Every year, my church holds an Easter vigil, beginning on Good Friday evening and extending through Easter Sunday morning. I’ve discovered I quite love the midnight to 4 a.m. hours – how quiet the church is at those hours! The little chapel area becomes a place set apart in space and time, with darkness and stillness of the night draped around …. a cocoon of calm.
I feel a fondness for that chapel – it has often been a retreat place for me, even in the midst of busy days, to come and find a bit of respite, to re-center. Not only to pray or meditate, but to think, to write, even to engage in an activity as mundane (and non-sacred seeming!) as work documentation – or to play the piano (which is one way I re-center). For me, it is a ‘thin place’ – places infused with the sense of the sacred, places that offer an invitation into reverence and renewal, places where the veil that often lies between everyday existence and Ultimate reality lifts or even dissolves …
The saying ‘thin place’ comes from Celtic wisdom tradition, where it is said that heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance narrows. The boundaries between heaven and earth collapse, dissolve … or, perhaps more accurately, our sense of those boundaries collapses, dissolves. Our perceptions change, deepen – or we see beyond our usual perceptions, see beyond our illusions …
It seems to me that not only are there ‘thin places’, there are ‘thin people’ (no, I don’t mean physically thin!), ‘thin friendships’ – people and relationships that are like spiritual conduits, that help us come closer to the sacred, that invite us to go deeper in our spiritual journeys, that support and enrich, challenge and teach us.
And … ‘thin times’. Those midnight hours seem like ‘thin times’ to me … hours where I can let go of time, hours that become timeless, because the rush of the world is stilled. Hours where the sacred feels wide open to me and I feel wide open to it, hours where the boundaries and barriers fall away, and this world/Ultimate reality blend together. (Not that they don’t anyway, but there are times and places it’s more discernable or we’re more open and prepared to discern it).
So the midnight vigil hours in the chapel are the profoundly holy convergence of a ‘thin time’ with a ‘thin place’!
For my vigil time, I brought along with me my old ‘spiritual journal’ (which has received little attention from my pen for a long time) in case the Spirit brought me words. And as I played the piano, words indeed came … “May we not be afraid to be awake … May I not be afraid to be awake”
I have always loved the times when I sat down to write and the words wrote themselves … coming to my hand not from my mind but from somewhere deeper, from the soul, and coming into my soul from a yet deeper Source.
I share these words here just as they came to me then at 4 a.m., without revision, these words that are truly not mine. And whatever they might mean to you is yours!
May we not be afraid to be awake
awake to ourselves, our pain, our need
awake to one another
awake to our own suffering
to others’ suffering
May we not be afraid to be awake
to see the crosses that are present
in the world
the crosses of suffering
the crosses of injustice
May we not be afraid to see
to see the crosses we bear
the crosses others bear
the crosses we have given others to bear
May we not be afraid to take
to take up our crosses and walk
to take away our crosses and walk
to take away the crosses of injustice
the crosses we have given others
take away these crosses so that others
may walk
We may walk together
May we not be afraid to see the suffering
to be with the suffering
to be awake to the suffering
to be there
present
awake
seeing
May we not be afraid to feel
to feel the pain
our own pain
to feel the pain
our neighbors often feel
the pain of their crosses
May we not be afraid to be
to be there
to be with ourselves in our own Gethsemane
to be with others in their Gethsemane
May we not be afraid to bear a cross of love
May we not be afraid
to be there
where there are crosses
May we not be afraid to be love
where there are crosses
So that only love, only Love
may be where there have been crosses
It’s so powerfully real to me that we must be willing to be with the pain, our own and others, in order to move through it and heal the suffering.
This thought, I think, has broad applicability, across many personal situations and relationships, across many societal issues.
Do we want healing? Justice? If so, are we invested in what the process means?
Because it does mean being willing to be awake, wide awake, to the pain of others – to say, the grief from relationship loss, the distress of poverty, the pain from accumulated wounds of racial injustices – before we can begin to understand better the suffering others have endured. To not be afraid to be feel the pain and discomfort that the awakening of deeper understanding and compassion can bring. To not be afraid to feel, to see, to be – to be humble, to be love.
To be wide awake to the pain, suffering, brokenness in the world is also to be wide awake to Love, to belovedness. Love is also in the world … but Love needs us to be awake to it so that we can embody it in the world.
May we not be afraid to be awake, to be wide awake in love to Love!
