Thin Place – A Maundy Thursday meditation on Mark 12 and John 15 from a Wizard of Oz Lent

Mark 14:12-16, 22-25
John 15:12-15

Celtic spirituality, both pre-Christian and Christian, has given us the language of thin places to describe places where it feels like the realms of the human and divine mingle.  “Heaven and earth,” the Celtic saying goes, “are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter. Journalist and author, Eric Weiner, writes of thin places, “[They] relax us, yes, but they also transform us – or, more accurately, unmask us.”

Ruins from Iona Abbey by Iain Marshall is licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0

People often talk about temples and cathedrals as thin places, or particular geographies – mountaintops or beaches – but in a New York Times travel article, Weiner argues that thin places can be more unconventional as well – a city park, a bookstore, or even a bar. Thin places give us a glimpse or a feeling of a reality different from what we typically experience – a reality more closely aligned with God’s spirit and intentions than we typically see.

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Ministry Snapshots: Year End Examen

One of my favorite spiritual practices, examen, comes from Ignatian spirituality, and gathering for worship on the last day of the calendar year became the perfect time to introduce this to the congregation. Examen is a technique of prayerful reflection on the events of a set period of time in order to detect God’s presence and discern God’s direction for us. The most common use of the examen is as a daily practice, yet it can also be used for longer periods of time that lend themselves for prayerful reflection. In worship we used a time of guided personal prayer to individually prayer the examen about the year that had past and the year ahead in a time. Inspired by Mary, who was known for “pondering” in her heart (Luke 2:19), and Simeon, whose prayerful eye saw God’s salvation in the baby Jesus brought to the temple (Luke 2:30), we looked into our lives and invited God’s leading into the new year.

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

To craft the guided meditation I leaned heavily on two resources that I merged for leading the examen in a group setting.

“Examen Prayer for the Year,” provided on the blog of Loyola Press

Praying the Examen with Others: a Struggle and Script,” on the blog On God and People by Jacob Tilstra