Thick and thin…now that’s a familiar image.  We talk about those who will stick with us, through “thick and thin,” and we mean those who will stand by us through whatever good or ill crosses our path.  In the language of spirituality, we talk about the thick times, the times when life is full to the bursting with meaning and our sense being alive, our sense of our God-self is full to the brim.  And we talk about those locations that we call thin places, places where it seems that time holds still and that the earth and the sky merge, revealing to us not our own God-self, but a momentary understanding of the thread that connects all things in the universe, both the divine (and eternal) and the incarnated (and ephemeral).

The idea of the thin place comes to us through what we have learned about Celtic spirituality — the idea that there is a place so beautiful and clean and unspoiled that, in our wonder, we can almost reach out and touch the edge of heaven.  I believe this; I have stood on the edge of heaven as I walked in the red rocks of Sedona, as I’ve sailed the Mediterranean sea, and countless other times in my life.  It is not like a time portal or anything so fantastic — a thin place is, to me, a place where you cannot escape the beauty that is the very essence of God.

And too, I believe that there are thin times just as there are thin places.   For many people, All Saints day is a thin time — a time when, perhaps, the lines between now and eternity are blurred and we stand among those who have gone before us.   For me, though, a thin time is not just about feeling close to those no longer with me, here, in this incarnated state.  A thin time, like a thin place, is about dropping the lines I draw within myself between present and past, between human and divine, between dead and living, and experiencing a kind of wholeness of being that is just not possible at any other time.

Holy Week is, then, for me, just such a thin time.  Not only do I join with the entire world of Christians (well, except the Orthodox, who use a different calendar) as I remember the formative events of our faith, but I experience again the loved ones gone, the music made, the faith received, and the sorrow and joy of it all.  For me, Holy Week is the true meaning of  that idiom, through thick and through thin.  I have a chance to experience both the fullness of my God-self AND that place where the divine and the incarnated worlds interact.

This Holy week, I find myself face to face with the great questions that are current in my life, and I find myself unable to join in many of the big celebrations of the church. That is the prerogative of a pilgrim journey.  And so I am drawn to seek out the small remembrances — I need to feel the both and that is possible in the idea of thick and thin, places where I can feel the heartbeat of the remembrance, where I can shed a few tears, where I can maybe reach a hand through the window of the thin place that is that remembrance.