A Thin Place

Today, everyday, we stand in a "thin place". Let me explain.

Evelyn Underhill was a modern contemplative. She was the first woman given lecture-wide status at Oxford. She wrote 39 books on Christian spirituality and philosophy.

Once, when a friend of Evelyn Underhill had been to the Isle of Iona, a place deep with roots in Scots Christianity (pictured at left), her gardener said to her, “Iona is a very thin place.” And she asked, “What do you mean?” The gardener, a Scotsman, said, “Its a thin place, because there is not much between Iona and the Lord.”

We need to be sensitive to the closeness of the invisible world. We need a sense of wonder. “The beginning of the truth is to wonder at things,” said Plato. That’s not just Plato — it is good faith in Christ as well. It works for me.

C.S. Lewis once said "We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. Every bush is a burning bush. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always easy to penetrate. The real labor is to remember to attend. In fact to come awake.

I have come to the realization that all of life, properly looked at, is a "thin place". I need to remember this, today.