In Memoriam

In his eulogistic poem In Memoriam, Alfred, Lord Tennyson shares both his faith and his grief in writing about the death of his friend Arthur Hallam. Here are but a sampling of the poet’s thoughts taken from this epic poem:

We have but faith: we cannot know,
For knowledge is of things we see;
And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness; let it grow.
...
Forgive my grief for one removed,
Thy creature, whom I found so fair,
I trust he lives in thee, and there
I find him worthier to be loved.
...
Whereof the man that with me trod
This planet was a nobler type
Appearing ere the times were ripe,
That friend of mine who lives in God.
...
That God, which ever lives and loves
One God, one law, one element,
And one far off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.

I have a friend who asked me to do a reflection on the subject of memorial services in general and within the Presbyterian tradition in particular. In opening up this subject, I think I would begin by saying that memorial services are – or can be – a tremendous help to the deceased person’s family. And family includes both the nuclear and the faith family. It is important for the nuclear family to have an opportunity to express their grief and their closure in a private manner, but it is also important for the faith family to have that opportunity as well. Oftentimes, sons and daughters, even spouses, have no clue as to how the one who has died touched the lives of people around them, both within their faith community but also the larger community as well. All of us need the opportunity to share grief, love, thanksgiving, and memories in some form of corporate memorial service. If you read one of my earlier blogs, you will see where I wrote of the Celtic understanding of “thin places” where the spiritual and material brush up against each other. A memorial service, properly done, can be one of those kind of experiences. As I re-read Tennyson’s In Memoriam in preparation for this posting, I felt the resonance between the spiritual and the material; between the grief of loss and the gladness of renewal and spiritual fulfillment.

The pastor's job at the memorial service is not merely to expound the Word, but also to express the feelings and thoughts of people who are too numb or too afraid to name them—to express the swirling hopes and fears of grieving hearts. The preacher needs to be both the voice of God and the voice of the people, and this is an exceedingly demanding and delicate task.

Like all Christian worship, the memorial service has both a vertical and a horizontal dimension. We come to a memorial service, or a funeral, to pay our respects to a loved one, a colleague, a friend. At the same time we come to give thanks to God through whom all blessings flow. Memorial services are public rituals in which profound grief is expressed, precious memories are rehearsed, and lifetimes are thankfully remembered.

But at the memorial service we also want and need to believe. When someone we love dies, our response as Christians emerges, at least in part, out of our faith. We believe that God is the creator and giver of all life, and that death is, in some sense, an intrusion into the goodness of God's creation. We also believe that Christ redeems us from sin and death by his cross and resurrection, and that therefore death ushers us into fuller life. The memorial service affirms and celebrates these bracing realities of faith even under the shadow of death. Here we listen to the death-defying words of Scripture, we sing of God's grace and of Christ's victory, and we place our loved one's life in God's loving arms.

David Adam, a vicar at Lindisfarne, and another keeper of the Celtic flame, has a poem that could easily be a part of a Reformed (Presbyterian) memorial service for one who has tried to walk by faith and not by sight, and I close this posting with his words:

The Weaver
I weave unto my life this day, the presence of God upon my way,
I weave into my life this hour the mighty God and all his power.
I weave into my sore distress his peace and calm and no less.
I weave into my step so lame healing and helping in his name.
I weave into the darkest night strands of God shining bright.
I weave into each deed done joy and hope to the Risen Son.

Celebrating the Possibilities

Celebrating the Possibilities

Christianity came to the British Isles through the military conquests of the Roman empire. When Caesar’s soldiers left in the 4th and 5th centuries to deal with other threats and incursions into the empire, it left the church to continue without the influence of Rome. What developed in that nearly 200 years was the foundation of what we know as Celtic Christianity. It followed a different tack than the highly structured Christianity of Rome; women and men served in church leadership roles on more or less equal status; doctrine was not as important as relationships; symbols, images, metaphors, both graphic and poetic, were more appropriate for communicating the gospel than theological abstractions.

Two figures emerged out of this period which helped articulate the course that the Christian movement would take. One was Augustine of Hippo, a bishop in northern Africa. A man who came late to the Christian faith in his own life, but whose scholarship led him to craft a doctrine of original sin which would be a linchpin for the church –both Catholic and Protestant – for centuries to come. This “taint” would guide church dogmatics and the evangelism which arose from it. The other personality was Patrick. Born in Britain, he was sent to Ireland to convert the pagan tribes, commonly known as the Celts. Patrick’s approach was to stress the goodness that he saw in human nature; to emphasize the possibilities that were dormant inside each heart. Helping the Irish to imagine what they could become may have been Patrick’s most profound rhetorical achievement. Augustine saw the dark side of the human soul; Patrick saw the possibilities of what could happen if a person had a personal relationship with the Christ of the gospels. To his mission and evangelization work, Patrick utilized an indigenization of the gospel, putting it into the words and images with which these pagan peoples were familiar, and then guiding them to see the Lord Jesus Christ in those images. For Augustine, salvation comes through Christ rescuing us from sin and atoning for the consequences of the fall from grace. Patrick sees salvation as Jesus Christ completing the good work that God began in us.

In this particular Celtic Crossing, I wanted to provide some background to some of the work I am doing here in California. One of my responsibilities is to help congregations work through their mission study prior to seeking a new pastor or a new associate pastor. Such a mission study is mandated by our polity. One of the resources which I was given was a book written by Mark Branson which focuses on a study model called “Appreciative Inquiry.” Adapted from a business model that was highly successful, Branson shows how this model can work because its intent is to look, not at what is wrong with this congregation, but rather to identify what is right and to appreciate, to celebrate, that righteousness. The focus on many, if not most, mission studies is to identify what is broken in the church, and figure out a way to fix it. Oftentimes, what is wrong – or broken – in a church has to do with attitudes and platitudes. As you enable people to appreciate what is right and purposeful and stimulate their imagination as to where this congregation might be heading when the Holy Spirit is at the helm, you find that the attitudes and the platitudes start diminishing.

And now let me carry this to an even more personal level in relationships with family or with spouse. When problems arise, and they will, how should you respond? Initially, you probably find yourself projecting self-righteous attitudes which are supported by self-serving platitudes. Then you get around to trying “to fix the problem.” I would offer the alternative of appreciative inquiry into these compromised relationships. Articulate what you truly appreciate in that person first of all to yourself, and then later to the other person. It is not a matter of determining fault or right-ness or wrong-ness; it is a matter of seeing the possibilities in this relationship – and appreciating what those possibilities could lead to.

Last fall, I was at a retreat up at Zephyr Point, a conference center on Lake Tahoe, to hear Dewitt Jones, a former photographer for National Geographic magazine and now a speaker in great demand around the country. Dewitt uses his imagination and the images which come from his camera to celebrate what is right with this world. Even amidst the storms and darkness and the pain of life, his camera catches images which he is able to celebrate as possibilities for hope and justice.

This is a cruel and unjust world in which we live. We are a sin-sick and sorrow-worn people, justly deserving God’s displeasure. But in the midst of it all – both in church and in culture - falls the shadow of someone like Patrick who sees the possibilities for goodness, and life, and hope; who gives us a sense of mission to celebrate the possibilities rather than cursing the darkness.

Do This ...

I write this during Holy Week and it will probably be posted on Maundy Thursday. Since I no longer preach on a regular basis, I find myself sitting in the pew observing the worship leaders, the choirs, the celebrants of holy communion, and others who are a part of the worship ministry on any given Sunday.

And so it was on that non-communion Sunday I found myself reflecting on those words engraved on so many communion tables: DO THIS IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME. Now I could ask a question which you might consider profoundly stupid, and that question would be “what does this mean?” I think each of you would say it means take this bread and eat it remembering Jesus; it means take this cup and drink it remembering the Lord’s death until he returns. And you would be right … as far as that righteousness goes. But in this article and in this holy week, I challenge you to hear these words in a different way. When I ask the question, “what does this mean?” I am not asking the meaning of what happens at the table, rather I am asking the ontological question of to what does the word this refer. It is not just an imperative to eat or to drink remembering the past; rather it is also an imperative from the lips of Christ himself to participate in the present reality of his life and of his ministry.

Given what was said at the table that night, and the power of that moment with the disciples, there is a profound sense of irony to Jesus’ encounter with Peter there at the seashore in the gospel of John. Instead of remembering Jesus on the night of his betrayal, Peter denied even knowing who Jesus was, hiding under a cloak of shame and fear. So Jesus addresses the issue of remembrance for Peter, this time in the context of a loving relationship: “Peter, do you love me” … “Yes, Lord, you know I love you” …”Then feed my sheep.” Three times these words are spoken, or words very similar, and again there is the call to remembrance: “Feed my lambs…do this, in remembrance of me”
“Tend my sheep …do this, in remembrance of me”
“Feed my sheep …do this, in remembrance of me”

Coming to the table is an opportunity for the community to remember this atoning love. But it is not just remembering what he did, it is not just remembering the “misty watercolor memories of the way we were,” but rather it is to remember what we have been saved to do.

There was another time in the life and ministry of Jesus where this phrase “do this” was spoken, and I believe if you juxtapose this other example with the sacramental language which is before us, you will see that one helps interpret the other. A question was raised by an attorney regarding what must he do to inherit eternal life. And in a bit of dialogue between the two, the attorney answers, “you shall love the lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” And Jesus’ response was what? … Do this and you will live. Jesus brings the focus away from self-justification to concept of sanctification. Do “this” – love the Lord thy God; and love the neighbor you hardly know – and live. Do this and you will live abundantly the life that has been granted you as a gift.

Do “this” in remembrance of me. When the “this” is demonstrating your love of God; when the “this” is demonstrating your love and concern for humankind, then you are participating sacramentally in the life Jesus purchased for you.

What is the “this” in your own life that you need to come to terms with? What is Christ calling you to do for the love of God and love of humanity when he says “Do this in remembrance of me?” So consider well whatever the “this” is that God has placed before you. Jesus raises before you in these pre-Easter days the same issues he raised before Peter in that post-resurrection appearance: Feed my lambs …tend my sheep …feed my sheep. DO THIS …in remembrance of me.

Have a most blessed Easter experience, and live in the light of Christ’s love

Church Membership and Faithfulness

Church Membership and Faithfulness

A couple of years ago, I learned that a Presbyterian church in the Austin, Texas area had admitted an avowed atheist into membership. The atheist, a professor at the University of Texas, wanted to check out his belief system, or perhaps better said, his un-belief system, from the inside and the only way he could do that it seemed to him was to join a church. With a sympathetic pastor and an accommodating session, he did just that.

I realize that we live in a culture, both sacred and profane, which challenges authority; people doing their own thing; marching to different drummers; eschewing discipline to allow for free expression of one’s actions. So, though I may have been dismayed and offended that this church and its pastor did not follow the polity of our denomination’s faith and practice, many others just shrugged the matter off with a dismissive “so what’s the big deal anyway; isn’t it the church’s responsibility to receive lost sinners?” And the answer is “Yes, but …” Yes, we have that responsibility, but it comes with an invitation to acknowledge one’s sinful state, and that this person has no hope, in life or in death, without the sovereign grace of God manifested through a savior, Jesus the Christ. The big deal is that the church – the pastor and the session – negated by its actions the very purpose of church membership. In an old ad for the American Express credit card, there is that elitistic phrase: "membership has its privileges." I believe that is what the atheist wanted, and the leadership of that church acquiesced. But church membership, at least in the Reformed tradition, is not about privilege, rather it is about obligation and responsibility. In short, it is about faithfulness.

One of the joys of parish ministry was in watching a person grow in his or her faithfulness. I tended to serve in churches for several years at a time – from ten to twenty years – so I was afforded that opportunity of seeing God work his good pleasure in the hearts and minds of people who came through the doors of the church. I well remember a Jewish woman, married to a Christian man at the time, coming up the long sidewalk to the temporary buildings were our offices were located as we finished construction on our church. She was looking for a church to raise her family, and wondered if this is where they should be. I think I told her to visit with us for a few Sundays and see if she couldn’t answer that question for herself. Eighteen years later,she stood before that congregation, having presented herself for baptism and to profess her faith in God and in Jesus her messiah. There was not a dry eye in the house, including my own. Over those eighteen years, she engaged herself in the mission ministry of the church. She helped in educating our congregation on the meaning of the seder meal; she helped in preparing this meal and in leading our people in the celebration of Passover. What became so obvious to so many was this woman’s faithfulness and love of God, even though she had never crossed the threshold of membership. But for her the church she chose, or was chosen for her and her family through God’s beneficence, was never a laboratory experiment to test the various compounds of belief systems and ecclesiastical doctrine. Rather, without the pressure to join up or be left behind, the church provided for her a place to be herself; to raise questions and to seek answers, to take as much time as it takes to turn her life over to him who is the redeemer of lost sinners. At the conclusion of one of his parables, Jesus counseled, “I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.”

I have argued for several years that we need another category for defining participation in the local church. “Active Member” no longer means much as far as our church rolls go; in fact being an active member in that church in Austin means you don’t necessary have to believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Active Members just have to show up; they just need to be visible from time to time. Granted the great majority do far more than that, but the requirements to remain in that category per our polity are pretty lame. Yet how do we account for the “faithful” who serve without becoming “active members?" Maybe we don’t need to. Maybe we, like Jesus, just need to appreciate how they model the gospel message and give thanks for that. And maybe we just need to give thanks to God for that irksome episode down in Austin, Texas for providing us with the opportunity to look at church membership in a new light. For when it comes right down to it, when last trumpet sounds, God is not going to ask us what church we joined on earth. Rather, he is going to ask us if we were faithful to the work of his church which he, through his Son, entrusted to us.

Stopping For Death

My father died on the first of December. It wasn’t expected, nor was it a surprise either. He was six weeks shy of his 90th birthday, and his days were filled with little else than putting together jigsaw puzzles. I share this with you because it is one of those crossroads I believe each of us comes to in life when a parent dies, and it begs the question how does one address this crossroad: does the death of a parent prompt you to change your course in life; does it draw you up short, wondering how you will go forward without that presence in your life, or do you cross over and deal with whatever grief and /or remembrances this death brings forth? I have known people whose lives went adrift when an elderly parent died, and they were like a ship which had lost its mooring. For me this has been a time of re-examining my feelings and attitudes towards death and dying.

Ever since my college days I have been periodically haunted by the Emily Dickinson poem “Death” where she writes:
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves,
And Immortality.

Dickinson addresses the condition that afflicts most of us – avoidance of the matter of death, with a succinct countering that death is neither offended nor dissuaded by our busi-ness. So, I would like to cross this intersection where mortality and immortality meet, and share some thoughts which may help you to address this crossing in your own life.

My parents had done the pre-arrangements with a local funeral home and with their church to be interred in the church’s columbarium. So those issues were on record for my sister and I not to have to deal with. But what about the obituary? What about the funeral service – the scriptures, the hymns, the touchstones in life which made my father the man that he was or the man he became? Those were knee-jerk responses, mainly from my sister, but how much better for family and friends if both of these benchmarks of one’s life could have informed by the one whose life is being memorialized in each.

What is it about death which causes us to balk in our conversation about it? It is not option, like what kind of car we will buy. It seems as Christians many of us cannot embrace that final frontier of life; like Dickinson there are so many other things with which to concern ourselves.

Many of you have sent cards and emails expressing your sorrow for me and my family, and for those thoughts I am truly blessed and grateful; they have each helped me to cross over this crossroad with greater resolve and faithfulness. And that support is enabling me to “stop for death” and do some things I have been putting off. Pam and I have talked about some of these issues, but then the conversation becomes awkward, and we shift to other things. But today I make the following commitments:

• I will put into writing the blessings I have felt in this life, and anticipate the blessing still to come.
  
• I will detail the scriptures and the songs that have informed my life and my ministry, and why each was chosen.
  
• I will lay out the mistakes I believe I have made over a lifetime of choices, with the realization that I may never have asked for forgiveness due to my own human frailties, and with the understanding that I certainly won’t remember all of them!


• I will contact the person I wish to conduct the service and seek his counsel and consent to this request.

As a pastor for well over 30 years, I believe that there have been only two or three funerals or memorial services that I have conducted in which any or all of the above bullet points were available to me or to the family. But what a blessing when they were!

So as your friend and as a fellow, finite pilgrim on this journey through the life God in his grace has given each of us, let me encourage you to “stop for death” and give some thought to the issues brought forth today, and then take whatever action the Spirit leads you to take.
There is a prayer that comes out of the Ionian Community of Scotland which goes:
We have laid our burdens down / In the presence of the living God / We have been nourished for our journey / In the presence of the living God / We have taken on the armor of Christ / In the presence of the living God. / Now lead us, guide us, defend us, / As we go into yet another world / In the name and for your sake, / O loving, living God.

Transitions

As a child of about 5 years of age, I remember sitting with my parents and my sister on folding wooden chairs in this big – at least in my eyes – hall of a Methodist church. In point of fact, this is my first remembrance of church at all in my pre-school years. Being preoccupied with something – my nose, my shoelaces, a fly on the dress of the woman in front of me – I was suddenly aware that my dad was not sitting with us anymore. I looked around; a little panicked until I saw him up in the front with a lot of other people standing behind the guy who had been talking for some time. Come to find out that this “talking guy” – soon to be identified as a preacher – had put a call out for people to join the choir. This was a new church outside of Memphis, Tennessee, and my parents were excited about being involved with something new, and different … and stabilized. Dad’s work with the telephone company and laying cable from town to town kept us unstable until such time as I was ready to start school. And what could give a family more stability than by joining a neighborhood church? In essence, Dad never came back to sit with the family; he was a choir groupie, and he was good at it. He had the voice for it, and he used it diligently for over 50 years.

This memory came to me one day when I was worshipping at a church here in Sacramento – sitting in a pew, not standing in a pulpit. At a time of introducing visitors, an older couple in the back of the church introduced their six year old grandson. As they wrapped up their brief introduction, the lad’s grandfather said with a note of pride in his voice, “Yep, sitting right where his father sat when he was this age.”

When our children came along, I was already out of the pew and into the pulpit; When Pam and I married, there was already the separation between pew and pulpit; neither my wife nor my kids nor myself have ever really had the experience of sitting in church together. On the rare occasion that it does happen, it really feels right and purpose–filled. As a preacher, I had the opportunity to observe those families who sat together, and prayed, and sang, and listened together. For a time, my wife gave up her spot in the choir, in order to keep a tight tether on our four in their younger years. Now, in my role as a non-parish pastor, I sit in pews and wonder why we have we lost the kids sitting with their parents. Have we become so acquiescent to children’s demands that we shrug our shoulders and say “whatever …!”

There was a woman in my first church in Arkansas who showed me a gold pocket watch which had belonged to her late husband. She showed me the tiny dents in the case, and then told me that those were teeth marks from her children. From the time they were small, she and her husband had them in church, and when they got fussy, she gave them the pocket watch to occupy their attention, to bite on, to look at their reflection on the bright metal, etc; later they were allowed to open the case and move the hands as they practiced their math, all the while seated in church with mom and dad. Later, the watch went back into the vest pocket as they stopped looking down and started looking up and participating in the worship experience. Long after her husband had died, and the children had married and moved away, she still carried that dented pocket watch in her purse; a sacred relic which brought to remembrance being in church worshiping God with her family around her.

One day I will be back in that church here in Sacramento, and I will find that grandfather and thank him for what he said that day and for what he and his wife had done so many years before.

Gifts of Grace

The other day I watched a DVD of the movie “Cast Away,” and like so many things that you see once and then see again, you are made aware of things you missed before.

This is a Christmas movie in so many ways, which is probably why it was released during the Christmas season of 2000. The doomed FedEx aircraft crashes on Christmas Eve and the Tom Hanks character washes up on a south Pacific atoll on Christmas Day. With a touch of irony, we note that one of the first “casualties” of the crash is the pocket watch his girl friend/fiancé gave him as a Christmas gift no longer works; from the point of impact into the ocean, time became irrelevant. But now there were other things to take the place of time, for along with the soggy salvation of the efficiency expert, Chuck Noland, there is the salvation of all these “gifts” – the FedEx packages – that come in with the tide.

Each of these gifts impractical though they may appear – ice skates, volleyball, party dress, videotapes, etc. – plays a vital role in Noland’s survival. But none more so than the one that is never opened, the one with the wings as of an angel that provides a balance to all the material things that this castaway makes use of until he is rescued some four years later. Why does he hang on to it? Why does it stay intact the whole time of his ordeal? It is the only link to the spiritual aspect of his life; God is never mentioned, to the best of my recollection, but the spiritual component of God is there from the very beginning of the film. There is a continuity of a sense of the eternal while everything else in Chuck Noland’s life is bound by the temporal, by the tick-tock of on-time deliveries. In the end, we witness how one man’s ingenuity and determinism contribute to his salvation, but in the end also, we observe how the gift of hope is held up in a simple unopened package with a west Texas address adorned with wings as of an angel.

I have told you already that I am fascinated about those places, events, opportunities where the spiritual and the material sort of brush up against each other. So, it happens here in this screenplay.

I believe that God gives each of us gifts to get us through the days of our lives. For me the film is a metaphor for the frustration and despair that hover around us like a shroud. But underneath the despair there are gifts that God sends us if we but look around. They may be practical gifts just to get us moving, and dressed and getting ourselves fed, but there is always a spiritual gift that helps us to look beyond our present circumstances into the world that is to come; that has yet to be revealed to us.

Life as he had known it with FedEx, with his girl, with his urban environment is as empty for Noland as that south Pacific atoll. But there was still one thing left to do; deliver the package; take the gift of hope – the unopened package – to its intended destination. And so he does. As the film ends, we get a kind of God’s eye view of the “born again to a living hope” person we know as Chuck Noland. He is standing at a west Texas crossroads looking back down one of the roads at a new opportunity that has been placed before him. And the irony this time is that as one gift got delivered, another one was offered in its place. A gift of grace for someone who was lost, but now is found; was blind, but now he sees.

… and the credits roll.

Welcome to my Blog - Celtic Crossings

(Photo caption: Dr. Hurst atop Dun I, the highest point on the island of Iona)

I have spent over 30 years in the parish ministry, writing sermons every week. Even when we moved to another church, I kept up the discipline, feeling that delivering sermons written in another time and in another place would be like offering my congregation stale bread when they needed a fresh slice of the gospel to inform and to challenge their present existence. My years as a parish pastor came to an end last summer when I accepted an interim position as an associate presbytery executive in Sacramento, California. Suddenly, I found myself in an entirely different mode as a minister in the Presbyterian Church. At first, it was refreshing not to “fret” over next week’s texts. But then I remembered how much I enjoyed writing these 15 minute polemics for my congregations, and I found myself missing one of the more time consuming aspects of parish ministry. Enter my good friend Mary Duval who not only encouraged me to enter blog-dom, but who volunteered to do all the creative stuff to make this blog appealing to any who would find it interesting. You might want to check out her art and her insights at www.artbymj.blogspot.com.

CelticCrossings is a theme I came up with for this blog because it raises a particular world view that includes a socio-theological reference that intersects with a traveler’s musings or reflections. There are many of you out there who can be far more conversant on things Celtic than I – I know because I have read some of your postings. But there is a degree of self-awareness which leads me to posit that much of my latter theological beliefs have been shaped by my reading and by my traveling in Celtic lands. There is so much that is ancient in this word Celtic and there is so much that is post-modern or “new age” in this concept. There are elements of celtic thought and theology in the writings of such people as J.R.R. Tolkien, Frederick Buechner, W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis and George MacDonald. Among Protestant churches, the celtic cross has long been a recognizable symbol, particularly among Presbyterian churches. Throughout the life of this blog, you will see many that I have photographed in my travels, most of which were headstones in cemeteries to mark the life of a fellow traveler on this cobbled road of faith.

Thus we come to the word “crossings.” In each of our lives, we come to places where we just stop and go no further; or where we come to a place where we are distracted or diverted to go a different way than we had intended, or we come a place and decide to cross over to the other side. It is in the crossing that I believe the greatest learning takes place and it is in the crossing that our greatest fears most often surface and must be confronted. Fear of failing, or fear of embarrassment, or fear of doing the wrong thing, are often the greatest impediment to growth and learning. Perhaps that is why the Bible has the exhortation: “Fear not …” come from the heavenly messengers of God before a significant event is about to take place.

One of the things I would like to investigate in this blog is how such crossings open us to experience God in ways we may never have imagined. The Celts had an expression for where the spiritual and the physical came together in close proximity. They called it a “thin place.” George McLeod, a Presbyterian minister from Glasgow, Scotland, once used this expression in reference to Iona, a small island off the west coast of Scotland. McLeod believed that on this place where Columba ostensibly brought Christianity to Scotland, one could experience that “thin place” where the physical realities and the hardships of life rub up against the spiritual aspects of life. McLeod devoted his life to rebuilding the abbey on Iona and to making it a community for worship, meditation, and study for people of all faiths and backgrounds to come an experience this thin place for themselves. Indeed, when I “crossed” over to Iona in the early 90s, I sensed it to be a thin place for me, and I have been back several times to plumb the depths of that initial experience.

In future blogs, I will share with you some of the other places where I – or friends of mine – have experienced crossings in our lives where God’s grace endured and fears were relieved. I invite you to share with me your own crossings as God’s grace and support were manifest in the thin places of your own life.