This audio recording opens with a reading of a text about St. Paul in Athens where he is proclaiming the good news of god’s revelation in Jesus Christ. The market place in Athens is an important place for discussing and sharing ideas. The reading begins at verse 19. The Athenians liked to spend their days learning new things about religion, Paul at first complimented their piety by noting how many shrines they had in their city then went on to espouse that the god that created the world was not to be found in shrines created by humans when he was able to create life itself and all the places we inhabit. He created a world where we can search for him but where he is always near us, for within him we live and move.
Marcus opens with a joke that his wife serves as a priest at his home church but that being married to a priest was not one of his adolescent fantasies.
The prayer Marcus opens with goes “Lord Jesus Christ you are the light of the world fill our minds with your peace and our hearts with your love. In your name o’ Christ our body and our blood, our life and our nourishment. Amen”
Open Hearts and Thin Places
These are two metaphors that have become very meaningful to Marcus in the preceding decade. Together they express much of what Marcus sees as central to the Christian life.
Part 1 the Metaphor of the Heart
Within the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, the heart is a symbol for the self at its deepest level, below thinking, feeling and deciding. This level shapes our intellect and will. According to the bible the condition of the human heart is that it is typically closed. The bible speaks of a shut, hardened or stony heart. The features that go with a closed heart include blindness, limited vision, distorted reasoning, lacking in gratitude, bitter when life is not going our way, closed to wonder and awe, self preoccupied, concerned with ourselves, we are in exile, we lack compassion, we cannot feel the feelings of another and act accordingly, we are insensitive to the plight of others. This our natural condition because it is the natural product of growing up and socialization. Becoming self aware leads to concern with ones self.
What opens and closes our hearts on a daily basis? One’s heart will be more open or closed throughout a day, sometimes one’s heart is more closed simply because of tiredness and the solution is simply to take a nap. Other times Marcus’s heart is closed because he is preoccupied, grumpy or too busy, his heart is closed when the world looks ordinary and he is being critical of the world. So our typical condition is that we have closed hearts as if there is a shell around oneself. One of Marcus favorite metaphors for the Christian life comes from Frederick Buechner “the purpose of life is for the hatching of the heart”. Marcus loves this metaphor because it also shows how important it is for the heart to break free from its shell, that the life within it will shrivel and die if it does not break free.
Part 2 The Metaphor of Thin Places
This metaphor comes from Celtic Christianity that presupposes a particular way of thinking about god. This way of thinking of the meaning of the word god is reflected in the passage read at the beginning of the talk. God is not far off, we live, move and have our being within god. The word god refers to a sacred spiritual encompassing reality that is all around us, another layer of reality.
Thin places are where the border that separates us from that reality becomes porous and permeable. Thin places are where the veil that blinds us to the reality of the sacred momentarily lifts and we have a sense of the reality of god. In Celtic Christianity thin places can literally be geographical specific islands or pilgrimage sites like Jerusalem or for instance. Thin places is not restricted to geographical locations, they are anywhere where our hearts can be opened to the reality of the sacred. In other words a thin place can be a sacrament or mediator of the sacred. There are many kinds of thin places for example the experience of nature and wilderness, or the experience of music, even experiences of illness can become thin places.
When we apply the idea of thin places to the practice of the Christian tradition we see how many of the practices might become occasions for thin places. Worship can be tedious or boring when badly done however the purpose of worship is to create an opportunity for a thin place from Pentecostal enthusiasm to Quaker silence the purpose is the same. Music is often involved especially participatory music. In the Protestant tradition the singing of hymns that you can sing at the top of your lungs is often reported as being a very opening experience. Marcus’s opinion is therefore if you have any say in choosing hymns you should never pick hymns that are difficult to sing. To those who worry about losing some of the traditional difficult to sing hymns Marcus says there may be a reason that people don’t know them already. Sound itself can open one’s heart, a German scholar of religions found that across cultures and traditions the long, open protracted vowel sound is universal in worship. The long vowel sound can be found in the Om of Asian traditions and in Hallelujah of the Christian tradition. Sacred time can also be an occasion for a thin place, for instance the holy festivals of Christmas and Easter. More people come during these times not necessarily because they traditionally always have but because these times are often deeply moving and they come with the expectation that something may happen. One of the most striking uses of time can be found in the Orthodox Jewish observance of the sabbath and their prohibition of work on the sabbath. This observance signifies that one day a week the world returns to it’s primordial state before the work of the creating the world began. Scripture and prayer are often accompanied by contemplative silences that are meant to allow for thin places.
These practices are not about what god wants us to do in that he has a set of requirements for us. The purpose of these practices is that they might open our hearts to the reality of god. Their purpose is to be thin places.
Part 3 What goes with the open heart
What are our lives like when our hearts are open? An open heart and seeing go together. We see most clearly when our hearts are open, whether it is a landscape or the person right in front of our face. An open heart is alive to the wonder of being, in a way it is remarkable that being could ever look ordinary to us. There is color and sound and shape. An open heart and gratitude go together. Sometimes you can almost feel your heart braking open with gratitude. An open heart and compassion and a passion for justice go together. A passion for social justice and compassion are the primary gifts of god.