Thin Places

Last night, one of our discussion questions was "where are the thin places where you feel especially close to the holy?"

A few nights earlier, as we met with the Bishop of St. Asaph, he described such places as where the threshold to the divine is palpable, where the boundary between heaven and earth is amorphous.

So we pondered just where in our lives we have that sense of being close to the holy.

It seemed as if each small discussion group got to that question almost simultaneously and I closed my eyes for a moment and listened as the pilgrims in the room started describing places here or in other locations where they had experienced being in a thin place.

Some had never heard of the notion or phenomena of thin places before this pilgrimage; some had experienced it in many places.

What was evident though is that for most the veil had been lifted at some point this week as this band of pilgrims wound back and forth through the north of Wales like a celtic knot.

At Basingwerk Abbey some heard the divine in the footsteps of the monks on the stone floors or felt it in the stones that ancient hands had cut and placed in walls that still stand in a reminder of God's permanence.

At several holy wells, the threshold was felt in the drops of water springing from the depths of the earth to cleanse, heal and refresh us as it has been doing for pilgrims for hundreds of years. Whether being immersed in a deep pool of healing water or blessing one another with a droplet from a tiny well, there was surely a sacred presence in the water felt by many.

This morning I looked back at some of the photos I have taken. What I saw was a litany of the thin places. On the faces of my fellow pilgrims captured in tiny digital images I saw peace, serenity, joy, and prayer. They had found their place to experience the holy sitting on ancient rocks, touching the  lake water where prayers had been lifted up for thousands of years, gazing at the works created by hands so long ago, defying the strength of the wind on a rocky cliff, or simply resting in the sun on the grass.

I know there are thin places that have been identified as such because they have been consistently thin for many people for many years, but I posit that each of us has a thin place or two that do not appear in any compendium of such sites.

So for those reading of our travels, "where are the thin places where YOU feel especially close to the holy?"

Me, you ask? I have a few thin places in my experience, but here I think it was walking out to an island at low tide and standing in the ruins of the tiny stone chapel and feeling a sense of oneness with those who had made that same trek centuries ago and felt the blessedness of that landscape and lifted their prayers on the sea breeze to heaven...