All Saints' Day

I have come to love the expression, ‘thin place.’ It was coming out of the very liturgy that we celebrate tonight that I first hear the words several years ago. While I knew in my heart where we had been, I hadn’t really put my experience together with the Celtic understanding of how we come closer to the holy. That night, we had the same clouds of incense — a sweet offering not meant to aggravate us but to touch all our senses, including smell — and the beauty of the Mozarabic preface to the Sanctus, which you will hear in a short while. This space became even more holy than it already is, and that night I heard for the first time, ‘The air has become very thin.’ I thought it was a reference to a sensation of an incense-induced suffocation but the one who was speaking to me loves incense. I learned that All Saints’ night just what a ‘thin place’ is.

In the Celtic tradition, places where people feel most strongly connected with God’s presence are referred to as ‘thin places.’ There is a Celtic saying that heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but in the thin places that distance is even smaller. It is in these places where the seen and unseen worlds are most closely connected and inhabitants of both worlds can momentarily touch the other. They are safe, not scary, places. Thin places are where it is possible to touch and be touched by God as well as the angels, saints and those who have died. A thin place is where the veil that separates heaven and earth is lifted and one is able to receive a glimpse of the glory of God.

A contemporary poet Sharlande Sledge gives this description.

“Thin places,” the Celts call this space,
Both seen and unseen,
Where the door between the world
And the next is cracked open for a moment
And the light is not all on the other side.
God shaped space. Holy. (1)

… A thin place requires us to step from one world to another and that often means traveling to a place where we have less control and where the unpredictable becomes the means of discovery but it is alright for us to go there.

When we go to those places and spend time there, we understand their power. We return from them refreshed and renewed, graced with a new awareness of the thin places in all of life. Having seen the glimpses of glory in those sacred landscapes, we begin to see glimpses all around us.

But what about other thin places, like the Communion of Saints, the unbroken chain of the living and the dead, which we celebrate tonight?

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The beatitudes we hear every year at All Saints’ (a text which is also a choice in the Roman burial rite and should well be one for us, too, I think) gives us a list of how to live a life well, a life based in following God. One might well call it thin living. To live thinly is not to starve oneself to attain some false beauty, but to attain the beauty of heart that comes from loving Jesus.

The Mayo Saints in their own way are examples of thin living. One of them, Edna, suffers from congestive heart failure. Despite the ups and downs that come from living with such a condition, she is an ardent follower of Jesus. She is the voice of prayer for the Saints, bringing to them week after week the concerns of the entire Mayo community — residents, staff, family and friends. She spends her days making butterflies, a known symbol of the resurrection, and distributing them around. She told me yesterday she has passed the 1500 mark. While she might never think of herself as a ‘thin’ person, I think the sincerity of her faith is a beatitudes faith. Likewise, our Phoebe and Esther and Newel and Harriet also demonstrate a similar thin personhood. They live the beatitudes, perhaps not even knowing it, and model for the rest of us a life lived well.

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In this thin place that we create tonight by our presence and our prayers, we remember the ‘thin place’ people of our lives, those people who, through their strengths and foibles, brought us closer to God. All Saints’ Day also offers us a chance to think about how we might become thin place people… a place where people might find God through us.

I pray that Saint Mary’s will continue to provide this incredible opportunity for people to enter into the thin place between heaven and earth. For it is in these thin places and people that the promise of the resurrection becomes the most palpable and real, since in them we feel and know that God is near.

END NOTE
(1) http://www.americancatholic.org/Messenger/Mar2001/feature1.asp#F3

PHOTO
The small string of banners by the Mary altar were done by Naomi's family. We hung them there this morning, remembering how Naomi would light a candle every time she came in the church as well as the dozens of candles her family lit last year.