“I’ve never had a religious experience,” she told me.
The young woman speaking was a good friend of mine from graduate school. She was intelligent and very gifted, working on her PhD and singing in a well-known choral group. Not only had she not had a “religious experience,” but, as I already knew, she didn’t believe in God.
She went on, “The closest I’ve come to a religious experience was singing Brahms’ German Requiem. I could imagine it might be something like that.”
If I had known then what I know now about the experience of God, I would have said to her that what she was recounting was probably indeed a religious experience. She just had not recognized it. In fact, we often don’t recognize the divine presence. Sometimes we go blithely on our way, never knowing that the Holy has touched us. Other times we may sense that something important has happened, or we may glimpse the mysterious depth of the moment, without being able to acknowledge that God was there.
The Celtic tradition speaks of “thin places,” where the veil between the temporal world and the eternal seems permeable, or “thin.” These have been called thresholds, or liminal places.
While the term properly refers to actual geographical places that are “thin,” I don’t believe we have to travel to Ireland or Rome or Jerusalem to find them. I suspect there are thin places that come into being when a location is infused with prayer. For example, I can’t count the number of times people have mentioned the peace they feel when they come through the front door of our Cenacles. It is not that the Cenacle community is any more holy than other people, but rather that the house has been steeped in prayer and worship — not only the prayer of the Cenacle Sisters, but also the prayer of our retreatants and guests.
Just so, the prayer corner in your living room, the chair in your bedroom, or the bench in the backyard where you pray regularly may lose its quality of ordinariness. What was previously an unexceptional spot may become a sort of thin place, bringing you more easily into awareness of the divine than most other places. Sitting there becomes a daily pilgrimage from the periphery of life toward the center.
Still other thin places, I believe, are not geographical at all, but are hosted within us. For me, music can open up a thin place. This is not automatic, of course, because any sense of God’s nearness is gift. But there seems to be something about music which carries within itself the possibility of liminality for people who are attentive. Even more remarkable, music can at times surprise into awareness those who would not normally be looking for the divine.
This gift of a threshold experience may have been what my friend was experiencing through the music of Brahms. She who did not believe in God tasted the reality of the divine, even though she could not name the reality she knew then as God.