A theologian writes - I’ve forgotten who; perhaps it was Thielicke... of a deeply formative time when as a young man he stood on the shore and gazed out onto the vast sea lying before him, feeling the mist on his face, the salt on his lips, and hearing the surf's pound and roar; the sight of the swell, ebb and flow almost mesmorizing -- the sound of the crash and then the quieter hissing on sand of the withdrawing waves.

He writes that standing there he felt himself to be l'iving on the boundary' and there came to him an enormous sense of the Presence of God, an awareness that he was living in a place between two worlds, a ribbon of space and time joining the temporal and the eternal. A borderland, a place between, a joining place of opposites in a complimentary dance.

The Irish Celts called such places ‘thin places’ where -- by simply being present, sensitive and quiet within, whatever the crash and tumult before them, there might came a deep and settled conviction that the Almighty was there and that, as Norfolk's Dame Julian of Norwhich put it, ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well - and all manner of things shall be well.’

In all places the Creator is very near. Perhaps in some places even more so.

Laurie Barber, February 2019