The term ‘thin place’ occurs in Celtic writings and refers to a ‘sacred place’ where the presence of God is felt keenly, a place where ‘the boundary between heaven and earth seems especially thin’, where we sense God’s presence more easily. There is a Celtic saying that heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but in thin places the distance is even smaller! The poet Sharlands Sledge writes:
‘“Thin places,” the Celts call this space,
Both seen and unseen,
Where the door between the world
And the next is cracked open for a moment
And the light is not all on the other side.
God shaped space. Holy.’ (quoted here)
We have probably all experienced places we have visited where we have sensed God’s presence: the grandeur of a mountain scene, the beauty of the sea lapping in to shore, the stillness of a forest glade. In the Bible, there are plenty of holy places where God’s presence transformed the ordinary: Mount Sinai where God appeared to Moses and Bethel where God appeared to Jacob in a dream and Jacob woke saying ‘Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.‘ (Gen 28:16), for example. The New York times ran a feature about these kinds of places, calling them ‘places that beguile and inspire, sedate and stir, places where, for a few blissful moments I loosen my death grip on life, and can breathe again.’ Phil Wickham’s song ‘Heaven and Earth’ touches on this theme, saying:
This is the line we’re choosing now to cross
Between heaven and earth, heaven and earth’ (Phil Wickham, ‘Heaven and Earth’)
In his song ‘The Ascension‘, which looks at the pilgrims’ journey to Jerusalem as they sang the Psalms of Ascent (Ps 120-134), he sings ‘This is the start of something amazing, a moment when heaven touches earth.’ All of us need those moments, when heaven touches earth and our eyes are opened afresh to the wonder and grace of God.
Gabriella Llewellyn, in a series of blog posts entitled ‘The Thin Places’, says that ‘Thinness is breathable and transparent. It’s vulnerable and weak. Like dough overstretched, Thin Places are areas of defenselessness. And then sometimes, they’re places of sheer and breezy beauty.’ She goes on to identify moments of thinness when we feel vulnerable, weak, ill-equipped but acutely aware of God’s presence: moments of failure, of forgiveness, of service, of misunderstanding, of struggle. As Paul remarked, ‘when I am weak, then I am strong.‘ (2 Cor 12:10) Thin places remind us of paradox and breathtaking, unearned, undeserved mercy and grace. They are places filled with awe and a sense of the holiness of God.