https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui What is a Thin Place for you? en-us 2020-10-30 00:59:22 UTC 2022-02-25 21:43:27 UTC hello@padlet.com https://padlet.net/icons/png/1f5bc.png mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875311235 2020-10-30 01:02:40 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875311235 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875312775  TRAVEL, like life, is best understood backward but must be experienced forward, to paraphrase Kierkegaard. After decades of wandering, only now does a pattern emerge. I’m drawn to places that beguile and inspire, sedate and stir, places where, for a few blissful moments I loosen my death grip on life, and can breathe again. It turns out these destinations have a name: thin places. ]]> 2020-10-30 01:03:35 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875312775 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875314081  It is, admittedly, an odd term. One could be forgiven for thinking that thin places describe skinny nations (see Chile) or perhaps cities populated by thin people (see Los Angeles). No, thin places are much deeper than that. They are locales where the distance between heaven and earth collapses and we’re able to catch glimpses of the divine, or the transcendent or, as I like to think of it, the Infinite Whatever. ]]> 2020-10-30 01:04:25 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875314081 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875314885  Travel to thin places does not necessarily lead to anything as grandiose as a “spiritual breakthrough,” whatever that means, but it does disorient. It confuses. We lose our bearings, and find new ones. Or not. Either way we are jolted out of old ways of,  seeing the world, and therein lies the transformative magic of travel. ]]> 2020-10-30 01:04:55 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875314885 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875316395  It’s not clear who first uttered the term “thin places,” but they almost certainly spoke with an Irish brogue. The ancient pagan Celts, and later, Christians, used the term to describe mesmerizing places like the wind-swept isle of Iona (now part of Scotland) or the rocky peaks of Croagh Patrick. Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter. ]]> 2020-10-30 01:05:47 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875316395 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875318019  So what exactly makes a place thin? It’s easier to say what a thin place is not. A thin place is not necessarily a tranquil place, or a fun one, or even a beautiful one, though it may be all of those things too. Disney World is not a thin place. Nor is Cancún. Thin places relax us, yes, but they also transform us — or, more accurately, unmask us. In thin places, we become our more essential selves. ]]> 2020-10-30 01:06:41 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875318019 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875319283  Thin places are often sacred ones —St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, the Blue Mosque in Istanbul — but they need not be, at least not conventionally so. A park or even a city square can be a thin place. So can an airport. I love airports. I love their self-contained, hermetic quality, and the way they make me feel that I am floating, suspended between coming and going.

One of my favorites is Hong Kong International, a marvel of aesthetics and efficiency. I could spend hours — days! — perched on its mezzanine deck, watching life unfold below. Kennedy Airport, on the other hand, is, for the most part, a thick place. Spread out over eight terminals,  there is no center of gravity, nothing to hold on to. (Nor is there anything the least bit transcendent about a T.S.A. security line.) ]]> 2020-10-30 01:07:27 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875319283 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875321056 .... Mircea Eliade, the religious scholar, would understand what I experienced in that Tokyo bar. Writing in his classic work “The Sacred and the Profane,” he observed that “some parts of space are qualitatively different from others.” An Apache proverb takes that idea a step further: “Wisdom sits in places.” ]]> 2020-10-30 01:08:33 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875321056 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875323738  The question, of course, is which places? And how do we get there? You don’t plan a trip to a thin place; you stumble upon one. But there are steps you can take to increase the odds of an encounter with thinness. For starters, have no expectations. Nothing gets in the way of a genuine experience more than expectations, which explains why so many “spiritual journeys” disappoint. And don’t count on guidebooks — or even friends — to pinpoint your thin places. To some extent, thinness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Or, to put it another way: One person’s thin place is another’s thick one. ]]> 2020-10-30 01:10:02 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875323738 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875325397  Getting to a thin place usually requires a bit of sweat. One does not typically hop a taxi to a thin place, but sometimes you can. That’s how my 7-year-old daughter and I got to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Video camera in hand, she paused at each statue of the various saints, marveling, in a hushed voice, at their poses and headgear. ]]> 2020-10-30 01:11:01 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875325397 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875326669  ...I was awash in time. That’s a common reaction to a thin place. It’s not that we lose all sense of time but, rather, that our relationship with time is altered, softened. In thin places, time is not something we feel compelled to parse or hoard. There’s plenty of it to go around. ]]> 2020-10-30 01:11:45 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875326669 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875327955  Not all sacred places, though, are thin. Freighted with history, and our outsized expectations, they collapse under the weight of their own sacredness, and possess all the divinity of a Greyhound bus station. 

For me, Jerusalem is one of these places. I find the air so thick with animosity, so heavy with the weight of historical grievances, that any thinness lurking beneath the surface doesn’t stand a chance. Walking through the walled Old City, with its four segregated quarters, I feel my muscles tense. (By contrast, I breathe easier in supposedly godless Tel Aviv.) ]]> 2020-10-30 01:12:26 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875327955 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875330116 ... Many thin places are wild, untamed, but cities can also be surprisingly thin. The world’s first urban centers, in Mesopotamia, were erected not as places of commerce or empire but, rather, so inhabitants could consort with the gods. What better place to marvel at the glory of God and his handiwork (via his subcontractors: us) than on the Bund in Shanghai, with the Jetsons-like skyscrapers towering above, or at Montmartre in Paris, with the city’s Gothic glory revealed below. ]]> 2020-10-30 01:13:41 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875330116 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875331838 ...Yet, ultimately, an inherent contradiction trips up any spiritual walkabout: The divine supposedly transcends time and space, yet we seek it in very specific places and at very specific times. If God (however defined) is everywhere and “everywhen,” as the Australian aboriginals put it so wonderfully, then why are some places thin and others not? Why isn’t the whole world thin? ]]> 2020-10-30 01:14:40 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875331838 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875335868  Maybe it is but we’re too thick to recognize it. Maybe thin places offer glimpses not of heaven but of earth as it really is, unencumbered. Unmasked. ]]> 2020-10-30 01:16:56 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875335868 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875359258 2020-10-30 01:29:25 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875359258 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875361344 2020-10-30 01:30:41 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875361344 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875363073 2020-10-30 01:31:39 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875363073 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875364094 2020-10-30 01:32:16 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875364094 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875365276 2020-10-30 01:32:56 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875365276 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875366640 2020-10-30 01:33:43 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875366640 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875368442 2020-10-30 01:34:44 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875368442 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875370063 2020-10-30 01:35:35 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875370063 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875371278 2020-10-30 01:36:16 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875371278 mrkohut https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875372946 2020-10-30 01:37:12 UTC https://padlet.com/mrkohut/o4n5qtf95eaypvui/wish/875372946