Thin Places

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

—John 1:14

My mother is Irish, and when I was in college I studied Irish literature and poetry in Ireland for a little while. One of my favorite Celtic ideas is the concept of thin places. A thin place, according to the Celtic mystics, is a place where the boundary between the natural world and the supernatural one is more permeable—thinner, if you will.

Sometimes they’re physical places. There are places all over Ireland where people have said, if you stand here, if you face this direction, if you hike to the top of that ridge at just the right time of day, that’s a thin place, where the passage between heaven and earth is a short one, a place where God’s presence is almost palpable. The boundary between the divine world and the human world becomes almost nonexistent, and the divine and the human can, for a moment, dance together uninterrupted.

Other thin places aren’t places at all, but states of being or circumstances or seasons. Christmas is a thin place, a season during which even the hardest-hearted of people think about what matters, in the face of the deep beauty and hope of Christmas. The shimmer of God’s presence, not always plainly visible in our world, is more visible at Christmas.