter with you:

             I, myself, am a thin place.      
            The Celts define a thin place as a place where heaven and the physical world collide, one of
     those serendipitous territories where eternity and the mundane meet. Thin describes the membrane
     between the tow worlds, like a piece of vellum, where we see a holy glimpse of the eternal--
     not in digital clarity, but clear enough to discern what lies beyond.
            Thin places are snatches of holy ground, tucked into the corners of our world, where, if we
     pay very close attention, we might just catch a glimpse of eternity.  Legend has it that thin places
     are places for pilgrims, where ghostlike echoes of those gone before can be felt and heard,
     where the Ancients whisper their wisdom near the ruins of a church or the craggy outcropping of
     a rock.  In this way, a thin place is an ancient doorway to the fairy-tale netherworld--a fanciful
     notion that children embrace and adults find preposterous.
             Maybe it’s my own imagination that hopes for real thin places on this earth.  I’m a storyteller,
     after all, prone to wander in make-believe worlds.  I’d like to believe in portals to eternity--Narnia
     doors beckoning me onward and upward.  Even so, I’m broadening the metaphor a bit.  Thin
     places are snatches of time, moments really, when we sense God intersecting our world in tangible,
     unmistakable ways.  They are aha moments, beautiful realizations, when the Son of God bursts
     through the hazy fog of our monotony and shines on us afresh.
    He has come near to my life.  I will tell you how.

Mary shares her life with her readers.  She tells of traumatic things that happened to her as a child that continue to impact her life today, and she also tells of the lovely things that she has experienced.  In each case, she identifies the part that God played.

When I opened the book, I was intrigued immediately upon reading that first sentence above (actually the second paragraph), “I, myself, am a thin place.”  I’d never thought of myself, my person and being, as a thin place, but I've started thinking about it.  We know from the Word that we are aliens in this land.  We are not of this world, yet, we live here as God’s children.  As Christians, do we wander always at the intersection of the spiritual and physical worlds?  Am I a thin place, and are you?