“THIN places” are in vogue. The idea has an extended history: pagan, Celtic, and Christian. These are places where the veil between the earthly realm and the spirit realm seems thinner. Heaven and earth are only three feet apart, the saying goes, but in thin places (caol áit, in Irish Gaelic) that distance is even shorter.
The American travel author Eric Weiner popularised the thought a decade ago, and it’s now invoked by secular nature writers in addition to spiritual seekers. Wild places and holy sites, places of deep meaning and heightened experience — these we call thin places.
Of course, it’s important to note how places can focus and prompt spiritual experience. But I even have begun to wonder if this language of “thinness” is useful. It may appear to imply that the “thick” materiality of this world is an impediment to our encountering the divine. This results in a sort of dualism: imagining creation as two realities — certainly one of matter, and certainly one of spirit — and inspiring us to flee from one into the opposite.
We can find yourself considering that spiritual experience should itself have a sort of “thinness” to it, as if it ought to be all the time ethereal somewhat than bodily and material. By praising thinness, we take the chance that faith becomes a way of regarding an invisible elsewhere somewhat than a way of being here: a way of escape somewhat than a way of coming home.
CHRISTIANITY has an extended history of lapsing into dualism and doing much damage thereby, but, at its best, it could actually suggest a world during which the divine is found incarnate, in and thru the stuff of the world. Spirit and matter will not be separable. If there ever was a veil between worlds, was it not torn from top to bottom on Good Friday?
From then on, we anticipate finding God omnipresent on this world: not only particularly, holy places, but in every single place. So, we don’t need the stone of landscape to wear thin before it could actually talk about God: the stones themselves cry out (Luke 19.40), even before we’re able to.
If that is so, perhaps we could be higher off speaking of special places as having a sort of “thickness”? In academic circles, thickness is all the fad: a useful paper at a conference is nowadays praised as being “thick” (meaning “wealthy”). We covet “thick description”: a sort of layered anthropological description, attentive to context and complexity, popularised by Clifford Geertz.
AlamyA 1703 etching of The Tearing of the Veil within the Temple of Jerusalem, Jan Luyken, Print Maker: Haarlem
Thickness reminds us that things extend in space in addition to time: it implies bodies; it earths us. Perhaps nature writing is so popular today, when much of our experience is thin and virtual, precisely since it does this job of thickening our sense of the world, making us attentive to textures and materials, subtleties of weather and lightweight. Perhaps the longing that this answers in us shouldn’t be for the world to thin out, but, somewhat, for it to thicken into something truly meaningful. Perhaps we long for “thick places”.
IN FAIRNESS, most of the writers now invoking the tradition of the “thin place” are involved in exactly this: how our tactile material world will be someway greater than itself, opening up transformative depths.
In Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s moving book Thin Places, wild landscapes help her to return to terms with the trauma of the Troubles. Thin places, for her, are emphatically material, even when “warmed by the presence of something”. The spiritual doesn’t replace the fabric, but is found inside it. For her, borders (geographical, temporal, and perceptual) develop into more porous in such places.
This seems right: if anything does thin out in these places, it shouldn’t be the fabric world itself, however the “doors of perception” — the on a regular basis blinkers that prevent our seeing what is de facto there. We are inclined to experience the world through what William James called “the hard rind of a margin”, but places and events can conspire to thin this rind, and, in such moments, we would glimpse this world because it is: saturated with the love of God. Such experience is God-thick, not world-thin.
WILD places and times of retreat clearly help lots of us to thin our blinkers and attend more closely to the world. But attending to distant and picturesque landscapes is a challenge for people “within the thick of it”: those with caring responsibilities, or in poverty or poor health. So, we should be careful to not suggest that God dwells only (and even mainly) on mountaintops or empty beaches.
To consider “thickness” somewhat than “thinness” might just help us to emphasize that the divine is here, within the peculiar mess of life, just as much as out within the wild. Wherever thick bonds of affection bind people and places together, God is present. Wild places are great, however the nappy-changing table, the hospital ward, and the care home are thick places, too.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh agrees: “Places that anchor and nurture us do not need to be beautiful, cut off, and even what is perhaps described as wild. I’m not only talking about forests, mountains, and wild coves. I’m also enthusiastic about supermarket automobile parks with even only one tree; the back of housing estates where life has been left to exist; dump-piles in burnt-out factories where insects glisten; dirty streams at the sides of things, filled with waste but still brimming with something like renewal.”
I KNOW of no thicker place than the altar rail. People kneel side by side, the threads of so many lives, different pains and joys, brought together and thickly woven with the grand story of God’s love. In the bread and wine, all this love and longing thickens until it could actually be touched, tasted, and shared.
In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, the character Seth is accused of getting a love that’s “too thick”. She responds: “Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love in any respect.”
The Revd Dr Rob Hawkins is assistant curate of St James’s, Cambridge. He writes about art and faith, and is a member of the editorial team for Art+Christianity.
