Sowing, Weeping, and Thin Places

You know how I love “tent stakes”. Well, officially, we all need one about now. Something that has roots, something that is sure, something that is predictable. In the upheaval I feel a survival instinct to ground my approach to the COVID-19 crisis. I felt a little nest arrive to harbor in when I read Psalm 126

This verse is where I want to hang my hat because it holds both poles...the sorrow that we can’t rush past...and the opportunity to sow seeds into our life and soul development.

Holding both sorrow and gratitude in equal measure is how we expand our soul container. Imagine you have loss and grief in one palm, and gratitude in the other. If we hold grief heavier than hope, like “opposite attracts magnets”, the magnets slam together and our hearts close off, get quiet, and fade.

On the other hand, if we hold in one palm grief and loss and in the other palm gratitude - this time in equal measure...in the way one same placing two like magnetic poles near each other, they repel, make space, open up your soul container to be ready to receive greater measure of what you are capital “H” soul food Hungry for and what you have to others is richer and vaster.

Personally speaking, I do not want to find myself on the other side of the COVID crisis and reflect within, “I endured the bad and survived...but I took none of the peculiarly charming offerings that were the “treasures stored in dark places”. I don’t want to survive the bad and take none of the good.

The moments we are in are extraordinary and will be known as so as history unfolds and is scribed. And the paper of your heart is being scribed now too. We are in the middle of it--in the middle of the grief and if we are brave to hope and patient to wait, in the middle of the gratitude.

We have this atmosphere, a felt environment that has removed the everyday things obstructing our long-game view. White space to dream, to serve, to connect in extraordinarily, especially deliberate ways, to grow spiritual roots.

But we miss the Liminal Space if we rush it.

No matter what shape the pandemic impact might hold for you on an individual level, hold reverence.

Hold reverence for the devastation of lives that deserves a Holy Shelter moment to weep.

We could not be more anchored in a space of liminal right now. Liminal means

threshold, in-between, suspended between the known of what was... and what we don’t know is next to come. We have CLEARLY left the known and are CLEARLY not in a place to know what is going to happen next.

As ridiculously uncomfortable as it is, the thing I treasure most about the liminal is that the “veil is thin”. A “thin veil” It is a spiritual formation term used to describe those moments when the physicality of our experience in this world is somehow closer to the unseen Kingdom.

Anne Voskamp writes in metaphorical terms of Joseph’s multicolored robe, torn and bloody and worn when presented by his brothers to his father as false evidence of his death,”When you are brave, you give yourself the gift of facing and touching torn places. The places where we’re torn into pieces can be the thin places where we touch the peace of God”

Thin places can be physical places, they can be times...and they can be moments: Birth, marriage, death, loss of job, dream, partner. Letting go of old and not yet in new.

Beloveds, our experience of COVID-19 sheltering takes my breath away a bit in the sense that the energy of the whole globe is suspended in the threshold of interruption of life as we know it.

I pray the unknown calls us to the “thin place” where we are invited to press into the Unseen Kingdom. Jesus’ Kingdom. Because that is where the only help that really seeps into our bones will come from:

Since it seems we are not birthing out of this doorway anytime soon, I want to offer you the experience I have found to be most “sanity stabilizing”. Simple as it is….is the practice of staying in the present moment.

It is surrender from allowing fear of future to overtake our emotions. If you are interested in cultivating a practice of staying out of the future...look back through some of my “Mandi on Mindfulness” Blogs and try a practice or two (do a search on my blog, there are a ton). I also offer you to look back on some of my JS YouTube commentaries...most of them have a thread of staying present and leaning into the thin places in one way or another.

Within this Holy Shelter we are all sequestered to, wonder what a step toward “treasures stored in dark places” would look like as you make your way from the center of this map to it’s outer edges...and beyond.