Thin places: Where have you found them?

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?

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[i]Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy

Pulling heaven down to earth

Here's a description of Heaven from Maria Shriver [Arnold Schwarzenegger's wife] from her children's book called, What's Heaven:

[Heaven] is somewhere you believe in ...It's a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clouds and talk to other people who are there....If you're good throughout your life, then you get to go to heaven...And [Grandma] is watching over us from up there..."

Note the following:  'Soft clouds.'  Entry into heaven conditional upon your own goodness.  A place 'up there.'

Now here's another picture of heaven from N.T. Wright:

'God's kingdom' in the preaching of Jesus refers not to a postmortem destiny, not to our escape from this world into another one, but to God's sovereign rule coming 'on earth as it is in heaven.' ...Heaven, in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hidden, dimension of our ordinary life - God's dimension, if you like. 

-- from Surprised by Hope

That's not to say that we won't enjoy what is typically called, "Paradise" upon our bodily death.  We will.  What's more, it is conditioned upon the gift of God's goodness dwelling in the new hearts he gives to those who receive friendship with him. 

What differences do you note between the typical expression of heaven represented by Maria Shriver's position, and N.T. Wright's description?  Which view brings you more hope today?

Let's stop locating 'heaven' 'up there, in the stars;' but instead, breath it in through our nostrils, sense it when the wind blows, and feel a presence brush over our skin during a great conversation.  For the kingdom is that "other, hidden, dimension of our ordinary life."  Now.

The veil flutters in the wind now.  Remember, it was torn in two.

Video - KINGDOM OF NOBLES

[This is a new video I just finished producing.] 

You were born into nobility. 

Five quotes on the Kingdom of God

THE KINGDOM:  What you can't see is often more important than what you can.  Because of Jesus, the eternal has penetrated the temporal, and heaven and earth have collided.  The Kingdom of Heaven is near and the veil is thin.

“It is the childlike mind that finds the kingdom.”  - Charles Fillmore

“If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God first, it will in the end make no difference what you have chosen instead.”  - William Law

“For me Christianity is about the Kingdom, not about the Church:  it has to do with human growth and development not church growth and development.”  - Michael Taylor

“The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching of Jesus, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought.”  -  H.G. Wells

"Earth is crammed with heaven,and every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries."
- E. Barrett Browning

Which is the real world?

Which one is the real world?

• Narnia, or the the professor's english countryside estate?
• The prince's palace, or Cinderella's sooty cellar?
• Your town; or another, more supernatural realm?

More specifically, from which direction does life flow?  From which direction does authority and power flow? 

The Kingdom of Heaven is not "heaven"  - what we falsely call the "afterlife."  Rather, it is a dominion in time and space; a world, as Jesus indicated, that was markedly "near."  Accessible.

Why else would we say we are "surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses?"  You can't be surrounded by something far away.  You are surrounded by these encouragers even now.  There are other characters in the story.  It's not just "Jesus and me."  As Dallas Willard indicates, there is no such thing as empty space.  The air around us is occupied. 

"Still, we have been speaking of the Otherworld and the manifest [the one we see] world as quite separate places.  The ancient Celts, however, made no such distinction... The material and the spiritual were not separate or self-limited states:  both were equally manifest at all times."  (--from The Paradise War, by Stephen Lawhead, p. 87)

So which is the real and most authentic world, the one that has the power to shape the other and call it into its true form? 

The unseen is the supernatural current of electricity that gives its light to the seen.  It is the seed that gives its genetics to the fruit; the Firstborn his inheritance to the follower; the Original its form to the copy.  The goal is restoration.  This is of course what we mean when we say that one day, the Kingdom of Heaven and the kingdoms of earth will be unifed: the natural earth (the 'seen' world) will be folded into and repaired by the supernatural (presently unseen) Kingdom of Jesus.  Heaven restoring earth.   Supernatural healing the natural. 

“The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching of Jesus, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought.”  - H.G. Wells