Michelle Jackson - Thin Places

Michelle Jackson wrote this piece. First published in the Cross on October 9, 2005, it is posted here with her permission.

Thin Places

The Bible is a collection of accounts of human encounters with God, from the human point of view. (I am not a fundamentalist.) But who were these people, whose stories we read? They were Jews in the Old Testament and Jews and Greeks in the New Testament. The philosophies and cultures that are encompassed within these writings are specific to these people and have to do with their image of God, within their own time.

Who am I? I am of European ancestry, half Italian and half northern European. Over the years I have been working on how to incorporate the sacred text we call the Bible into my own personal history. I have struggled a bit with those scriptures that deal with the war-like images of God as a vengeful warrior. There is more to the God that I have come to know within my own life, than is contained within the images of the Bible. I began to wonder...what is the record of the encounters with God of the ancient Europeans?

We know something of the ancient Celts, for that is who they were, but they didn’t leave many written records; they were primarily an aural people. What we know is classified as anthropology, rather than theology. We know their artifacts reflect a deep affinity for the sacred in nature. Ireland has many stories of ‘thin places’ where the border between the less visible sacred and the more obvious profane was not so well defined, (profane originally meant ordinary, not obscene.) The ancient Celts, who lived all over Europe, were more in tune with an image of God as reflected in nature: water, trees, meadows, moon and sun and the seasons of life being some of their favorites.

When we read the Bible, we see that after the characters in these stories have an encounter with God, they commemorate the event by giving a special name to the place to denote that it is Sacred. The Old Testament is full of the names of wells and piles of rocks where people met God. If I were to name some holy places where I have encountered God in my own life, where would they be? Surely, Trinity Cathedral is first to come to mind, but it is only first among equals. My own back garden is another sacred place. If we Sacramentans were to define a sacred place somewhere in Sacramento, where might it be? At the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers, perhaps, or under a huge valley oak in one of the parks? In ancient times, each household also had their own private sacred objects. Where are yours? Where is mine? The Church took over this function, over time, and said that the only ‘real’ sacred places were altars in churches, presided over by priests.

Last winter, I erected a Celtic cross in my backyard, because I needed to recognize in a tangible way, that this is holy ground, for me. Repeatedly, this is a place where I have met the Holy One I call God. When my son came home from school he thought it was a headstone and asked me who died. Cemeteries are also thin places. Ancient people were more used to the idea that sacred was mixed in with ordinary, not so removed from the everyday. We have lost this way of thinking. I want to recapture it, and part of what I do as a spiritual director is to help individuals recognize how God is in their own lives.

The Church, in all its liturgical glory is a wonderful place, and I find that as often as I come to Holy Communion, I meet the God whom I saw at work in the garden. I honor this God in church, with God’s people, but I must also honor the other places where I meet God and God’s other creatures, the trees, the mice, the birds, the tomatoes, and possums. The sacred texts that we have come to call our Bible are a guideline for us as a record of a certain people with their own image of God, but we have codified them to the point that we are afraid to play with them. Where do you encounter God? What is your own story of these meetings? If you were to build an altar to commemorate your sacred encounter with the Holy, where would it be and what would you do on it? Where is your holy place? What is your God like?

The truth is that our lives are full of encounters with the Holy One, full of thin places. For each one, it will be different. Some feel close to God in nature, others feel close to God in relationship with others, and in service to others. I challenge you to seek out the God of your own life and give honor in a tangible way.