I started this blog a
few years ago, although I only began writing regularly last summer. The
initial intentions for this space remain the same, however, and so I would like
to introduce this space with the initial post from July, 2008 (with the caveat that the photo at the left is of the Caribbean, not the Long Island Sound!):

 

We spend our summers in
a little town on the Connecticut shore. I forget the peacefulness of this place
every year until we drive up and see the water and smell the salty air and feel
the breeze. It is what the Celtic Christians called a thin place–a place where
heaven and earth touch, where God seems more readily present, more easily accessed.

 

It is easier here to
pray, especially prayers of praise and of gratitude. It is easier to carve out
time to read and write and reflect. It is easier to avoid the distractions of
the phone and the Internet and the television. It is easier to delight in our
daughter Penny–as she pours water from one cup to another in her wading pool,
as she relishes a bowl of chocolate ice cream, as she shouts “Yay!”–arms
overhead, eyes wide–upon sighting a boat on the water. It is a refuge. It is a
thin place.

 

But we only come here
for the summer or an occasional weekend during the school year. And I suspect
that if we lived here year round, some of the magic would dissipate. I would
wake up cranky some mornings, find myself blind to Penny’s discoveries, feel my
shoulders tighten as bills and phone calls and appointments lined up.

 

The gift of this
place, in other words, is present only to the degree that I am able to receive
it. And although it is harder to discover thin places when I don’t have a view
of the sea, I know they exist everywhere. In that moment each night when I watch
Penny sleeping. In the warmth of Peter’s hand upon my leg as we read in bed. In
the question a man of a one-month old with Down syndrome asked yesterday. After

45 minutes of conversation, he said, “Does your daughter call you Mama?” It was
a thin place, a sacred moment, to be able to tell him that his daughter will
know him as her father, that she will love and be loved.

 

This blog is intended to be about discovering,
and remembering, thin places. It is meant to uncover ideas, relationships,
points of connection, moments of deep beauty that draw us towards one another,
and towards the Holy One.