on holy ground

It was only a tool shed – a place for lawnmowers and rakes and bags of potting soil. But the moment I swung open the barn-red doors, I saw something else in this little shed tucked away in the woods – a cozy place to read, to write, to meditate and pray. My husband graciously stowed his tools in the garage and set about creating a place of solitude for me. It didn’t take much – a worn wicker couch, an old quilt, a small woodburner stove, some favorite books.

I began to spend hours there every morning, leaving the house before dawn, lantern in hand. It was a private place for me to meet with God, to sit in his presence,meditating on his words. I was meeting with my Lover in this place. It became our shared sacred space.

It took me by surprise one day when a visiting pastor entered my little tool shed and stopped in his tracks near the front door.  “This is a thin place” he said, sinking down into the old couch. Many minutes passed before he spoke again. “The veil is thin here.”

I’d never heard anyone talk of thin places before that day. I’d read about it in books and knew it as an old celtic phrase used to describe a place where the veil between heaven and earth is stretched taut – a place where the two worlds meet, where spirit touches matter, where heaven and earth kiss.  A place where the invisible is not necessarily unseen.

Thin places are often associated with wild, untamed places. I admit that I’ve experienced thin places in the hills of Ireland, the mountains of Switzerland, the ruins of Israel, and the monasteries and art museums of Italy – as well as my tiny rustic cabin in the woods. I have also experienced thin places in homeless shelters, mud hovels and remote jungle forests so hot that each breath sears your lungs.  Clearly it has nothing to do with place.

This is an an ongoing theme in my life, these thin places. As a matter of fact, on the days that I’m not talking myself out of it, I’m writing a book on the subject.  What I know I could write on the head of a pin, but here are a few opening thoughts on the matter…

God is everywhere and in everything. Thin places are more a matter of recognizing and embracing this fact.

A thin place exists where worship is thick. I remember well the starry night in a remote village when hostile villagers, worried that we had angered the ancestors, insisted on sacrificing a cow to appease them. The newly planted church congregation gathered under a grass roof in pitch darkness to worship together,  and they began to sing, in perfect 3-part harmony,  the Malagasy version of “there is power,power, wonder-working power in the blood of the Lamb/ in the precious blood of the Lamb.  Worship was thick, heaven touched earth and God came close.

A thin place exists where people are desperate. I’ve learned from personal experience that God runs to the desperate – like the father in the prodigal son parable. One night at a large city shelter, I watched as grown men – tough biker types – knocked chairs over in their eagerness to get to the front of the room for prayer. I remember tears streaming down the face and onto the shirt of a huge man with a big, bushy beard – a man who had lost everything.  I remember the presence of God that filled the room that night.

Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures and Handel’s Messiah teach me that a thin place exists where beauty is. Mother Teresa and my father who is battling cancer teach me that thin places exist where suffering lives. Frank Laubach and Hudson Taylor and my own weak flesh teach that the veil between heaven and earth stretches taut at the place of  failure and loss.

God is in everything – and all ground is holy ground for those that have eyes to see. So I’m learning to look and to listen and to expect the veil to thin out and God to appear out of nowhere.  Or out of everywhere.

Photo by Chris Barbalis on Unsplash