Thanks

Excerpt of a poem by W. S. Merwin

Listen

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings

we are running out of the glass rooms

with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

and say thank you

I have noticed that when I describe “thin places” to others, a variety of experiences and ideas are brought forward about what I mean. I have heard profound, life-changing experiences, uncanny coincidences, awe-inspired moments, channeled spiritual wisdom involving art and music, quietly illuminated everyday things that for most, barely merit notice, and tapping into a power that guides us to find ways to treat others with kindness and respect when we are exhausted, angry, or fearful-not at our best.

The first category is closest to my heart as a recovering alcoholic. Recovering alcoholics are familiar with profound, life-changing experiences that open the way to sobriety, yet don’t seem to have any good, rational explanations. Many times, there are a number of coincidental encounters that line up over time to make the alcoholic able to consider stopping. In hindsight they seem to be conversion events many recovering alcoholics attribute to a loving Higher Power. Many non-theists are willing to admit to the mysterious nature of the recovery experience. I hear from individuals in my AA groups, one-after-another, who relate how, one day, something happened that changed their daily destructive, addictive habits to a clean and sober way of living. These are uncanny, life-affirming changes that happened because of an accident, a DUI, a chance meeting with someone, a supernatural voice. I even heard of someone telling me that after passing out in his own vomit, he looked up to see his dog who then spoke to him in words that he had to stop drinking! For alcoholics, there are always prior accidents, DUIs, and a long line of people telling us to do something about our drinking. Why would one more make the difference? And yet it does, something changed.

AA’s call these experiences “bottoms” when everything zeroes out and we have no where else to turn. We describe these events in depth to never forget how bad it was, where we came from. This is the moment of transformation. These moments are also called the grace of God, miracles, gifts of desperation, our moments of powerlessness from which arise paradoxically the power to stop drinking and to stay stopped. Other near-death experiences or highly traumatic life events fit this same category and can be thin places for anyone, not just alcoholics. These stories are usually described using the same phrases as recovering alcoholics and are equally inspiring.

I intend to write further blog posts about other categories of “thin places”. Stay tuned!

After a hiatus of several years, I have decided to continue my interviews with people about “Thin Place” experiences. I have discovered since that the idea of Thin Places did not originate, as I thought, with the poet, John O’Donohue in a Krista Tippet interview, but has a rich history in Christian and Celtic traditions. Strangely enough, there is even a catalogue of travel sites that have been documented where visitors can be jolted out of an everyday perception of reality. (“Where Heaven and Earth Come Together, The New York Times, published March 9, 2012, online at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/travel/thin-places-where-we-are-jolted-out-of-old-ways-of-seeing-the-world.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0) While it may be that architecture and sacred spaces might avail travelers of “thin place” experiences, it goes without saying that those travelers, still have to have the inner composure and awareness to be available to it.

I include a short article I found this morning by a Rev Terry Davis (John O’Donohue is cited!):

Reflections / By Rev. Terry Davis / March 17, 2013

Dear Friends,

This coming St. Patrick’s Day makes me think of my former chaplaincy supervisor and friend Maureen. Maureen, her husband and their daughter took a family trip to Ireland a few years ago. When she returned, she commented that there were many “thin places” there – places where the distance between heaven and earth collapses. The New York Times journalist Eric Steiner described it as locales where “we’re able to catch glimpses of the divine, the transcendent or, as I like to think of it, the Infinite Whatever.”[1]

Steiner says that that ancient Celts, and later, Christians, used the term to describe mesmerizing places like the Isle of Iona (which is now Scotland) or the mountains of the pilgrimage site Croagh Patrick in Ireland. Writes Steiner “Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places, that distance is even shorter.”

Maureen described a craggy point with mist rising over the ocean, a quiet and small country church that was hundreds of years old, and other places she visited in Ireland where the presence of the divine seemed particularly strong to her.

Regardless of our theology, it is likely that we experience thin places of our own. For me, it was a walk last Sunday afternoon with Gail along a new nature trail less than a mile from our home. As we were leaving, I walked down an alternate path and ended up in a clearing along a sandy-banked creek. The sun was slanted in the sky, the water was clear and the current was swirling, and I could hear a woodpecker tap-tap-tapping away on a nearby tree. I was mesmerized, rooted to this sacred spot, and I didn’t want to leave.

While I don’t believe in a literal heaven, I do believe that there are places – thin places, perhaps – that evoke a tremendous sense of peace and a feeling of change inside. And, I had just discovered one.

Irish Teacher and Poet John O’Donohue wrote, “May you allow the wild beauty of the invisible world to gather you, mind you, and embrace you in belonging.”

Translated for me: take time to find those thin places. The distance to discovery is shorter than we think.

Yours,

Terry

If you have an experience you would like to share, please write it up and send it to me:

[email protected]

I have always loved cemeteries. My first memory is being in a cemetery with my Dad. I was six. He is holding my hand. Someone close to my Dad had died unexpectedly and we’re watching his sons planting flowers at the grave. My Dad told me why we were there and talked softly with the two men. He was smiling and was very kind.

My older brother and I went with my Dad to the cemetery many times as we were growing up. In spring he and my Mom planted geraniums on my grandfather’s grave. My Dad said these flowers were “hardy.” There was a water pump and my brother and I would pump the water into my Dad’s old tin watering can and we’d water the plants. We often played hide and seek among the gravestones. We peeked into mausoleums and tried to read old stones. Some displayed oval photos of the deceased. I thought they were cool and helped me better imagine who was resting there.

As the years passed I still visited the cemetery with my Dad. We had more stops to make as we planted more geraniums on my grandparents and my Mom’s graves. We still used the old tin watering can. We included the visits on our “chore runs.” The last time I visited the cemetery with my Dad was around a month before he died. He was ailing but he wanted to visit my Mom’s grave to make sure the stone had his name on it. My Dad lived alone after my Mom died and whenever I’d visit, we’d do our chore runs. Visiting the cemetery was often the last chore of the day. Once we noticed that the small triangular stone on my grandparents grave was pushed back into the ground. The cemetery office told us they were doing this with small stones so they could mow the grass more easily. After a year the stone was covered by grass and hardly visible.

About three years before my Dad died we took on the mission of getting the cemetery to raise the stone. We went to the office and stated our case. The woman looked up the plot and said she wasn’t sure. A grounds manager came into the office, said he’d look into it and get back to us. He took down my name and phone number and said he’d call me after he saw the grave.

Two years passed and my Dad and I still went to the cemetery but we never heard back from the worker. After my Dad passed away I’d still drive through the cemetery.

During one visit, I decided that I wanted to finish my Dad’s and my final chore ….getting my grandparents’ grave stone lifted. I was sure the office folk didn’t even remember our previous request. Determined…. I drove to the office and told the same woman at the desk that I wanted the stone raised. She looked at me quizzically. At that very moment, almost on cue, the same grounds manager I spoke to years before walked into the office. He was holding a worn piece of paper in his hand. He looked at me like he’d seen a ghost. “Are you Peggy Brennan? You’re not going to believe this but I was just cleaning out my old truck and found the note with your name and number in the back of the glove compartment!” The three of us were stunned and speechless. It was as if my Dad entered this thin place at that very instant and put the note with my name directly into the man’s hand. The grounds manager assured me he’d raise the stone without delay. I knew my Dad was so very, very near as he helped me finish our final chore.

My family refashioned the gravestone and it now sits proud and erect in place.

Cemeteries are thin places for me. They are still, quiet and calm. I sense the people resting underground and somehow they keep me company. I feel a peaceful reverence and my heart rests lightly. It all started that day when I was six holding my Dad’s hand.

This is an excerpt from an article about Thomas Kelly by Roger Owens in the September 2017 issue of Friends Journal. It struck me as a description of a dramatic thin place in Thomas Kelly’s life. To read the  full article:

A Mysticism for Our Time

I [Roger Owens] started reading Kelly when I was 32. I remember this when seeing the mark I made in the biographical introduction to A Testament of Devotion of what Kelly was doing when he was 32. Because I wanted to explore the inner life of prayer he wrote about and lived, I was as drawn to the story of his life as I was to his writings.

A lifelong Quaker, Kelly was academically ambitious, driven, convinced that success as an academic philosopher would ensure he mattered. He received a doctorate from Hartford Theological Seminary in 1924 and began teaching at Earlham College in Indiana. But he pined for the rarefied intellectual atmosphere and prestige of an elite East Coast college. In 1930 he began work on a second doctorate at Harvard, assuming this would be his ticket east. But when he appeared for the oral defense of his dissertation in 1937, he suffered an anxiety attack; his mind went blank. Harvard refused to let him try again.

This failure proved the turning point in his life. It thrust him into a deep depression; his wife feared he might be suicidal. It also occasioned his most profound mystical experience, and he emerged a few months later settled, having been, as he put it in a letter to his wife, “much shaken by an experience of Presence.”

His friend Douglas Steere, a colleague at Haverford where Kelly was teaching at the time (he made it back east), summarized how many perceived the fruit of Kelly’s experience: “[A] strained period in his life was over. He moved toward adequacy. A fissure in him seemed to close, cliffs caved in and filled a chasm, and what was divided grew together within him.”

Three years later Thomas Kelly, 47 years old, died suddenly while washing dishes. The essays published in A Testament of Devotion were written in those few years between the fissures closing and his death. He died not only a scholar who wrote about mysticism, but a mystic himself, who knew firsthand that experience of spiritual solitude purported to be the essence of religion.

Prelude:  From doing this blog, I have realized that there are a variety of types of “thin place”  experiences. They seem to run on a continuum from profound and life-transforming, to those that are small, quiet, and come and go almost unnoticeably. Below, I share mine which is more toward the life-transforming side of the spectrum. I want you to know that I wrote this almost a month ago and it has taken many weeks of going back and forth in my mind to decide whether this story was appropriate to share with Meeting. I finally decided that being a part of the Quaker community is important enough to me to share it and let myself feel vulnerable. If anyone else is feeling shy about coming forward with their own “thin place” story, just know I get it.

My relationship with my mother was strained from an early age. She was tough on me and I retaliated by getting into a lot of trouble. As a teenager, I got busted shoplifting a number of times and my friends and I were arrested for breaking, entering, and causing a fair amount of damage to a construction site. We were juniors in high school and had gone on one of our drunken binges on a Friday night. The judge sentenced us to do community service taking care of the grounds of the police station for the summer. I was angry that my parents had gotten divorced and my mother was hanging around the minister she worked for at the Presbyterian church, who I thought was a jerk. My dad was living in a house in a nearby subdivision. I was court-ordered to spend Sundays with him. I remember going over on Sundays to watch football together, and at times, I might meet one of his new sleazy girlfriends. His roommate was a drunk and the house smelled bad.

By the time I graduated from high school, my mother got remarried to the minister and my dad picked up a second wife as well. I couldn’t get out of town fast enough. The next 15 years I lived on both coasts and ended up in Chicago. I didn’t speak to my mother or father very much, nor did I visit home a lot. I somehow finished college, got a low-paying museum job, destroyed a marriage (luckily there were no kids) and got a master’s degree. All throughout this time I drank as much as I could and I took drugs whenever they were available. After graduate school, I got a job in New Haven. At this point I knew that by coming to New Haven, I had to stay away from the bars because I was pretty sure that, as in the past, drinking would become my life. I would not be able to hold on to the new job if I got friends who drank the way I liked to drink. My dad had joined AA and had been sober for several years. Because of his example, I realized that I too, couldn’t control my drinking anymore, but I also couldn’t stop.

Eventually, I ended up joining AA too. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but there were certainly thin places in the making of this decision. I found friends in AA and I heard stories of people’s family lives that were much worse than mine. Nevertheless I held on to a deep resentment toward my mother. This resentment had tendrils that snaked into other areas of my life, into relationships with women, with authority figures, police. I had developed a vitriolic political edge and I fought if provoked. My sponsor also grew up detesting his mother. He had worked a lot on forgiveness with her and had made significant headway on their relationship before she died. I told him I would never, ever forgive my mother. He didn’t push me, but he said gently, that yes, I would forgive her sometime too, maybe not just now, but sometime.

Recovery from alcohol was a lot tougher than I imagined. Alcohol was such an integral part of who I was, what I did, and who I hung around with. Removing it left me feeling hollow and not sure about who I was. AA suggests that you work the 12 steps with a sponsor as part of a full recovery. One of the steps is to make a list of those we had harmed and become willing to make amends to them all. I made this list, which included my ex-wife, brother, sister, father, employer, and a good number of friends, and started making those amends. My mother’s name was not on the list.

My mother holding the deer trophy head with her little sister. Circa mid-1930s

Two and a half years into my recovery, my step father (the minister) started going through old photos and sending packets to me, my sister, and my brother. I received a package of these photos. They were mostly of me as a kid, me and my dog, my little league and football photos, high school graduation, but there was one photo that stopped me in my tracks. It was my mother as a young girl hefting her father’s taxidermy trophy deer head with all her strength for the photographer. In the distance behind her sat her dad and uncle smoking, drinking, reading the paper on the porch of their house. There it was, stark evidence of what I knew already. My mother grew up with alcoholics, one importantly was her dad. This photograph and the realization that she had to find her way as a small child through a chaotic and abusive world explained why she had had trouble being a parent. And then, she married an alcoholic. She never got a chance to catch her breath or to know what a sane reality was.

My resentment crumbled and I made amends to my mother. I told her that I was sorry that I had kept her at such a distance and that I didn’t want to continue to do that anymore. Surprisingly, when my mother heard my amends, she made amends back to me. I tried to stop her because that wasn’t what I was trying to accomplish. I was merely trying to clear my side of the street. But, I couldn’t stop her and she told me that she felt bad that she hadn’t been a very good mother to me. Even though I couldn’t cry, my commitment to our relationship was cemented. While I couldn’t make myself feel feelings for her, I acted as if I did. I never forgot her birthday, I made a big deal of Mother’s Day. I visited and she and I talked. I listened to her and found out a lot more about what was going on in our family while I was growing up. The amends continued organically and my feelings toward her grew with them. I probed how she felt about a variety of topics and we became friends. We both softened toward each other. This experience brought my mother back into my life and a deep friendship developed with my stepfather. My whole outlook on life eased toward authority, toward politics, toward women. This amends so deeply changed who I am, I stand in awe.

My mother is still alive, but in dementia care in St. Louis, MO. It is sad that I can no longer communicate with her as in the past. I visit every 6 months and I sit with her and rub her hands and feet. I live with a secure knowledge that I have no more unfinished business with her and I have regained a mother.

Update: I just visited my mother in St Louis. The first time I saw her, my brother met up with me at the care facility.  We sat on either side of her and rubbed her hands, feet, and neck. We received little, if any response. I was shocked and a little depressed that so much had changed in 6 months. I went again the next morning with not many expectations. I found her parked in her wheelchair in a big circle of patients with a tenor singing gospel hymns. My mother acknowledged none of the hymns and after a bit, she fell asleep. When it was over, I pushed her wheelchair to the bird aviary. She became attentive. I told her that I love birds. I could swear she nodded like she knew. We rolled over to the common room and I sat down and held her hand. I looked into her eyes and she squinched up her face and looked back into my eyes. This happened a number of times with some unintelligible moaning vocalizations. I knew, without a doubt, she knew who I was and I knew she was trying to tell me she really loved me. I looked back into her eyes with tears streaming down mine and I told her I really loved her too.