PEOPLE often talk of holy places as “thin”, where the boundary between this world and the heavenly realm is so porous it’s barely there. These are usually ancient sites of prayer and pilgrimage, or of astounding natural beauty.
I relish these, but there are also “thick” places. On the spiritual map, they look as though they’re going to be thin, but when you arrive, that sense of the holy is hidden from you. I’ve come to recognise this as the strange cartography of the Spirit. Here be blessings.
FITZROY Gardens in Melbourne is a good example. We were in Australia on a three-month sabbatical in 2024. In advance, everything seemed to shout, “Thin place!” Oh, the writing I would do, the people I would meet, the coffee I would drink! I spent many hours sitting on a bench in these gardens, in the hot February sunshine, wondering what on earth was wrong with me. Why was my soul not wafted heavenward on the lemon-eucalyptus-scented air as the magpies fluted melodically as if from Eden itself?
At one level, the answer was obvious. It was only six months since my mother’s death, and four weeks since a bout of Covid. But, even without the double whammy of grief and coronavirus, I’m not sure that Fitzroy Gardens would have felt much thinner to me. Other people are able to use sabbaticals to soak up the sun and write books. I seem to fall apart. It’s as though time out opens a cupboard door in the soul. Out tumbles all the soul work I’ve been deferring as I labour up life’s down escalator. The thin veil separating me from the heaven of Fitzroy Gardens became clogged and difficult and thick.
I REALISED recently that I’d always assumed that Jesus’s words “I came to give them life, life in all its fullness” meant “life in all its fullness of joy”. But what if, by his life, death, and resurrection, he was showing us instead what it might look like to play music on the full human instrument — all the hopes, all the fears, all the bliss, all the pain? We are more fearsomely and wonderfully made than the vastest of cathedral organs, with ranks ranging from fairy panpipes right down to ground-shaking 64-footers. We have more stops and manuals and pedals than we can begin to imagine.
This is what those thick holy places make me consider: that I am scared to feel the full weight of my feelings in case I am annihilated by pain. I’m learning that it’s not an option to play only happy tunes. The human heart can’t be selectively muted. It’s all the time and key-signatures, or none of them.
This Easter might be the season to open our hearts, open our arms, come what may, trusting that pain and death itself have been annihilated by the one who has gone on ahead — fully human — to open up for us an entire cosmos of holy space.
Dr Catherine Fox is an author, senior lecturer, and academic director of The Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.
