Thin Experiences and the Virgin Birth

I remember someone who told me that they had been surprised by gratitude. Not that they were ungrateful before. Perhaps they could be characterised as someone who found meaning without transcendence, without mystery, without anything more than what can be explained by science for example, that is, without God. A flattened reality, but as it turned out, a flat reality haunted by transcendence and mystery. I say that because they realised that they felt grateful. But to whom? It didn’t make sense. Who should they be grateful to when life was good? Maybe it is just luck? (No, hang on, isn’t luck/good fortune originally part of the Greek/Roman pantheon of gods?) If they were to be consistent they would either have to give up being grateful or embrace the truth that we are surrounded by mystery and transcendence. They chose gtatitude. I liked their honesty and consistency. 

 Gratitude is a very common experience. It’s worth thinking about. What does it mean to be grateful? Should it be expelled by telling oneself that it doesn’t make sense in a universe lacking inherent meaning and purpose? Possibly. But then again, maybe there is more to it. Maybe gratitude, the experience of gratitude, is one of those thin places of our lives where the ‘more’ of mystery and transcendence breaks through. 

 When I tried to be an atheist I lost beauty for similar reasons. I could still recognise beauty, of course. But beauty seemed more than skin deep to me. It ran deeper than my appreciation of it, there was ‘more’, another thin place where transcendence breaks through into our lives. The bond between us as people, human compassion and love, for similar reasons are thin places. You can explain our bondedness, compassion, and love if you wish in terms of evolutionary benefit to the species, but we often experience them as thin places where we sense the ‘more ‘ of reality.  And this mystery, this transcendence, this ‘more’, is never against our humanity, never against human experience, it deepens the truly human as we encounter what transcends us. 

 But the ‘more’ isn’t like a thin layer of icing on a cake that you can just peel off and throw away leaving the cake undisturbed. The ‘more’ is not an add-on. We can live as though it is, sure. That is the nature of the ‘more’ that I am talking about. Transcendence – the ‘more’ - suffuses our lives, yet we can live most of the time oblivious to the presence of transcendence. Thin experiences make us aware of the presence of what I am calling transcendence and mystery, the experience that there is a good deal ‘more’ in our lives and in reality, and mystery really is everywhere once we have our eyes opened. This is part of the religious impulse. When I tried to be an atheist I was unable to ignore this ‘more’ no matter how hard I tried. And why would I ignore it? Not just for the sake of consistency, but because more is on offer! 

 And so we come to Christmas. I know that the whole virgin birth thing might be difficult to believe. Or is it? When I read the accounts of the Gospels it seems to me that people experienced Jesus himself as a thin place. A thin place in the flesh, in person. That the mystery that surrounds us, that beckons us to a deeper experience of our humanity and of life, would become manifest personally as a human being, isn’t such an alien idea really. You could think of the virgin birth as another way of saying that mystery came among us, that the mystery surrounding us, that is deep within all reality, came to fruition in the womb of Mary. Those who can’t let anything exist outside of the test tube cannot accept what I am saying. But if you sense, like I do, that there is ‘more’ going on in your life, that you have thin experiences, then faith beckons. The mystery beyond us, yet that also encounters us so often if we have the eyes to see, this mystery, so beautifully matched to our human experience, of course it would become human. Of course. The experience of thin places in my life didn’t make me expect Jesus, but once I encountered Jesus, I understood the thin experiences of life better. Indeed, I understood that mystery and transcendence are embedded in the very fabric of my humanity.