In preparation!
The concept of thin
places raises a question which is universal. Is the way we react to
a place defined by its objective physical qualities or by what we
know about it? It was George Macleod of Fuinary who
said that the island of Iona was a thin place. He meant that the
veil between the physical and the spiritual, the mortal and the
immortal, was almost transparent in the intensity of its pellucid
skies and its religious history. He knew.
He used to describe
the feeling he had standing on the pier at Fionphort looking across
the sound to the Abbey as being like moving up to the front line at
Ypres. Why should someone love Iona? Because it is green and white
after the red rock and grey cloud of Mull? Because from the bay at
the back of the ocean you can look westwards into the sunset and
know it has not yet risen over America? Or is it because they know
it as a cradle of Scottish identity, have experienced some
spiritual renewal there, know it meant a lot to a friend, or simply
were happy there themselves once? It is not possible to disentangle
these things. Just as no landscape in Scotland has remained
unaffected by human activity, so we enscribe every landscape with
our culture. This transcendence is easiest to explain through
the lens of religion, but “thin places” are not
confined to religious sites. One such secular place that Eric
Weiner uses is the view from The Bund in Shanghai, China. Looking
across the harbor you see buildings reaching straight for the
heavens, glass paneling reflecting the sun like winking stars. As
it stands, there may be few countries as outwardly secular as most
of China, and yet this view continues to take the breath away from
any tourists lucky enough to visit this highly-modernized
city. Thin places relax us, yes, but they also transform
us,or, more accurately, unmask us. In thin places, we become our
more essential selves.
