{"id":3561,"date":"2013-05-15T06:17:02","date_gmt":"2013-05-15T10:17:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/thinplaces\/?p=3561"},"modified":"2013-05-13T16:12:42","modified_gmt":"2013-05-13T20:12:42","slug":"when-heaven-and-earth-meet-experiencing-a-thin-place","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/thinplaces\/2013\/05\/when-heaven-and-earth-meet-experiencing-a-thin-place\/","title":{"rendered":"When Heaven and Earth Meet–Experiencing a Thin Place"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Every so often it seems right to remind myself and those of you who read this blog that it is a place that is loosely ordered, a set of posts that should hold together, even if only by a single thread. Yes, I write about faith and family and disability, with some cultural commentary and books I love thrown in, but the name of the blog is Thin Places because I want it to be a place of unexpected connections. Some of you have probably read the sidebar before, but just in case you haven\u2019t:<\/p>\n

This blog is about discovering and remembering thin places, places where heaven and earth touch, where God seems more readily present, more easily accessed. It is meant to uncover ideas, relationships, points of connection, and moments of deep beauty that draw us towards one another and towards the Holy One.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019ve been reading My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer<\/a>, Christian Wiman\u2019s spiritual memoir. I love it. I\u2019ve underlined and starred dozens of passages so far, but last night as I was reading of Wiman\u2019s return to church after his diagnosis with cancer. He writes about sneaking out of the church at the end of the service in order to avoid the pastor, and then exchanging some emails with the same pastor and then learning from a doctor that his cancer was terminal. Wiman writes:<\/p>\n

That was the cloud I was walking under early one bright winter morning, maybe a week after the exchange of e-mails with the preacher, when I heard my name. I turned around to see im half running down the street toward me as he tried to pull a flannel shirt on over his T-shirt, careful not to trip over his untied shoes. I was in no mood to chat, especially not to an enthusiastic preacher, and all my thoughts were hostile. But I stopped, and we had a kind of introduction as he tied his shoes, and then he asked if he could walk me to the train station. Those days are a blur to me, but I remember two things from that morning very clearly. I remember Matt straining to find some language that would be true to his own faith and calling and at the same time adequate to the tragedy and faithlessness\u2013the tragedy of faithlessness\u2013that he perceived in me. And i remember when we parted there was an awkward moment when the severity of my situation and our unfamiliarity with each other left us with no words, and in a gesture that I\u2019m sure was completely unconscious, he placed his hand over his heart for just a second as a flicker of empathetic anguish crossed his face. It sliced right through me. It cut through the cloud I was living in and let the plain day pour its balm upon me. It was, I am sure, one of those moments when we enact and reflect a mercy and a mystery that are greater than we are, when the void of God and the love of God, incomprehensible pain and the peace that passeth understanding, come together in a simple human act. We stood for a minute in the aftermath, not talking, and then went our suddenly less separate ways.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wiman doesn\u2019t use the words thin place, but he describes a thin place, a moment of connection in which God showed up, in which two human beings became suddenly less separate.<\/p>\n

I highly recommend My Bright Abyss<\/a>, and may we all have eyes to experience thin places today.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When was the last time you experienced a thin place, a place where heaven and earth seemed to touch, if only for an instant?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,5],"tags":[634,633,161],"class_list":["post-3561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-faith","tag-christian-wiman","tag-my-bright-abyss","tag-thin-places"],"yoast_head":"\nWhen Heaven and Earth Meet-Experiencing a Thin Place - Thin Places-Faith, Family and Disability<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"When was the last time you experienced a thin place, a place where heaven and earth seemed to touch, if only for an instant?\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/thinplaces\/2013\/05\/when-heaven-and-earth-meet-experiencing-a-thin-place\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"When Heaven and Earth Meet-Experiencing a Thin Place - 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