Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 37

Some call it Celtic spirituality. These days the term largely refers to the ancient Irish belief that there are certain places where the curtain separating this world from the other world is very thin, even sheer; places where the membrane separating secular from sacred, the ordinary from the numinous, is porous or permeable; thin places that are thick with the mysterious presence of God. It is as if the door between this world (time) and the next world (eternity) cracks open for a moment, enough to permit us to see the other side.

A friend told me about a trip he and his wife and their children and grandchildren made over the Christmas holidays to an island. At one point the family held something like a tribal council to discuss how they would celebrate Christmas in a tropical paradise. They decided they would send a message, not in a bottle released to the outgoing tide, but written in the sand in big, bold letters.

What message would they send to the universe, to God, to an airplane flying over? They settled on three words: joy, peace, and love. I saw a picture made of the kids standing in the O of JOY. The letters were probably big enough to be read from thirty-thousand feet without glasses.

Methinks when those kids are old and gray they will remember that island and that beach and those grandparents and that Christmas as a thin place where they experienced something bigger than themselves, bigger than life, something mysteriously better felt than told, what Rudolph Otto termed mysterium tremendum et fascinans, “the tremendous and fascinating mystery.”24

One of our primal needs is to spring ourselves occasionally from the humdrum—out of the rat race—and off to a thin place. Taking our little ones to a thin place may be the greatest gift parents and grandparents have to offer, far more precious and lasting than a gift card to an all-you-can-eat pizza place or one more video game.