The wind whispered through the tall pine trees. Sparrows danced in the foliage. Dappled sunlight painted the leaf litter with varying shades of green and brown. There was something extraordinary about the forest that surrounded Devil’s Tower. Eons of time weighed heavily in the pine-scented air. Each step rested in the holy ground of a thin place where the sacred and profane are separated with a tissue-thin veil of holy presence. I was walking in the shadows of spiritual power.
Thin places are part of the Celtic Tradition, where the “veil” between the everyday and the extraordinary touch one another. The slightest breeze will offer a fleeting glimpse of another dimension to our lives. Some see this as the division between the ordinary and the spiritual. I struggle with the dualism of the two. They are part of the same web of life and reflect the world where we live, breathe, and have our being. For me, a thin place is where I see my life from a different point of view.
In my experience, three thin places speak to the human journey in creation.
The first is musterion, a Greek word usually translated as mystery. The second is aeternitas, traditionally understood as eternity. The third is communitas or community. Each of these perspectives offers paths through our distracted daily lives and allows us to catch a shimmering glimmer of what is constantly before us, the everyday holy that steals our breath.
Generally, our day-to-day seeing looks past anything that is not useful now. Mystery shakes us out of this blindness. It evokes awe and fears that awaken our senses and opens our minds to new possibilities and explorations.
When the depths of time, eternity, shows up, it throws the ticking clock against the wall of reality. Eternity challenges the flow of time that lulls us into a shallow and false certainty about cause and effect. Eternity awakens us to the reality behind the mythologies of everyday living. It breaks the common, reminding us that we are constantly surrounded by the extraordinary.
Life in community forces us to accept that we are creatures of limited understanding and perspective. Meaningful relationships take us to foreign lands beyond our experiences and perceptions. We come face to face with the inner experiences of others. Those moments also shine a light on our inner lives and offer a glimpse into the shadows in our self-understanding.
Devil’s Tower rises out of the prairie of Northeastern Wyoming. It has been a beacon for humanity for thousands of years. Early native tribes used it to navigate their trails through the open prairies. The spirit of the place seeped into their oral traditions and spoke of bears that lived in the forest surrounding the place. It was a place filled with awe and wonder where the earth shook when the rock columns would split off and crash down the cliffs.
A large thunderstorm arrived the night after we hiked around the monolith. The lightning streaked across the sky. The thunder boomed and rolled all around us. Had I endured the tempest in a small tepee and been exposed to the howling winds sweeping off the grasslands, I would have known that we were in the hands of something far more significant than ourselves. I would have been moved to awe and fear, the central elements of worship and prayer. This is the power of thin places. They awaken our spirits to an existence far beyond our day-to-day experience and evoke gratitude, awe, and wonder. As Rudolf Otto said, they create “tremens et fascinans” in our deepest selves.
These times and places challenge our ego that tries to sum up life in formulas that begin “I am….” We are far more than any words we can use to complete that statement of who we are.
These sacred places attack the core statements about life that begin with the words “I think….” Life is greater than any thought that tries to tame and control it with our mind.
Thin places such as Devil’s Tower wipe away our “I believe …” proclamations and leave us living in awe of a world that will never allow any certainty of belief.
Our egos, ideas, and beliefs obscure such places from our souls. We cling to a shredded reality that does nothing more than protect us until the storm becomes too great. We are then overwhelmed by reality. But a powerful encounter with a thin place will blow the tent away, leaving us naked, cold, and afraid. The pounding rain, thunder, and lightning shatter our self-understandings, thoughts, and beliefs. This is the great gift of the thin places in our lives.
When we cannot voluntarily let go of these things in contemplation, the thin places emerge and force us to face the deeper reality of our lives, where genuine love, trust, joy, and hope exist and become the paths to survival. In such moments we become shrouded in the spirit that moves into our lives in thin places. We encounter that wondrous mystery that forces us to acknowledge the eternity that is our natural home in time. We discover that we are part of a community of people whose only hope is in the love of their neighbor and whose only joy exists in the trust of the community that created and sustains us.
I hope you will stumble upon a thin place just as the storms build. In such moments, may you hear the bears roaring in the thunder. I pray you catch a glimpse of the world beyond yourselves in shadows cast by lightning. I sincerely wish that you find comfort and peace in being part of the great flow of life that exists in the eternity of time (past, present, and future) in that single fleeting moment as the veil moves between this world and the next.
Journey on, My friends.
Bob