Where Wisdom Sits

Last updated on: March 12, 2012 at 7:48 am by Lori Erickson

Where Wisdom Sits 2012-03-12T07:48:22-06:00 Lori Erickson

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One of my favorite thin places--Bear Butte in South Dakota (Bob Sessions photo)

Several weeks ago I recommended Eric Weiner’s Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine. Yesterday Mississippi Marian (a friend and devoted follower of this blog) sent me a link to Where Heaven and Earth Come Closer, a piece in the New York Times by Weiner that discusses one of my favorite concepts: thin places. Weiner writes:

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.

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.

I’m very familiar with the idea of thin places (a concept and term we owe to the Irish), but Weiner expanded my notion of what they can be. In addition to beautiful natural places, he writes about bookstores and bars, for example. He even says that some airports can be thin places (though I must say that’s where I draw the line). He continues:

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…

Mircea Eliade, the religious scholar, … observed that “some parts of space are qualitatively different from others.” An Apache proverb takes that idea a step further: “Wisdom sits in places.”

Pilgrimage

Eric Weiner

thin places

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