Thin and Thick

I still can't work out whether I was unreasonable in detecting a reluctant, nay disappointed, tone in the Bishop's note to us on Tuesday. He writes:

In last Wednesday’s Morning Prayer we heard about the so-called ‘tent of meeting’ which was pitched ‘far off’ from the makeshift campsites which characterised the Israelites’ forty years in the wilderness … (Exodus 33:8). And there ‘the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend’. ‘Tents of meeting’ don’t have to be physical structures .... Elsewhere in the scriptures we read of a whole diversity of ‘thin places’ where such divine encounters take place …Similarly for us, there will most likely be particular places – whether outdoors or in – which we approach with a sense of prayerful expectation  … I have made the decision that it is now possible for one clergyperson (and their household, if applicable) to pray in each church … For many of our church communities, I suspect, the arrangements of the past few weeks will continue, as clergy choose to model home (or a series of parishioners’ homes) as ‘thin places’, and I certainly want to give that every encouragement. But if clergy wish to re-enter their church buildings for prayer or broadcasting purposes, please feel free to do so.

I could be awkward, because, as we know, legally we've been perfectly free to do exactly that all along: I haven't done so out of obedience and solidarity with the restricted society around me. But I preferred to focus on the assumptions behind what the Bishop wrote, as those are dodgy enough. In fact, in this short statement, you can hear cats leap positively yowling out of bags.

Supposedly, the spiritual notion of the ‘thin place’ derives from Celtic Christianity. This is convenient because you can say anything you like about Celtic Christianity. Real Celtic Christianity, in so far as it had any separate identity at all, was St Cuthbert subsisting on shellfish on Inner Farne, the brethren of Skellig Michil clinging to their storm-racked perpendicular rock in the Irish Sea, the Culdees reciting Psalms for hours standing up to their necks in freezing water, or St David feeding his monks on a diet of water and leeks as they pulled their own ploughs across the fields. But usually people mean something more approachable than that.

Look up ‘thin place’ online, and you'll soon be told that it’s an English translation of the Gaelic term Caol Ait. This is informative, as it is completely ungrammatical. What someone has done, at some stage in the not-too-distant past, is simply translate the words separately into their Gaelic equivalents with no concern as to how they fit together. This should alert us to the fact that the term ‘thin place’ is of no great antiquity. It is absent, in either Gaelic or English, from Lady Wilde’s Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (1887), and Lady Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920), the authoritative compendia of Irish folklore from that epoch.

It’s certainly used by Christians to mean a locale where divine presence can be specially discerned. Mindie Burgoyne writes from a pagan perspective and ‘feels compelled to keep the original definition [of ‘thin place’] as it relates to pre-Christian Ireland’, but also describes conversations with various Irish ecclesiastics including four monks and nuns at venerable abbeys, who all told her about the notion of the ‘thin place’. The first use of the term in a Christian context appears to come from George MacLeod, the Church of Scotland minister and founder of the Iona Community in 1938. He referred to Iona as ‘a thin place where only a tissue paper separates the material from the spiritual’ (or ‘earth from heaven’, as some people give the quote). MacLeod doesn’t seem to have published this statement anywhere, and all of the twenty-or-so online citations are secondhand, but let’s assume he did communicate it in some semi-permanent form. Perhaps this is how it found its way into Christian thinking.

Back beyond MacLeod, there is only one reference to ‘thin places’. This comes in the 1885 memoir of an American spiritualist from Boston called John Wetherbee, entitled Shadows, being a familiar presentation of thoughts and experiences in spiritual matters.  ‘The Spiritualist’ writes Wetherbee, ‘knows from his experience that … the light shines through the thin places or cracks in the curtain between the two worlds whether the thin places or the cracks know it or not’. He goes on to relate a lecture in which Congregational minister Nehemiah Adams reported a story a dying parishioner had told him of seeing a spirit, and concluded that ‘the curtain between the two worlds was thinner than it once was’. From this, Wetherbee starts musing on such experiences and, just as there are special sensitive ‘ganglionic’ locations in the human brain, concludes that similar locations might exist in the world at large. He even wondered whether Boston might be one, or contain many, explaining why Spiritualism had made such headway in the Massachusetts city. Wetherbee gives no indication that he acquired the notion of the ‘thin place’ from anyone else: rather it was his reflecting on Revd Adams’s story that led to the idea. How it made the viral journey from Spiritualist Wetherbee to Presbyterian MacLeod is anyone’s guess, but it’s definitely not some ancient Irish folk wisdom.

So much for history. As for theology, we can see perhaps four principles converging in the idea of the ‘thin place’, and the holy place more generally, which are relevant to current discussions about the role of the church building in this time of plague. I say they converge: they are not all compatible with orthodox Christian thinking.

Firstly, that God is omnipresent and can everywhere be spoken to and heard from is a truism. ‘Go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father who is in secret’ says Jesus (Matt 6.6). This would seem to argue against the identification of any special ‘sacred space’ at all. The universal extent of divine presence underlies the multifarious encounters with God that speckle the Scriptures: as Bishop Andrew notes, ‘including homes, gardens, mountains, rivers, lakesides, weddings, mealtimes and religious festivals’.

Secondly, there may be locations, or occasions, where as individuals we are used to meeting with God. They are, if you like, reflections of personal rituals, of moments when we are accustomed to concentrating on God. My ex-partner’s father, a fundamentalist Evangelical clergyman, still talks to the Lord while digging in the garden at dawn, and, during the time the church here has been closed, my morning and evening Office has been said in the ‘Children’s Room’, the only one in my house with a window that looks directly onto the garden. These ‘thin places’ are personal, and mean nothing to anyone but us. They reflect nothing other than our own spiritual habits, based exactly on the Christian belief that God is not specially present in one particular place, but everywhere. This is the type of ‘thin place’ Bishop Andrew means when he refers to ‘particular places – whether outdoors or in – which we approach with a sense of prayerful expectation’.

However, the third notion involved in the concept of the ‘thin space’ is emphatically not Christian at all, and it is just the one its originator, John Wetherbee apparently, intended. This is the idea that there are particular physical, geographical points where, due to some occult quality of the place itself, ‘the veil between worlds’ is lowered and human beings can expect spiritual experiences. The assumption that such an experience is more likely to happen in a particular place has no scientific or Christian basis, and yet it seems to be the one which informs most use of the term: it is what it means in popular usage. It is, basically, pagan.

The Bishop makes an error when he elides this sense of the ‘thin place’ into the specifically Christian creation of the church building. This place does not derive its spiritual significance from our choices or preferences. It is not holy because we like it or want it to be holy. It is not holy because it is beautiful or historic. It is not holy because the soil it is built on sits across a ley line, or because there is a holy well, an ancient yew tree, or an oddly-shaped rock, in the churchyard. It is not like a clearing in the woods where we might go to peep at the Wee Folk. It is holy because it is the physical sign of God’s promises. To think its sanctity relies on what we feel or want to feel or choose is a fundamental misunderstanding of its nature, of the nature of sacraments, and of the Church. This leads us to the fourth point.

When the Christian community meets, it is constituted around the sacraments which reveal the saving work of God made known to us in Jesus Christ. It carries out the acts that he commanded us to carry out, communion and baptism (as well as others he didn’t command but which we’ve also found express the promises of God). We Christians began meeting in private rooms, or outside, and there is nothing illegitimate about that. But whenever Christians meet in numbers larger than a household, they require an appropriate space, and we discovered it was useful and more safe to own those spaces. It was natural that they began to be organised physically around the sacramental acts that took place in them, although ultimately it is the community, not the building, which is galvanised by those acts.

The point is that the acts embody the commands and promises of God. They are not our possession; we belong to them, since they express the real nature of the God who commanded us to carry them out. The tabernacle was not where the Israelites chose to meet God, but where he had commanded them to meet him. When the cloud over the tabernacle lifted, they moved camp; when it rested, they remained. Later, the Lord, not them, selects a place for his name to dwell, first Shiloh and then Zion. The varied encounters with God related in the Scriptures, again, take place at God’s initiative, not human beings’. They are, at no stage, their choice. People do not turn up and hang around ‘with a prayerful expectation’ that God is going to arrive, somehow compelled either by human desire or by the nature of a location.

Whatever significance the church building has, it has it because it is where the community called into existence by the saving work of Jesus Christ gathers, over time, to carry out his commands. This is what is behind TS Eliot’s statement in the Four Quartets that

You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid.

The validity of prayer, again, doesn't come from our piety or feelings, but from the promises of God. Has prayer been valid in your kitchen? If so, whose prayers other than yours? Who but you has responded, there, to the commands of God? To call a church by the pagan language of the ‘thin place’ is to make a deep mistake. It is not a thin place, but a thick one, woven into dense fabric by God’s promises to us and ours to him, inhabited by a community shaped by the life of Jesus.

If the terminology of the ‘thin place’ leaked into the Christian Church via George MacLeod, there is an irony. He was referring to Iona – a church, a monastery, a cathedral, a burying ground, a place where the promises of God, and God’s commands, had been responded to and lived out by a Christian community over centuries; where life had been offered to him and seen through the lens of the Cross; where human mourning and joy had been transfigured into the life of the coming Kingdom. Iona, like all churches, is the opposite of the pagan Thin Place, where human beings linger in the hope of a vague glimpse into some reality beyond this world. It is, rather, an effective sign of the Kingdom. As thick a place as ever there could be.