What is a thin space? Picture a familiar window and the child that might be playing on the other side. She sees you watching her, and like the kid on “The Christmas Story,” she comes close and presses her snotty nose and face against the glass to make you smile.
I sometimes stand at my kitchen window and think about what angels might be out there-or picture the face of someone who is gone. I reach my hand out and almost feel that I have touched the face on the other side, but cannot deny the pane that is there, keeping me from that which is beyond. 
Of late I have sat with many who are perched on this windowsill. This week alone I have said goodbye to four elderly people I have loved and cared for. They are now, I believe, in a reality that is sharper and clearer, brighter and more colorful than the one I now know. They have entered a space where the grass would hurt our feet because of how much more real and solid it is than our own.* It is the place I tried to draw in this mural with my daughters, where our world is chalked in black, white and gray, but the other is full of joy, light, color…and gumdrops!
This faith does not change the fact that I can no longer joke around with those four residents, or give them supper, or touch their wrinkled skin. But in this environment of loving and losing so many, I take comfort in the story of Christmas! I know that in Bethlehem of Judah the window was opened. The barriers around our small reality were invaded by God’s greater, all encompassing reality, and in a miracle our minds can barely fathom, the DNA of a righteous teenage girl joined with God himself in an immaculate scandal of cosmic love.
Where is your thin space? Whether it’s the church altar, the chair by the dying, or the woods at Abbots Pond, I’m committed to run toward what I can now know in part, and I want to invite everyone I know to join me as I press my face into the dark glass.
*C.S Lewis, the great divorce
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