Thin places don’t exist.

I’ve been thinking about the topic of “thin places” for several months. Recently, guests on retreat at Greenwood asked if I believed that Greenwood was a thin place. I took this to be a providential sign that now is the time to try and bring these thoughts to life.

First things first. I come in peace. I am not picking a fight with any of my brothers and sisters in Christ who have a particular penchant for all things Celtic. Instead, in this post, I aim to present an alternative perspective on the world. Through thick and thin, it is an outlook teeming with Life because it focuses on a person and not a place.

The term ‘thin place’ was popularised by the pioneering Church of Scotland minister, George Macleod. Macleod brought shipbuilders from Govan, along with a cohort of trainee ministers, to Iona, a beautiful island off Scotland’s west coast. His vision was to nurture faith and community in the process of rebuilding the island’s ruined Abbey. The founder of the Iona Community described his beloved Iona as “a thin place where only tissue paper separates the material from the spiritual.” It was a stroke of creative genius, but the term has a dangerous theological undertow that can sweep us off our feet and far away from the Rock that is higher than I.

It’s genius in that it draws you to a destination. A destination in MacLeod’s day that was out of the spotlight, quietly tucked away off the coast of Mull, with a ruin needing rebuilding. Want to get closer to heaven? Hungry for a spiritual experience? Come here! To a thin place. Here you can see through the tissue paper to the great beyond.

Why is it dangerous? The seeds of idolatry are latent within. More on that point later. For now, let’s explore the worldview that gave rise to the term.

Notice the dualism present in Macleod’s definition. There's the material, and then there’s the spiritual. On Iona, they are only separated by tissue paper, but they are separate nonetheless. This framing is a product of the Enlightenment. The philosophical worldview known as Modernity, which enabled the Industrial Revolution, divided the world into that which could be measured and mastered and that which was deemed obsolete in the modern age. The belief in God’s active and miraculous intervention throughout all history is squarely relegated to that latter category. Instead, human reason made its ascendancy. Time and in it the march of progress, raises humanity to all that we are capable of becoming on our own.

Seen from this point of view, it becomes clear why the spiritual now lurks at the edges of our tamed, precisely engineered, and rational outlook. If it couldn’t be weighed, measured or known for utilitarian mastery, it was sent outside the camp. Yet the progress myth is just that - another story we tell ourselves as we try to make sense of our world.

While there have been tremendous technological advances that enrich human life through this worldview, the shadow side of this story is that, with all our scientific breakthroughs, we have also found new and far more elaborate ways to kill one another. When progress is lord, there is high collateral damage.

There is another way of seeing the world. Thin and thick places alike. This worldview has its roots in the ancient world and greatly enabled the Christian apostles and early church fathers to engage with the surrounding Greco-Roman culture in which they lived as missionaries. To be a Christian Platonist is not to separate the material from the spiritual. Instead, here is an outlook where participation is key. Time, past, present and future participate in the eternal, simultaneously. Nature participates in the supernatural. Earth participates in heaven.

Jesus never came that we might have spiritual life in all its fullness. Instead, in him is Life. All of life. Matter matters. The material is lifted and transformed in him. Everything that has been made has been made through him and is redeemed in Him. It is through material sacramental signs, chiefly of water, bread and wine, that we are invited to participate in the reality of God’s presence. Moreover, with eyes to see, you can behold the beauty of Him, who is holy other, in all that has been made; in the way a willow tree bends in the wind, or a daisy manages to push its way through the cracks in the concrete. Yes, a greater reality is always waiting to be seen and participated in any present earthly moment.

While I consider it an incredible blessing to call the wild and wonderful west coast of Scotland home, and I love every opportunity to visit Iona, it is dangerous to build one's faith and experience on the thinness of a particular place. Idolatry waits in the wings. If you are too focused on the place, you will miss the wonder of the person, the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, who transforms all time and place.

A strong motif repeated throughout John’s Gospel is that places in Israel’s story are now taken up into their fuller meaning in Jesus. For instance, Nathaniel, whom Jesus saw under the olive tree before Philip called him, is told that he is going to see angels ascend and descend upon the Son of God. This angelic activity, previously associated with Jacob’s encounter at Bethel, now revolves around Jesus. Jesus is the ladder connecting heaven and earth.

Advance a few chapters, and there is Jesus' discussion with the shamed woman drawing water from the well in the heat of the noonday sun. This is not just any well. This is Sychar, and John makes specific reference that this is the well that Jacob gave to his sons. The true Son is now at this well about his Father’s business. He can give you a drink of living water that will become a well on the inside of the disciple, springing up to eternal life. Notice the material, in this case water, is pointing to and participating in a greater spiritual reality. He who is the ultimate reality is standing alongside this woman in those searing temperatures.

This all sounds wonderful, but the woman wants to move the conversation to safer theological ground, perhaps because she is deflecting his prophetic and knowing gaze from her story. “You Jews worship in the temple in Jerusalem, and we Samaritans worship on this mountain.”Notice. Two different places. Where is the thinnest of them all? Jesus doesn’t centre worship on either place. Instead, he calls forth what the Father is looking for, those who will worship him in Spirit and in Truth. How are we to do that? Through the person of Jesus. He who calls himself the Truth and who through the Holy Spirit will lead us into all truth. It is in him that we worship God truly.

It is the place of the temple in Jerusalem that all four Gospel writers describe as being thoroughly reoriented in the person of Jesus. Forty-six years in the making, rebuilt in three days. Throughout his ministry, Jesus acted like the temple. It’s the place where sins are forgiven, healing happens, and the outcast is reintegrated into the wider community. All that Jesus did (and still does in and through his body, the Church). This incensed the religious authorities, and when Jesus then took on the full might of the temple by cracking that whip, turning those tables, and there was the sound of coins jingling on the floor, his fate was sealed. This threat to the place had to be dealt with. Yet, in his very death and resurrection, the temple is destroyed and rebuilt, and all time and space are reconfigured in the body of Jesus.

Thin places have their tissue paper. Why settle for those? There is a place where every veil is taken away. Heavenly Zion can be seen and participated in. Not in the ever after, but in the here and now, when two or three gather in His name and call upon One who is mighty to save. Let us lay down our idols, for sadly, the term “thin place” is bandied about too freely these days, perhaps with the same design as Macleod intended, about drawing people to a destination. Instead, let’s keep the main thing, the main thing.

As I close this post, I can see the faces of those dear saints who came to Greenwood on retreat. Do I believe that Greenwood is a thin place? No, I don’t. Because I don’t believe in thin places. Yes, Greenwood is a place of exquisite beauty, and we were drawn here with the sign of St Columba’s Well being on the land. However, the purpose of this sign, as with any sign, is to point beyond itself to the greater reality of God’s presence that is at hand and can be experienced in all places if we are open with a heart ready to receive him.