The Thin Veil

Recently I have been doing some reading about Celtic spirituality.  While Celtic music may be more familiar to us, there is a vein of spirituality which originated in Ireland and Scotland long centuries ago. There was a time when it would have disappeared completely had it not gone underground alongside the mainstream Roman Catholic Church.    One of the distinctive parts of that tradition is a belief that there are places where the veil between earth and heaven is very thin.  It is an image that surely brings to mind that Hebrew passage about the great cloud of heavenly witnesses.

 

As I reflect back over my years of ministry and preaching, I realize that I have often preached this "thin veil" theology.  The time I was most likely to preach about it was on All Saints Sunday which is not too far away on the liturgical calendar.  There was something very special and eternal about that service of worship as the names of the departed saints were called and the people on this side were called to the Table for the holy meal.  There was a sense in which that Table, though present and physical among us, seemed to disappear into that invisible realm where those on the other side gathered with us.

 

Perhaps, it has to do with my experience of dealing with the early and untimely death of my Father when I was hardly a child that sent me as an adult to a place of considering how we are here and they are there and hardly is there anything between us.  I remember so many who have crossed over the dark river.  Sometimes I find myself walking about and calling their names.  It is not that my calling the names will bring them back into my presence, but maybe they, being there on the other side of that ever present thin veil, hear and know that they have not been forgotten.