Don Friesen
The Scripture readings last week were very positive, revelling in the blessings of God, encouraging us to see blessings in even the most unpromising and unexpected places. After the magi have returned home and we have all taken down our Christmas trees, the spirit of Christmas continues, urging us to celebrate life and its blessings.
If in ancient times it was important for even grown men like Jacob and Esau to receive their father's blessing, we too live our lives more confidently when assured of our parents' love and blessing. We are an imperfect people, however, and many live unsettling lives because they never received such assurance. For some, who are otherwise well-adjusted, this lack of blessing becomes a powerful motivator, something for which to compensate. The pursuit of success provides opportunities to prove to others – but mostly to ourselves – that we are worthy, and not only worthy but that others should recognize this more fully – and often earlier than they do! We attempt to earn the blessing that we did not receive. For others the lack of our mothers' and fathers' blessing is more damaging, and otherwise rational and gifted people develop ways of undermining themselves. Though capable of success, they set themselves up for failure, confirming the assessment that, indeed, they are not worthy.
Jesus' Moment of Blessing/Approval
So much for my armchair psychologizing, except that I have met many people for whom this scenario is true. In contrast, our Gospel reading provides an account of Jesus' baptism in which he is drenched with the blessings of his heavenly father. As Jesus "was coming up out of the water," Mark tells us, "he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.'" (Mark 1:10-11) What a dramatic and affirming moment!
Our family has a pump organ – sometimes called a harmonium – which we keep for nostalgic reasons. When as a child I began taking piano lessons it was the only instrument we had, and so I learned my first John Thompson pieces on an instrument which you have to pump with your feet in order to generate sound. A pump organ consists of an assortment of reeds, bellows, keys, knee swells and stops – stops with names like "Octave Coupler" and "Bass Coupler," which cause more notes to play than you're actually touching, and you can see those keys moving even though you're not touching them!. It's quite magical for a child, and continues to hold fascination for adult children like myself.
Mark's Gospel is like that. It's a terse Gospel, written in a sparing style but the few keys he touches have a coupler effect and then some! Sometimes one key sets off a whole chord! The descending dove is coupled with keys in Genesis, reminiscent of the Spirit that "brooded" over the waters, bringing order and light to what was chaos. Jesus, the Light of the World will illumine and order our lives. The voice from heaven, calling Jesus "the Beloved," with whom God is well pleased sets off echoes in Isaiah, who, in describing the Suffering Servant, said:
We are left with a tear, a rip in the heavens, as if God's eagerness to bestow His blessing upon Jesus simply could no longer be restrained. Something had to give! The fabric of the heavens could no longer hold back God's love. The barrier between heaven and earth had been worn thin by God's keenness to push ahead with His plan to redeem humanity. Jesus' baptism evoked such a powerful response from God that it left a gaping hole in the heavens, setting God loose upon the earth!
Mark plays this "tearing apart" key with the "Forte" stop as well as the knee swells, the volume of his declaration swelling loud as well as resonating with other Scriptural notes and chords. The "Octave Coupler" is activated, for the same word will be used at the end of Mark's Gospel at the death of Jesus, when the veil that separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the Temple is torn from top to bottom! (Mark 15:38)
Meanwhile Mark's choice of word strikes a chord in the Old Testament, heard in Isaiah's plea for God to break through the barrier that separates earth from heaven:
The Old Testament concept of God often involves quaking and such, God's appearance at Mount Sinai, for example, shrouded in billows of smoke and accompanied by thunder and lightning, fire and trumpets and such. (Exodus 19:16-22) A bit dramatic, but I don't mind a lofty God who is more than a buddy. I need a God who is capable of more than my ineffectual self!
"In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth," God "separated" a number of things, the light from the darkness (Genesis 1:4 & 18), the waters from other waters (1:6-7), day from night (1:14) and so on, and given the Old Testament's lofty conception of God – so lofty that we dare not even utter His name – we may think of the heavens and the earth as very separate, perhaps unbridgeable. The Psalmist, for example, confessed:
The ancient Celts said that heaven and earth are only three feet apart, and, they said, that distance is even smaller in the thin places, the sacred places where heaven comes close to touching earth. A poet described these "thin places" as those places ...
(Sharlande Sledge, "Thin Places," cited by Sylvia Maddox)
The Celtic Christians imagined a veil – a screen or curtain – separating heaven and earth, but in some places the fibres of that veil have worn thin. There are places where the veil between this world and the next is so sheer that one can almost step through, or, if you turn around quickly enough, you may just catch a glimpse of an angel!
This is the point at which I become grateful that Celtic Christianity was tempered by the Western expression of Christianity, otherwise you soon have fairies and leprechauns leaping out of those gaping holes! On the other hand, I recall thin places of my own. In one I experienced a deep feeling of unity with the stark northern landscape. In another I was overwhelmed by a rush of God's forgiveness, and it liberated me from a very heavy spiritual burden. Another time I had a strong sense of confirmation of my ministry, that I really was where God wished me to be. These experiences occurred in very mundane places, but I remember each place vividly.
Marcus Borg writes, "A thin place is anywhere our hearts are opened." "They are places where the boundary between (heaven and earth) becomes very soft, porous, permeable ... places where the veil momentarily lifts and we behold (the "aha of the Divine"). (Borg, The Heart of Christianity, 2003, paraphrase by John Morehouse)
Thin Places Allow Breakthroughs
This fall I was following the search for Brandon Crisp, the fifteen-year-old boy from Barrie who went missing in October. Like many people, I was hoping for a breakthrough in the search, some clue or sighting that would turn the search in a more hopeful direction.
There are many things in life that beg for a breakthrough. Jackie Robinson (1919-1972) broke through baseball's colour barrier in 1947. Barack Obama's similar breakthrough will be celebrated later this month. Women attempt to break through "glass ceilings". The city of Ottawa prays for some breakthrough that will bring an end to the bus strike.
Occasionally we hear of medical or scientific breakthroughs that promise to change life for the better. One of the notable breakthroughs of 2008 involved research into brown fat tissue. Scientists found that brown fat is remarkably similar to muscle, a discovery that could lead to new treatments for obesity. ("Leading journal names the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of 2008," The Guardian, December 18, 2008)
Sometimes breakthroughs come about by accident, as in the case of penicillin, thanks to Alexander Fleming's (1881-1955) sloppy work habits, but even so, an unwelcome fungus growing in one of his petri dishes led to a very welcome medical discovery.
Breakthroughs are also important to relationships. Over Christmas we watched the movie, "Walk the Line" (2005), the story of country music legend Johnny Cash. I had been putting off the movie, thinking that I would have to suffer through his off-pitch growling for several hours. As it turned out I sang along with every song, and the story of his life was told well. I was particularly intrigued by Cash's relationship with his father, from whom Cash suffered nothing but rejection – a very painful loss of parental affection and blessing. It is only at the end of the movie that there is a subtle change in the relationship between the two. Something in the old relationship that poisoned it developed a puncture such that it could no longer continue to contain hatred and contempt.
Breakthroughs are also important to faith, and to the Church. Thin places can precipitate those breakthroughs. They are not only places or moments of revelation, they are often experiences that affect us profoundly and change us. They precipitate breakthroughs that change our orientation, our values and our priorities. They shape and re-shape us.
The Apostle Paul came upon a thin place while travelling to Damascus (Acts 9) and it totally rewrote his life's mission. It changed his way of looking at Jesus. It changed his way of relating to Christian believers. It was a tremendous breakthrough, for Paul, personally, as well as for the fledgling Christian movement. God punctured Paul's defences, prompting a complete turnabout.
The Apostle Peter came upon a thin place while in the company of a man named Cornelius (Acts 10), causing him to question previously-held ideas about people he felt were chosen by God and those who were not! It was an amazing breakthrough in the life and direction of the Early Church. God poked a hole through the fabric of Peter's social-theological construct, allowing in a powerful insight, that "God shows no partiality". (10:34) That gaping hole was large enough to let in a flood of Gentiles!
Sometimes God has to rip a hole in our dry and brittle approach to things of love and the spirit. No doubt many of you have seen the movie, "Chocolat" (2000), about a woman who arrives in a small French village to open a chocolate shop. It's a traditional village, and opening a chocolate shop during the season of Lent seems ill-advised. In fact it wreaks havoc with village spirituality. Everyone of good standing in the village goes to church, and the village's overseer does his utmost to see that Lent's ascetic dictates are observed. The delectable goodies produced in the chocolate shop, however, have great drawing power. One night just before Easter the overseer broke into the shop to destroy the creamy morsels before they can corrupt the pious, who were weak when faced with these tasty morsels. As he was destroying these confections a small bit of chocolate landed on his lip – lips that had not tasted food for days. It overwhelmed him, rendering him powerless to resist its magical spell.
Now, granted that this movie caters to our modern conviction that no principle is worth resisting if what we're resisting is pleasurable. On the other hand, unless one's faith is kept fresh and vital it can grow dry and unappealing. A slight crack in the wall of inflexible conviction is not an altogether bad thing.
Invisible as music, but positive as sound
Thin places are places of revelation, breaking through our defences and changing the way we look at things. The thin places are found at the intersection of heaven and earth, the temporal and the eternal. Three feet isn't a great distance, but it might has well be an uncrossable chasm if we fail to see it.
Thomas Merton (1915- 1968) wrote that we "are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through all the time." That's a comforting thought, except that we often fail to see it, as Merton himself recognized. Some of us "see through a glass, darkly". (1 Corinthians 13:12, KJV)
It calls to my mind the story and poetry of Emily Dickinson. (1830-1886) For one thing, she is another person who suffered the lack of her parents' blessing. Her mother was cold and aloof, her father stern and austere. Her father was a domineering figure in her life, and she says that her relationship with him was half-love and half-fear. She lived in her family home until her death, and her most familiar view of her father was of his back. Her father spent many of his hours sitting in his chair in the parlour, facing a fireplace, and as Emily passed the doorway to his room she would glance in at her father and see only his back – not a very warm image!
Dickinson was a recluse, a private but very prolific poet, writing nearly eighteen hundred poems. Only a handful were published during her lifetime. She hid them in a box and requested that after her death they be burned.
Dickinson longed for those thin places that would assure her of God's existence, let alone God's love and blessing. She doubted God's existence as much as she lamented God's distance, God's absence, God's apparent lack of interest in humankind. In one of her poems she writes:
What is interesting to me is that what Dickinson could not find in God, the Father, or God, the Creator – warmth, personality, closeness, and compassion – she found in Jesus of Nazareth. But that, after all, is what the incarnation is about. It's what Epiphany, the revealing of Jesus to the Gentile world, is about. The light of God shone through Jesus. God removed the distance between earth and heaven, between the temporal and the eternal, by coming to us in Jesus Christ, God's Beloved. Thanks be to God!
"Here is my servant, ... my chosen, in whom my soul delights...." (Isaiah 42:1)
A key that caught my attention this time around is Mark's description of the sky. I'm surprised I haven't noticed it before, because for a prairie boy the sky is omnipresent. Mark tells us that as Jesus "was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart...." (Mark 1:10) An interesting choice of word, because both Matthew and Luke use a different word, a gentler word simply translated as "opened". "When Jesus had been baptized, ...as he came up from the water, ...the heavens ...opened...." (Matthew 3:16; cf. Luke 3:21) In Mark, however, the heavens are "torn apart," the Greek word – schizomai – being the one from which we derive the words, "schism" and " and "schizophrenia". It's the kind of dramatic word that must have inspired some of our Advent hymns, like "O Saviour, Rend the Heavens wide!" (Hymnal: A Worship Book, #175) and "Fling wide the Door, Unbar the Gate!" (#186)
"O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence – as when fire kindles brushwood and ...causes water to boil.... When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, ...the mountains quaked at your presence." (Isaiah 64:1-3)
Thin Places, Places of Revelation
"When I look at your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars that You have established; what are human beings that You are mindful of them...?" (Psalm 8:3-4)
In contrast, an ancient Celtic proverb tells us that heaven and earth are only three feet apart! The Celts had not yet discovered the metric system, but they left us with this wonderful notion that God is closer than we think! Since the heavens were "torn apart" no one has ever been able to stuff God back inside the heavens and patch the hole or secure our secular lives from any further breaches of transcendence.
"...where the door between (this) world
Thin places are places of revelation, places in which we glimpse things that lend depth and meaning to our lives. A thin place is a place or moment in time where any barrier between the human and the divine become porous. We live in a world we experience through observation; we can see it, touch it, test it, measure it. As people of faith, however, we know that there is another world, another dimension to life that is not so easily observed, touched, and measured. It is the realm of our Creator, our Redeemer, the Holy Spirit – a world hard to comprehend and understand, but that makes an indelible impression upon us when we come across those thin places.
And the next is cracked open for a moment
And the light is not all on the other side."
"This world is not conclusion
Her poem begins with the assertion of faith: "This world is not conclusion / A sequel stands beyond," but it ends with the "tooth (of doubt) that nibbles at the soul—" Those of us for whom thin places are few and far between pluck at any "twig of evidence" that comes our way, but assurance of faith eludes us. Dickinson wondered a great deal about God, her contemplation generally dark and filled with uncertainty. While her contemporaries referred to God as "Father," Dickinson referred to God as an "eclipse".
A sequel stands beyond
Invisible, as music,
But positive, as sound.
It beckons and it baffles,
Philosophies don't know,
And through a riddle, at the last,
Sagacity must go.
To guess it puzzles scholars,
To gain it, men have shown
Contempt of generations,
And crucifixion shown.
Faith slips—and laughs, and rallies—
Blushes, if any see—
Plucks at a twig of evidence—
And asks a vane, the way—
Much gesture, from the pulpit—
Strong Hallelujahs roll—
Narcotics cannot still the tooth
that nibbles at the soul—"
Quotations of Scripture are from the New Revised Standard Version, unless otherwise noted.