A Thin Place

A few years back Father Bill Burke visited the diocese and delivered a series of talks on the Eucharist. As we celebrate the Solemnity of The Body And Blood of Christ, I thought it very appropriate to share a couple of the wonderful stories he told;

There was once a man who hated pilgrimages but was convinced to travel to the Isle of Iona off of Scotland. It's a place that has been home to countless monks and contemplatives throughout the centuries. He figured he would just have a nice picnic. Instead he had an experience of 'connection' and presence that struck him so deeply, he struggled to put it into words. Each time he would try, the words and ideas would get tangled in his mind and on his lips. No idea, no phrase could quite capture the intense spiritual experience he had had that day.

The old ferryman upon taking him back asked him how the day was and again, he struggled to put what he had encountered into words. The ferryman smiled and in his heavy Scottish drawl nodded his head and said, "Ye donna have ta explain Lard. I sees it all the time. Iona, she's a thin place."

And the man knew then just how to describe it. Thin. A place in the world where the stories of those who preceded us, 'wears through' the ages to touch us with it's presence. A thin place were the living story of the People of God, continues to make it's presence known and engages us in it today.

The Eucharist is a 'Thin' place where the stories of our faith, the Kingdom, the Reign, the Presence wear through the fabric of our world and draw us into an unique experience of Christ.

Father Burke also shared a passage on the Eucharist that has quickly become one of my favorites. From "The Shape of the Liturgy" (London 1945) Dom Gregory Dix,, p74.

“Do this in remembrance of me...”

Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuges of fugitives in caves and the dens of the earth.

Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetish because the yams have failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so, wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheater; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the think June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonization of S. Joan of Arc – one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundred part of them.

And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei – the holy common people of God.

This summer, may the Eucharist you share, wherever your travels have you sharing it, make your world and your life a thin place.

And may it take your breath, and your words away.

Peace and God Bless