“THIN places” are in vogue. The idea has a long history: pagan, Celtic, and Christian. These are places where the veil between the earthly realm and the spirit realm seems thinner. Heaven and earth are only three feet apart, the saying goes, but in thin places (caol áit, in Irish Gaelic) that distance is even shorter.
The American travel writer Eric Weiner popularised the idea a decade ago, and it is now invoked by secular nature writers as well as spiritual seekers. Wild places and holy sites, places of deep meaning and heightened experience — these we call thin places.
Of course, it is vital to notice how places can focus and prompt spiritual experience. But I have begun to wonder whether this language of “thinness” is helpful. It might seem to imply that the “thick” materiality of this world is an impediment to our encountering the divine. This leads to a kind of dualism: imagining creation as two realities — one of matter, and one of spirit — and encouraging us to escape from one into the other.
We can end up thinking that spiritual experience should itself have a kind of “thinness” to it, as if it should be always ethereal rather than bodily and material. By praising thinness, we take the risk that faith becomes a way of relating to an invisible elsewhere rather than a way of being here: a means of escape rather than a means of coming home.
CHRISTIANITY has a long history of lapsing into dualism and doing much damage thereby, but, at its best, it can suggest a world in which the divine is found incarnate, in and through the stuff of the world. Spirit and matter are not separable. If there ever was a veil between worlds, was it not torn from top to bottom on Good Friday?
From then on, we expect to find God omnipresent in this world: not just in particular, holy places, but everywhere. So, we do not need the stone of landscape to wear thin before it can speak about God: the stones themselves cry out (Luke 19.40), even before we are ready to.
If this is so, maybe we would be better off speaking of special places as having a kind of “thickness”? In academic circles, thickness is all the rage: a useful paper at a conference is these days praised as being “thick” (meaning “rich”). We covet “thick description”: a kind of layered anthropological description, attentive to context and complexity, popularised by Clifford Geertz.
AlamyA 1703 etching of The Tearing of the Veil in the Temple of Jerusalem, Jan Luyken, Print Maker: Haarlem
Thickness reminds us that things extend in space as well as time: it implies bodies; it earths us. Perhaps nature writing is so popular today, when much of our experience is thin and virtual, precisely because it does this job of thickening our sense of the world, making us attentive to textures and materials, subtleties of weather and light. Perhaps the longing that this answers in us is not for the world to thin out, but, rather, for it to thicken into something truly meaningful. Perhaps we long for “thick places”.
IN FAIRNESS, many of the writers now invoking the tradition of the “thin place” are interested in exactly this: how our tactile material world can be somehow more than itself, opening up transformative depths.
In Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s moving book Thin Places, wild landscapes help her to come to terms with the trauma of the Troubles. Thin places, for her, are emphatically material, even if “warmed by the presence of something”. The spiritual does not replace the material, but is found within it. For her, borders (geographical, temporal, and perceptual) become more porous in such places.
This seems right: if anything does thin out in these places, it is not the material world itself, but the “doors of perception” — the everyday blinkers that prevent our seeing what is really there. We tend to experience the world through what William James called “the hard rind of a margin”, but places and events can conspire to thin this rind, and, in such moments, we might glimpse this world as it is: saturated with the love of God. Such experience is God-thick, not world-thin.
WILD places and times of retreat clearly help many of us to thin our blinkers and attend more closely to the world. But getting to remote and picturesque landscapes is a challenge for people “in the thick of it”: those with caring responsibilities, or in poverty or poor health. So, we must be careful not to suggest that God dwells only (or even mainly) on mountaintops or empty beaches.
To think of “thickness” rather than “thinness” might just help us to emphasise that the divine is here, in the ordinary mess of life, just as much as out in the wild. Wherever thick bonds of love bind people and places together, God is present. Wild places are great, but the nappy-changing table, the hospital ward, and the care home are thick places, too.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh agrees: “Places that anchor and nurture us do not have to be beautiful, cut off, or even what might be described as wild. I’m not just talking about forests, mountains, and wild coves. I am also thinking about supermarket car parks with even just one tree; the back of housing estates where life has been left to exist; dump-piles in burnt-out factories where insects glisten; dirty streams at the edges of things, full of waste but still brimming with something like renewal.”
I KNOW of no thicker place than the altar rail. People kneel side by side, the threads of so many lives, different pains and joys, brought together and thickly woven with the grand story of God’s love. In the bread and wine, all this love and longing thickens until it can be touched, tasted, and shared.
In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, the character Seth is accused of having a love that is “too thick”. She responds: “Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.”
The Revd Dr Rob Hawkins is assistant curate of St James’s, Cambridge. He writes about art and faith, and is a member of the editorial team for Art+Christianity.
