One of the ways we can be more present to the God who is always present is to slow down and pay closer attention to what’s going on around us. You never know when heaven and earth will kiss each other in a moment of clarity, insight, or transformation.
The Celtic Christians called these moments “thin places.” A thin place occurs anywhere our hearts are opened up to the reality of God all around us. Even though he’s doesn’t use the term “thin place,” that’s what James Kugel is describing in this passage from his book The God of Old:
There are not two realms in the Bible, this world and the other, the spiritual and the material–or rather, these two realms are not neatly segmented but intersect constantly. God turns up around the street corner, dressed like an ordinary person. He appears in an actual brushfire at the foot of a mountain. And it is not even that, on such occasions, He enters the world as we conceive of it from somewhere else. Rather, it seems that the world itself as we conceive of it has little cracks in it here and there. We conceive of it one way, and most of the time it goes along with that conception; but now and again people turn out not be people and ordinary reality turns out to be something quite different from what we thought. This represents the Biblical authors’ most realistic sense of the way things really are. The spiritual is not something tidy and distinct, another order of being. Instead, it is perfectly capable of intruding into everyday reality, as if part of this world. It is not just “in here”; it is also out there, a presence, looming.
Telling Stories, Asking Questions, Learning Lessons
It seems to me that we’ve got an impoverished translation of Jesus’ words in the Lord’s Prayer — you know — that bit about “Our Father who art in heaven”. It’s as if God is way, way out there — “beyond the azure blue”.
But Jesus’ words are really “Father in the heavens” — heavens is plural — and the first heaven is the atmosphere directly above our heads. God actually inhabits the air we breathe and the places we sit and talk. He’s there, after all.
I highlighted that quote from your sermon last week, “the spiritual is not something tidy and distinct”. It spoke to me about the spiritual life being full of questions, searching, emotional, and with an ebb and flow to it. I am still thinking about how God reaches into my daily existence and how “God within me” reaches out. It seems that in our denomination, we have been taught to be tidy when it comes to God and to ignore the spirit experience altogether.
I agree wholeheartedly with the quote. And, I would add that our reality confirms further the concepts put forth.
“..Have been made partakers of the divine nature” coupled with “Christ in you, the hope of glory” makes the presence of God in our lives, for lack of a better word, familiar.
I am the same individual who once was alienated from God but now I have supernatural abilities due to my share of the God nature. I have a capacity to love unconditionally that I did not possess before I was born from above. The words I speak when I share the gospel are now not just my words but they are empowered by the Holy One who abides in me.
What a concept!
Grace and Peace,
Royce Ogle