"This thinning between worlds happens not only in the physical terrain but also in the landscape of time, in the turning of the wheel of the year. The ancient Celts believed that at certain festival times, the gates to the otherworld opened. The living developed practices designed either to entice the spirits or — depending on the spirit — to keep them at bay. This awareness of those who have gone before us persists in the Christian tradition — as, for example, in the Feast of All Saints, which we celebrate on November 1, the traditional new year of the Celtic calendar, when the veil was at its thinnest.
"The rhythm of the Christian year offers its own thresholds, inviting us to enter into a deeper awareness of the God who dwells both within and beyond chronological time. As we spiral again and again through the liturgical seasons and holy days, we are called to move more deeply into the story of God, to notice how this story has unfolded in the lives of those who have gone before us, and in our own lives. As we move deeper into the story, it moves deeper into us.
"Thin places remind us that we travel in the presence of the communion of saints and in the company of the God who, in the person of Jesus, intersected and inhabited time. In taking flesh, God opened wide to time, to the effects of its passing, to the weight of chronology. Yet this God dwells also beyond time. It is a mystery, this simultaneous entering and shedding that God does with time. In the thin places, we are given a glimpse.
"May your journey through this day
offer a thin, thin place
where heaven and earth meet
and time falls away."
Thin Places Within
"There are also thin places that we carry within ourselves, our own stories, our own internal terrain. I know the places in my soul where the past makes its presence known, the occasions when memories surface, inviting my attention, encouraging me to see within them what I had not seen before. They come bearing comfort, or they come to offer questions.
"In these thin places I sometimes have a keen sense of the shadows of other lives — fleeting impressions of what might have happened if I had made a different choice or if another path had opened to me at a crucial juncture or a seemingly ordinary one. I am not meant to inhabit or linger too long amid these glimpses of other lives, yet they visit nonetheless. They come as reminders of how it matters what we choose. They come too as a reminder of grace: that God can work within every choice, even the ones we made long ago.
"What is time like for you these days? How do you experience the meetings and crossings of past, present, and future?
"In the choices of your past,
in the choices of your present,
in the choices yet to come:
the God of wisdom inhabit you
and inspire the way you go."
