Thin Places

Many of us have found a lot of joy in the Celtic tradition of 'Thin Places.' A Thin Place is some 'where' where a person feels like he or she is standing in a place where heaven and earth almost touch.

I remember my semester abroad in college standing in Durham Cathedral in England--impressed by its beauty and massiveness, by the years and years it took to build. But I didn't sense any special sacredness. And I regretted that. It had been a long time since I had been moved by (or into) the sacred.

At the time of this musing I was standing at the altar rail. I happened to look down. The place for kneeling on my side of the rail was plain stone--instead of stone covered by lovely hand-stitched cushions.

Then, out of the blue, I was overwhelmed with a strange and powerful sensation. Looking down I'd just noticed that all across this 30 or 40 feet of hand-hewn stone there were knee prints--cupped depressions made by eight centuries of human knees sinking, resting, waiting before the altar.

It's hard to articulate--or even know--exactly why I was affected, why so moved simply by noticing knee-prints. It must have had something to do with sensing a kinship with that long procession of people I'd never met--and never would. And I guess that just by wishing I could feel the specialness of the cathedral I had become a pilgrim too. I was getting some sort of pervasive intuition that Life, a Meaningful Life, is always like a pilgrimage.

I sank down and let my knees rest exactly where those other knees had rested. And in that moment, I was down the rabbit hole--or out the back of the wardrobe: Sacredness became stunningly palpable--in the cathedral and in me. I was in a thin place.

Earlier this year, Eric Weiner, travel writer for the New York Times was even writing ths about Thin Places:

"I’m drawn to places that beguile and inspire, sedate and stir, places where, for a few blissful moments I loosen my death grip on life, and can breathe again. It turns out these destinations have a name: thin places."

Unfortunately, getting to a thin place can be very expensive. I just went on Kayak and the cheapest roundtrip flight from Atlanta to London is $948--that's if you fly out and return on a Thursday. Travel near a holiday and it's a lot more.

Happily, we really don't have to go anywhere to get to thin places; we move through thin places every day. We're just moving so fast and have developed such thick human hides that we rarely sense the thin places we pass.

Instead of buying roundtrip tickets to London, Dublin, or Kiev, we could simply invest in Permeability. We can learn how to open, become permeable to sacred moments and places we move through every day. Instead of passing by them, we can through them, we can invite them to move through us as well. When we're open like this, we're being spiritually permeable. 

The word Permeable comes from two Latin words that simply mean to pass through. 

Pretend for a minute to be Mary Oliver: what do you do when you see a robin's egg? 

Imagine your favorite grandparent: what does or did he or she do upon seeing you? 

Do that. 

When you notice something that flickers with even a hint of something that attracts your soul, slow down--it doesn't have to be more than 30 seconds. Notice that flickering and the tiny beginning of a smile on you and in you. 

Give in to it, go with it. It wants to get bigger. Let it. 

Welcome it. Focus on it. Celebrate it. 

Thank yourself for slowing down. Thank God for being alive.

Let your neural pathways know this is important! Without taking a little time to focus, to welcome, to celebrate, our brain patterns won't change. Cathedrals took time to build. So do we.

Becoming permeable, allowing ourselves to slow down and let life pass into us and out through us, we become thin places. Others become thin places. Life Itself becomes 'thin' in evermore delightful and meaningful ways. 

If You Keep Walking

One Sunday afternoon this past summer I went hiking on the high grassy balds in Shining Rock Wilderness Area and got caught in a thunderstorm. Sitting on Tennant Mountain eating a sandwich I could see it, and hear it, coming. It was a small storm--and it was moving in a direction that wouldn't bring it right over me, so I kept eating, enjoying the sound of thunder and the feel of the wind.

I also put on a waterproof parka. And when the little storm went by me to the north, I was glad I did. Rain drops, not many, but big, began splattering on the rock outcrop where I sat.  I kept the last bit of sandwich dry by bending my parka'd self over it.

The rain got heavier. For the first time, lightning flashed close by. Apparently, as the little storm rose up the highest ridges, it was generating, growing. Time for me to get off the summit and move on.

For the next 45 minutes or so all around and over me lightening crackled and thunder roared and rain poured and I slogged along a trail that had become a lively little stream.

To say the least, it was a powerful experience.

Moments of terror, of prayer, of feeling like an idiot--and finally of a kind of resignation that grew, step by step, into a strange kind of peace. I was in the middle of something wild but wonderful--and something I had absolutely no say over. All I could do was walk on--soaked from the waste down, water squishing in my boots with every step.

Carl Jung used to tell his patients that emotional turmoil is often like hiking in the Alps in a thunder storm. As you climb up from your village, if you keep walking, often you'll climb right out of the storm--putting it behind and beneath you in the valley you just left. You can look down and see the lightening in the clouds below, hear the thunder, watch the drama. It's still storming down there--but no longer on you.

I was thinking about Jung's story as I walked. I'd soon be out of the storm, or struck by lightening. Nothing at all I could do about it.

So I began trying to 'embrace the moment.' To feel the rain on my face and the water in my boots. To marvel at the spears of lightening and the thunder that bounced off the ridges and rumbled and rumbled. I tried my best to let go of every fearful impulse my poor mammal brain was generating--and simply to keep walking.

One worrisome thought at a time...I let go. Again and again.

Breathing in, taking another soggy step, breathing out.

Rain on jacket, rain on face, rain running down the inside of my pants and wicking into my socks and on down into my 'waterproof' boots.

Wind. Lightening. Fast-moving clouds. Rolling thunder.

On and on and on exchanging fear for feel: wetness, wind, light, deep rumble.

It was almost mesmerizing.

What doesn't kill you, some say, makes you stronger. It can also make you just plain happy to be among the living.

Slowly the storm moved on, the rain stopped, the lightening and the thunder were at 'a comfortable remove.' And I was still alive. Really, really alive.

Getting to Know the Nature of Restlessness and Fear

Yesterday I wrote about Refraining. I went back again this morning to Pema Chodron's When Things Fall Apart, yet again, to read what she has to say about it. It's probably the 20th time I've read it. But it's not like reading a novel where you know how things will turn out and get bored with the story. It's more like reading a book about biking through America while you're actually biking through America. How do you find the scenic routes, the best out-of-the-way restaurants, the B&B's? How do you repair a flat, replace a tire, true-up a handle bar? What do you need to know and what do you need to do to make the trip safe and memorable?

Anyway, if you've caught a glimpse of how Refraining can be a very tasty practice, you're bound to learn more and enjoy it by reading these paragraphs from When Things Fall Apart.

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Through refraining, we see that there's something between the arising of craving--or aggression or loneliness or whatever it might be--and whatever action we take as a result. There's something there in us that we don't want to experience, and we never do experience because we're so quick to act.

Refraining is the method for getting to know the nature of this restlessness and fear. It's a method for settling into groundlessness. If we immediately entertain ourselves by talking, by acting, by thinking--if there's never any pause--we will never be able to relax. We will always be speeding through our lives. We'll always be stuck with what my grandfather called a good case of the jitters. Refraining is a way of making friends with ourselves at the most profound level possible. We can begin to relate with what's underneath all the bubbles and burps and farts, all the stuff that comes out and expresses itself as uptight, controlling, manipulative behavior, or whatever it is. Underneath all that  there's something very soft, very tender, that we experience as fear or edginess.

There has to be some kind of respect for the jitters, some understanding of how our emotions have the power to run us around in circles.  That understanding helps us discover how we increase our pain, how we increase our confusion, how we cause harm to ourselves. Because we have basic goodness, basic wisdom, basic intelligence, we can stop harming ourselves and harming others. Because of mindfulness, we see things when they arise. Because of our understanding we don't buy into the chain reaction that makes things grow from minute to expansive. We leave things minute. They stay tiny.

It all comes through learning to pause for a moment, learning not to just impulsively do the same thing again and again. It's a transformative experience to simply pause instead of immediately filling up the space.

Anything can come up, anything can walk into our house; we can find anything sitting on our living-room couch, and we don't freak out. We have been thoroughly processed by coming to know ourselves, thoroughly processed by this honest, gentle mindfulness..

Don't Just Do Something--Stand Still

I remember reading a passage in C. S. Lewis about temptation when I was in my twenties. He said that we humans are usually like grass in strong winds, we bend, we give in so quickly to life's many strong forces that we don't really know what strong wind is.

But, he said, an oak tree knows all kinds of wind because it stands upright, taking the wind's full force.

I got to visit Lewis's neighborhood in Belfast once. Strolling in a lovely park I remembered his metaphor of grass and oaks and strong winds. The park was full of massive old beech trees, smooth silver bark and coppery leaves. The day was delightful--cool, the sun going in and out of clouds, a light breeze. I wondered how long those beeches had lived, two hundred, three hundred years? And here they were, still standing.

Later, walking along a coastal cliff, I got to experience gale force wind. You had to lean into it not to fall down. Because the coastal path wound around inlets, sometimes the wind was coming from the land and other times it was coming from the sea. Every now and then it would lighten up--and I'd stumble in whatever direction I had been leaning--which was really scary when I had just been leaning toward a two hundred foot cliff three or four feet away! I decided to walk five feet to the leeward side of the path. Lots of tall grass and some rocks, but it gave more stumbling room.

Standing upright, being a stand-up kind of guy or gal in strong wind is not easy. As long as we go with the flow, we never get an accurate sense of just how strong the flow is.

The Buddhist's, who are often more pragmatic about spiritual formation than we Christians, suggest we practice something called 'Refraining' in lots of small ways so that we can learn how strong the wind is and also begin developing the muscles it takes to stand up when the wind is fierce.

Instructions for Refraining are simple: instead of going with the flow, whatever the flow happens to be, we simply don't. When we're about to scratch an itch, we don't. When we're about to interrupt somebody, we don't. When we're about to turn on the 6:00 O'clock news, we don't. Etc., etc., etc.

What comes next?

Usually some kind of antsy-ness. Some urge to do the thing we were just about to do.

Ironically, it's feeling and learning more about this 'what comes next' that begins to train us to be stand-up kind of people.

If we stick with it, sometimes Refraining is easy. Like a stroll in the beech tree park on a perfect day. Sometimes Refraining is really, really hard, like navigating a coastal cliff path in gale force winds.

When I'm practicing Refraining my mantra is often, "Be still and know that I am God." The stronger the wind, the quicker I usually realize how being still connects with knowing God is God.

Yet the essence is the same, whether life is sweet or bitter, downhill or uphill, breezy or stormy, it's always helpful to be practicing how to be still and discovering the kind of stuff we only discover being still.

---

At some point, not that long ago, on another path along coastal cliffs when the wind was fierce, I noticed a gull hovering, staying roughly in the same spot. She just shifted a wing a little this way, a little that way--rose a little, dipped a little, holding her ground, even though her 'ground' was coming at her at 20 or 30 miles per hour.

Ah, I  thought. There's somebody who knows how to do it.

Not many of us will ever learn to stand still in Gale-Force Life as elegantly as that gull, but the practice of Refraining slowly teaches our souls something about strength and balance. Something about the nature of the winds we face. Something about our 'selves.' Something about being still. Something about something in us. Something about knowing God is God.

Song of the Builders

What sustains our hope for the world? Especially the world just next door. What sustains us so that we regularly get renewed in hope and love and energy?

Over time, awareness shows us what feeds us and what doesn't. And Wisdom is always near to turn us toward to the good stuff, the energizing stuff.

It's Monday. Eat. Otherwise the journey will be too much for us.

Song of the Builders

-Mary Oliver

On a summer morning

I sat down

on a hillside

to think about God -

a worthy pastime.

Near me, I saw

a single cricket;

it was moving the grains of the hillside

this way and that way.

How great was its energy,

how humble its effort.

Let us hope

it will always be like this,

each of us going on

in our inexplicable ways

building the universe.

What Happens Next?

To highlight (dramatically!) the chutzpah it takes to 'lean into' what scares, frightens or repulses us, Pema tells this story about her teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche.

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The first time I met Trungpa Rinpoche was with a class of fourth graders who asked him a lot of questions about growing up in Tibet and about escaping from the Chinese Communists into India. One boy asked him if he was ever afraid. Rinpoche answered that his teacher had encouraged him to go to places like graveyards that scared him and to experiment with approaching things he didn't like.

Then he told a story about traveling with his attendants to a monastery he'd never seen before. As they neared the gates, he saw a large guard dog with huge teeth and red eyes. It was growling ferociously and struggling to get free from the chain that held it. The dog seemed desperate to attack them.

As Rinpoche got closer, he could see its bluish tongue and spittle spraying from its mouth. They walked past the dog, keeping their distance, and entered the gate. Suddenly the chain broke and the dog rushed at them. The attendants screamed and froze in terror. Rinpoche turned and ran as fast as he could--straight at the dog. The dog was so surprised that he put his tail between his legs and ran away.

We can meet our match with a poodle or with a raging guard dog, but the interesting question is--what happens next?"

---

Those last three words are a key to a door that opens, and opens, and opens to Life. What happens next? When we bump up against hard stuff--do we freeze, run away, or lean in?

Pema reminds her readers that the 'safest way' to begin to work with this 'leaning in' is in meditation (not in actually running toward rabid dogs)! Even if we meditate 5 minutes a day we will regularly meet unpleasant stuff. When we do, what happens next?

The purpose and gift of meditation is to train us for 'what happens next?' Just sitting still paying attention to our thoughts and feelings we routinely 'face' the whole range of our humaness. Facing means not turning away. Not turning away takes discipline, patience, and courage. Doing this a little bit every day develops discipline, patience, and courage.

Meditation also comes with the instruction to 'hold' all the stuff that comes up with kindness--which means we don't just see what we see but also learn to care about it. This seeing and caring is slowly and surely transformative.

Pema concludes this section of When Things Fall Apart by saying, "We don't sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we'll be more awake in our lives."

As I wrote yesterday, meditation--living mindfully, learning to not turn away from what scares me--helps me follow Jesus. Meeting challenges conscious that 'what happens next?' never has to be a hypothetical question continues to light up the reality that the Kingdom of God is always at hand.

Unknown Territory

As I continue this year by year spiritual journey (the same journey Rumi  calls 'this being human') I'm bumping into joy over and over again discovering that Wisdom is around us everywhere.

Every religion has profound strands of human and divine insights stored, treasured, and proclaimed. (Every religion also has lots of ways of distorting wisdom, too, smothering it under layers of fear, self-righteousness, nationalism, and lethargy.)

The natural world, science, poetry, literature--all areas of life also have profound lessons and classes in Wisdom. What a wonderful convergence is going on in the world for those who begin to trust that when we know the truth it sets us free.

Consider the convergence between the wisdom Jesus brought to life by dying--both in metaphor and in his own life story--and this Buddhist insight, simply stated in these two paragraphs of Pema's:

"Basically, disappointment, embarrassment, and all these places where we just cannot feel good are a sort of death. We've just lost our ground completely; we are unable to hold it together and feel that we're on top of things. Rather than realizing that it takes death for there to be birth, we just fight against the fear of death.

Reaching our limit is not some kind of punishment. It's actually a sign of health that, when we meet the place where we are about to die, we feel fear and trembling. A further sign of health is that we don't become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it's time to stop struggling and look directly at what's threatening us. Things like disappointment and anxiety are messengers telling us that we're about to go into unknown territory."

It's taken awhile, but now it's hitting me full in the face: 'Going into unknown territory' is exactly what it's like to follow Jesus.

He trained those who followed him by taking them into unknown territory every week or maybe even every day. Those followers either quit or grew. They died a little bit every week or day or hour, or they dropped out. There are no alternatives.

This stuff Pema's talking about, this practice is about getting with the program, going ahead and accepting once and for all that if growth takes death then, by God, we're gonna learn to die gracefully, bravely, lovingly and regularly!

Wisdom is always giving us little glimpses of how to do this, how to grow. Familiar habits and patterns are always giving us little excuses not to grow--giving us 'reasons' to stay put, fearful, and unchanged.

This 'little practice' Pema gives us of using disappointment and anxiety, etc., as reminders that we're stuck (for us Christians, that Jesus has left the building!) is wonderfully helpful on the spiritual path. The very things that have always slowed us down become the very things that start moving us along. This kind of practice strengthens our spiritual muscles and re-tunes our wisdom receptors.

Try it. Notice when you feel lousy. Lean into it.

Notice how you feel lousy, where you feel lousy; notice what feeling lousy does to you.

Be kind to yourself in each moment of noticing.

Notice that you have a choice about how to respond, how to choose what comes next.

Notice what it's like and how you change going into unknown territory.

Notice if these little deaths really do lead to bigger Life.

By noticing and choosing, in small yet potent ways, we learn what's true and regularly experience for ourselves what sets us free.