The ancient Celts believed in “thin places” – certain places in the natural world where the veil between heaven and earth was so thin that it allowed heaven to seep through, whereby the individual could touch another world while still standing in this one -- on a lonely mountain top, a hidden field, a remote island. These places were portals to the Other World.
This shouldn’t surprise us. There’s plenty of biblical precedence for this:
- The Mount of Transfiguration where the ancient ones meet with the everlasting One.
- The Jabbok River where Jacob wrestled with a "man" through the night.
- The Island of Patmos, where the island becomes a staging area for a breathtaking revelation, and John receives instruction for the seven churches from the Living One himself.
- The warrior-poet, David, is instructed to wait until he hears the "marching in the balsams" before striking out in battle against the Philistine army. That "marching in the balsams" was the heavenly war host advancing like ghosts through the trees.
As occupants of the near- and- now Kingdom Jesus spoke of, we are literally walking through heaven. Heaven is a kingdom that saturates the air around us as Dallas Willard reminds us: "But it is precisely from the space immediately around us that God watches and God acts."[i]
When he comes to deliver us, he doesn't journey to us from far off, or take the red eye, or fly in from space—he comes from out of the air next to us.
One of the worst ironies in modern Christianity is that we’ve lost a supernatural view of reality. The God and the Kingdom we speak so fondly of remains hog-tied by our cerebral rationalism, put there by those of us who are comfortable with a predictable “reality.” "The Kingdom of God" isn't a metaphor – or helpful idea about 'heaven:' It as a mysterious and disruptive presence. It is the "real world."
Where are the thin places where you live?
[i]Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy