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This is an article by Douglas Todd, who generally writes interesting pieces.

 

Looking for ghosts? Try a 'thin place'

Almost half of all Canadians, regardless of their religious beliefs, agree we can have contact with the spiritual world

By Douglas Todd, Vancouver Sun October 30, 2010

It's revealing that Canadian Immigrant magazine regularly runs pieces explaining the origins of Halloween.

New immigrants to Canada often find the night of Oct. 31 startling, with macabre-costumed trick-or-treaters knocking on doors amid a general celebration of things dark and disembodied.

If they're allowed, children of all ethnicities typically get into Halloween in a big way. I'm convinced most Canadian kids, and adults, now like Halloween better than Christmas. It's less fraught with obligation and carries an intoxicating edge of mystery.

Canadian Immigrant magazine does a decent job of describing the Celtic origins of Halloween -including how it was brought to this country in the early 1800s largely by Scottish, Irish and Welsh immigrants.

"Halloween was first developed from an ancient pagan festival celebrated by Celtic people more than 2,000 years ago in the area that is now the United Kingdom, Ireland, and northwestern France," says the magazine.

The Halloween festival was initially called Samhain (pronounced SOW ehn). The early Celts saw Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 as the beginning of the winter season; of long nights and dormant fields.

Quite accurately, Canadian Immigrant magazine continues:

"Celts believed that on the night of Samhain, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred, and the ghosts of the dead returned to earth."

Spirits, both harmful and harmless, were able to pass though. And the need to ward off the dangerous ones led to the wearing of costumes and masks. The magazine, however, doesn't add another crucial thing about Samhain -that the earth-revering Celts often called the season in which humans could easily connect to the spirit world a "thin place."

The evocative phrase, "thin place," is being revived today. It has become part of a common cross-cultural spiritual vocabulary.

Used to describe both special times and sacred geographical locations, "thin place" has grown as popular as other generic spiritual terms, such as "mindfulness," "second birth" and "loving-kindness."

The intriguing concept of "thin places" has been picked up across religious traditions, as well as by those who consider themselves spiritual but not religious.

Indeed, polling shows that people who don't belong to traditional religions are often the most eager to delve into "thin places."

Sociologist of religion Reginald Bibby has found 46 per cent of Canadians agree with the statement: "We can have contact with the spirit world."

And a growing number of Canadians go further. Thirty-one per cent of Canadians literally believe "we can communicate with the dead." That figure is 10 percentage points higher than in 1985.

Seattle's Tom Cashman, who leads workshops on Celtic spirituality, has studied some of the world's noted thin places, including Scotland's Iona Island, northern England's Lindisfarne Island and locations in Wales and Ireland.

Putting it simply, Cashman says Celts believe thin places are those times or places "that cause the hair to stand up on the back of your neck" -- when you suddenly feel you've made contact with the other side of reality.

How do different traditions deal with thin places?

For the growing ranks of modern-day pagans, sometimes known as witches, it's crucial to celebrate the thin place of Samhain.

Like Celts, neo-pagans consider Samhain not only the beginning of winter, but the first day of the new year. Some neo-pagans have constructed elaborate Celtic-inspired rituals to honour the dead.

The Roman Catholic church has also found its own way to respect thin places at this time of year. In the 800s, as Canadian Immigrant explains, the Roman Christian church, influenced by Celtic Christians from Britain, established a new holiday, All Saints' Day, also called All Hallows. The evening before All Hallows was known as All Hallows' Eve, or as it came to be abbreviated, Halloween.

Mexicans have blended aboriginal traditions with vibrant Roman Catholicism to create the major "thin place" festival called The Day of the Dead, which occurs Nov. 2. That's when Mexicans communicate with the saints and dead relatives, honouring them using sugar skulls.

Like the earth-revering Celts, Canada's aboriginals are also drawn to thin places. Aboriginal spirituality emphasizes linking with animal guides and ancestors through rituals and unique geographical locations known as "power spots."

In turn, so-called New Age practitioners have picked up on "thin places." They hop on jets to see them at Peru's Machu Picchu, Japan's Mount Fuji, California's Mount Shasta, Scotland's Iona and England's Stonehenge.

In Asian folklore, there are also many thin places and thin times of year, when it is auspicious to honour the dead. For instance, many Chinese people, influenced by Buddhism, go out of their way to mark the Ghost Festival, which follows the lunar calendar.

In an expanding act of multicultural creativity, Vancouver's city-run Mountain View Cemetery has begun to host its own thin-place traditions. Some of those events are planned for this Halloween weekend.

Cashman, who is Episcopalian (Anglican), says it's important for Protestant Christians and others to reclaim elements of Celtic Christianity, as well as the concept of thin places.

Celtic Christianity, he says, was much less "conforming and controlling" than Roman Christianity. "It emphasized diversity and imagination."

The ancient Celts and their Christian followers were close to the earth and the seasons. They developed the idea of thin places, Cashman says, because they didn't experience time as linear, but as a spiral. "If you think of time as a spiral, it's not much of a stretch to think you can slip from one part of the spiral to another."

Since monks such as St. Columba, St. Cuthbert and St. Aidan are widely respected for spreading Celtic Christianity to Britain and northern Europe during the so-called Dark Ages of the Roman Catholic church, Cashman is not the only contemporary Christian trying to revive it.

One of North America's most well-known Bible scholars, Marcus Borg of Oregon State University, devotes a chapter to thin places in his best-selling book, The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith.

Playing down parapsychological understandings of thin places, Borg goes for a more naturalistic definition. He says thin places do not need to be strictly understood as times of year or geographical zones.

Instead, he calls on people to understand thin places as a universal metaphor -- for any time when the human heart is truly opened to the sacred, to the presence of spirit.

Borg believes there is a non-material dimension of reality. Thus, he says, we always live in two worlds -- and thin places are places where these worlds meet, where the veil between the two realms is momentarily lifted.

As a liberal Christian, Borg thinks of a thin place as an entryway into "the commonwealth of God," within which he says "we can move and breathe and have our being." However, for Borg, thin places are not restricted to Christians.

I appreciate the way Borg says thin places occur almost anytime people open themselves through a "sacrament of the sacred" -- which includes music, meditation, religious worship, nature experience, dream work, reading of scripture, silence, poetry, story, art and singing. Even an inspiring conversation can be a thin place.

In other words, Borg helpfully teaches that no one has to restrict the exploration of thin places to festive times of year, such as Halloween or Ghost Festivals, or to exceptional places, like famous "holy" spots.

Instead, religious or not, we can consider ourselves in a thin place almost any time we suddenly find ourselves alive to wonder, reverence and compassion.

dtodd@vancouversun.com

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/life/Looking+ghosts+thin+place/3751927/story.html#ixzz144et1yqQ

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The last word: Why old dogs are the best dogs

They can be eccentric, slow afoot, even grouchy. But dogs live out their final days, says The Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten, with a humility and grace we all could learn from.

Friday, October 24, 2008

From the book Old Dogs, text by Gene Weingarten and Michael S. Williamson, based on a longer excerpt that originally appeared in The Washington Post. ©2008 by Gene Weingarten and Michael S. Williamson. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster Inc.