If you were to google ‘thin places’ as I just did, you would find a nice AI definition that talks about moments or places of transcendence. Often sacred places, but going somewhere is not required, it can be a moment of awareness in your home, on the street, in the grocery store. It is a heart opening awareness, an unexplainable knowing and being. I think of it as God breaking through the exterior shell of our everyday identity and reminding us of who we really are, what we are meant to be.

I believe that God lives everywhere and can be known in everything. I am not pantheistic, I do not think everything is God, but I do think everything can reveal to us aspects of the creator through the function of the art. A chicken is not God, but a chicken can teach me about divine traits like patience, and trust. I have found moments of profound connection to God in unlikely places like the rose bush growing on the side of a freeway in the midst of garbage and blight, and I have failed to find God in places I expected like Iona.

I was reflecting on this over the weekend at a church retreat in Lake Tahoe. We had a lot of time to walk with intentionality, to sit by the lake and be present in majestic creation. I was tired but slept badly so found myself awake before dawn watching as the mountains went from gray to lavender to pinkish gold. We were practicing what it looks like to honor the sabbath and so I spent much time sitting on rocks looking at the water, and doing nothing but being present. I was also using the time to read The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel so wondering a lot about that distinction between sacredness of time and sacredness of space.

One of the interesting things about what we think of as sacred space is that usually it has been sacred to a lot of different people over a long period of time. When you walk into an ancient cathedral it is not uncommon for there to be a more ancient alter buried below the building, and below that alter perhaps a forgotten rock or stump or rustic carving that is even older. We are drawn to certain spaces repeatedly, but I don’t think it is because God is uniquely found in that place, or that the place has a particular power. I think it more likely that something about that place encourages or allows us to shed the layers of identity that get in the way of our ability to experience the divine presence. It’s not that I am closer to God because I go up to the mountains, it is that when I go up to the mountains I take less of the ego-self that is concerned with day-to-day busyness, proving, doing and it is easier for my heart and my soul to see rightly.

I think that this is what Heschel is offering, the idea that marking a moment of time as distinct, changing the practices of your life in those moments, helps to strip away those layers of self that get in the way of surrendering to just being with, through, and guided by God. It can be easier to do that marking by creating a space for the encounter, a physical space to experience a shift in time, which is why we say we are ‘going to church’ when what we mean is that we are going to a building where ‘church’ will be happening. Worship is meaningful when we dedicate ourselves to being different during that time than what we are in the other days and moments of our lives. But the invitation and the lesson of thin places or sacred time is that we don’t have to go somewhere to be different, we have to be different to experience the power of going there, which ultimately can be anywhere.

The lesson I am taking from the weekend is that I don’t go to a ‘thin place’ to encounter God, to experience a transcendent moment of awareness; the lesson I think is that I need to thin myself out egotistically, I need to peal back, or allow to be pealed back those things that build that shell of self-importance and social identity and make myself a little more accessible to the everyday presence of God in my life. Going to sacred spaces, practicing the sabbath, meditation, these are all ways of chipping away at those layers that keep us separated and help to keep ourselves thin enough to live open-heartedly as a norm, to be as someone who walks with God.