I rest in the grace of the world
Delighting in Thin Places
Iken Reach in Suffolk is one of the most sacred places I have visited. It is my personal ‘thin place’, a place of intense stillness and beauty.
Iken is on the River Alde, a mysterious river with two names, a river that flows in two directions. I want to take a moment to celebrate the river Alde. With its source near the village of Laxfield (home of a Protestant martyr), it flows past Snape, through my thin place at Iken. Instead of meeting the sea at that beach, it is held by the shingle, turns and flows south, changes its name to the Ore, its shape is the crook of an arm cradling some exceptional wildlife, curlew, bittern. It graces the Suffolk shore with its presence until meeting the sea near the beautiful beach at Orford ness, opposite shingle street, which itself is often referred to as a thin or sacred place.
Many writers note that that these places seem to dissolve the boundary between the ordinary and the sacred, between heaven and earth or between the material and the spiritual, the verge of awareness as Kimmich Beach has it. Perhaps this is your experience of sacred places.
For me, however, it is the dissolution of the boundary between my inner and outer worlds that I have experienced at the estuary at Iken. The grace, rest and vibrant meaning-making that comes from finding our wordless core silently echoed in the stillness of a place.
When asked many people will share their experience of places where the world seems to hold its breath, where qualities of beauty, stillness and silence allow them to connect more fully with the divine. Perhaps where worries and anxieties can be put aside and you can just be present. As a child I called this rather ominously the ‘grave yard’ feeling. I hope it resonates with you.
Really the joy of this service is that simple, it has been to give you some time to delight in your own experiences. For me this is the most essential part of our gathering today. If to worship is to literally acknowledge the worth of something, then that is what we are doing today.
For this reason, I hope it has been useful for me to share some definitions. I do like the idea that we can simply hold the concept, enjoy it, turn it over in our minds and heart and delight in this rather mysterious gift that has been given to us.
As Elizabeth Barret Browning has it, the ‘Earth is Crammed with Heaven’ and sometimes we can find heaven and sit in it and know that it is enough and it is good.
There is something wordless about these fragments of grace, glimpses of something else just out of reach, the brilliance of creation shining through, breaking into the ordinariness of our lives.
This is the grace of the world, Wendell Berry’s peace of wild things.
Thin Places share some common elements
Everyone’s experience is unique and the vocabulary used to describe these places is filtered through our pre-existing beliefs but these tissue thin places do seem to share some elements.
For example, the idea that these are places can be worn thin by prayer and meditation is common. That somehow it is in the interaction of spiritually literate human with their environment that carve out these thin places, eroding the thickness of the everyday world until it touches the divine.
Another element many people share is the numinous feeling of silence and stillness that comes from a place that throws you into the present moment. Thin Places provide many us with the gift of silence in order that we may listen more attentively to the still, small, voice within. This is the ‘true silence’ spoken of by Adyashanti where thin places bring us more deeply into the present moment and therefore allow us to rest in our true nature.
This silence is what Eckart Tolle refers to as the ‘field of stillness’ and again he suggests this is an interaction, a dynamic where the universe comes to know its own beauty as you come to know yourself as one with it.
Contemplative religious experience can sometimes be mistaken for social isolation or look rather individualistic practice, to be hermit like isn’t usually a compliment. Thin places and pilgrimages to them, acknowledge the shared experience if not the shared place, all these things link us and bind us together as people as well as anchoring us in our environment. Interiority itself is a gift, but perhaps there are other fruitful gifts in the interaction of self and place and with others on a shared spiritual journey.
There is value in examining Thick Places
Perhaps is equally spiritually useful to contemplate thick places. To reflect on and try to avoid times when we are taken away from our spiritual lives by the noise of the world and the distraction of our own thoughts and worries.
Adyashanti talks of ‘coarse consciousness’ and the dangers of absenting yourself from your true nature. If you are yet to discover a thin place, perhaps you can at least thin out your everyday life, spend more time in love for others, reflection, self-awareness and compassion.
I wonder if it is only me that associates warmth and safety with thickness and tends to feels safer in thick places. It is easier to rest in familiar places, old habits of thought, unchallenging people, the daily routine.
It has helped me, and I hope it helps you to be reminded to find safety in the moments when the veil in pulled back. Thin places can be places where sacred work is done, places where the grace of the world will hold you and where you will find a way to encounter the divine in whatever form you need that experience to hold.
The concept of Thin Places can be challenging
Many fruitful tensions that arise when examining the concept of places set aside for the holy.
Why isn’t the whole world a thin place? I thought that God was there at the end of every exhalation. If you want to pray, we are told, enter your inner room. What does it mean to use the metaphor of the veil? Do I believe in two separate worlds or realms? Is it me that is transfigured by being there? Or is the place endowed with those qualities because of something within me.
I have no answer to these questions. But what I have taken from this process of reflecting on thin places is that it has made me even more of a liberal, even more ardent in my insistence on religious freedom because I simply do not know.
My reflection on thin places has itself become a ‘thin place’, a fruitful place, a fount of new and sometimes challenging spiritual ideas. It has given me the freedom that is granted us by all liminal, transitional places, a freedom to embrace ideas and feelings and experiences that are out of our ordinary. For example
Contemplating the thin place of the clouds allows me to gently touch the medieval images of heaven, embracing the thin place in the glorious echoing cold of the Cathedral has brought me back into mainstream religious spaces, a friend’s passionate commitment to the Islamic ‘night of power’ has deepened my understanding of his experience of God. A whirling vibrant mix of other people’s notions of God which I can gently touch and access without judgment and with renewed understanding, glorying in the fact that these hitherto confusing or seemingly irrational notions can now be mine to access and participate in.
I have recently had the painful experience of sitting with profound uncertainty. The kind of uncertainty that is only soothed by time and only healed when the puzzle pieces of our lives finally seek each other out, change our paths and slot our untethered worries back into our organised lives. In going through this time I have had no choice but to embrace uncertainty and the simple painful place of not knowing. Seeking out thin places helped me hugely and I recommend as a good tonic for such times. But it has been the act of contemplating the ‘not knowing’ the ‘not understanding’ that has led me to embrace agnosticism on all levels about all things from careers, to health, to life after death. Agnosticism in turn has led me to celebrate liberal and free spaces wherever we find them. As part of this service I invite you to rest from time to time in agnosticism. You don’t not need to know or understand everything.
Thin Places are an invitation
And so I invite you to celebrate your thin places, these luminous, numinous places of prayer, enjoying places that help you cultivate inner stillness in your lives but also, I also invite you to embrace the meaning generating mystery these places have to offer.
Lizzie Kingston