“Thin places – where
heaven and earth come closer.” That was the heading of a New York Times article
three years ago. “This column will change your lives,” roared another article
in the usually sedate Guardian in London, UK.
“We’re in the territory, here, of the ineffable: the stuff we can’t
express because it’s beyond the power of language to do so.” Ireland is
littered with these places a writer on travel in Ireland wrote.
So what are they, these places where the veil between our
earthly – or earthy – existence and a transcendent, spiritual existence
vanishes?
To me they are not places so much as experiences. Totally unexpected moments of delightful
ecstasy when one sees and hears and knows that one is closer to the infinite,
transcendent reality we call God. An experience we simply cannot have in the
hurly-burly of everyday life.
And yet I had one such experience recently in, of all
places, a hospital emergency room. No, it wasn’t a room; it was a warren of
corridors where patients like me waited endlessly for attention from a nurse or
a doctor or someone to transport us to another part of the hospital for more
extended care.
I lay in that place for forty-eight hours before being moved
to the RAZ, a large room - called a zone not a ward - where one waited in a bed slightly more comfortable. Sooner or later one would be assessed more completely while waiting for a bed in the medical or surgical ward where
more extensive treatment could be given.
This thin place had happened earlier during a sleepless night as the
business and desperate noises of emergency medicine went on all about me. I was
in pain but not as severely as others nearby. Not like the young man in the
throes of withdrawal from drug addiction and had lost his methadone. Or the
older man like myself calling out endlessly for someone – anyone - to help him
find his wallet then finally demanding to see the police to lay charges on
whoever had stolen it.
In the midst of this cacophony of an emergency department in
crisis, I suddenly felt how grateful I was for the care I was being given in
such hectic circumstances. My immediate need for pain relief had been met by a
young nurse with a hypodermic needle applied to my left buttock.
Perhaps it was the morphine taking effect that launched me
into the ecstasy I experienced. I felt lifted beyond my immediate situation and
wrapped in the warmth of a presence I had rarely experienced before. I realized
that I needed to make some changes in how I was living toward the end of my
ninth decade. My communication of faith and the religious life available to
anyone would henceforth have to be in a different form. With means like this
blog I could reach beyond the circle of a few friends who gathered on Tuesday
mornings for coffee and conversation about scripture passages I had pointed out
in some preliminary notes posted online a few days earlier.
Furthermore, my wife’s declining health was a major factor in
whatever changes I had to make. This revelation of future possibilities reminded
me of another moment all of sixty- four years ago when another thin place
experience had made me realize how marriage would involve endless sacrifice
reflecting the sacrifice of Christ himself. So I proposed marriage to the young
woman. She accepted and our lives together since then have fulfilled for both
of us all that thin place prophesied.
When the momentary ecstasy dissolved into the reality of my
surroundings, I knew that I had been richly blessed by my stay in that
emergency ward. My experience could only be described as being given the best
of care in the worst of circumstances.
Thank God we can pray daily that the new hospital we can see
from the windows in our senior residence suite will be opened as promised by
the end of this year. In the meantime, we can pause to experience the richness
of spiritual life in those thin places.
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