...rip down the curtains

When it was midday, dark overtook the land for hours.
At the next watch, Jesus cried out,
"My God, 
have even 
you
forsaken me?"
Then with a loud breath,
Jesus breathed his last.
And the curtain of the temple, 
the one dividing the Holy of Holies,
was ripped apart,
top to bottom.
---Mark 15:33-38 (para. laca)

The veil of the Temple was man's best effort to keep God and people separate from each other. It protected the Holy of Holies, the Ark of the Covenant, the supposed residing place of God's spirit, from contact with any of God's people, save for one priest, one day per year. God was, almost literally, kept in a box, behind a curtain, too holy and remote to be involved in the lives of God's people.

On God's Friday, with Jesus' submission to the powers that called for his death, that veil was torn in two from top to bottom, not  as if by human hands. Jesus, then, was God's best hope for tearing down forever the barrier between God's realm and ours, between God's existence and ours, between God's heart and ours. Jesus' 3:00 Friday was God once and for all refusing to be contained by human hands, or by boundaries human minds create.

It was time to rip down the curtains.

Thin places

Now the heavens start to whisper, 
as the veil is growing thin. 
Earth from slumber wakes to listen
to the stirring, faint within...
---Mary Louise Bringle

In Celtic spirituality, there are spaces where the division between the physical world and the spirit world grow 'thin', allowing for a sort of supernatural transfer between realms. In these thin places, all kinds of magic might happen.
Christianity surely has at least two 'thin places' in its story. One, the moment of Jesus' death on the cross, is marked by a literal thinning of the veil --- the heavy curtain in the Temple at Jerusalem, separating the presence of God from the presence of God's people, is ripped open from top to bottom, ending forever constructed separation between God and us. The other thin place is surely the moment of God's 'crossing over' --- the Creator of the universe taking on the skin of a creature, Word becoming the frailest of flesh. It is this thinning that we await during the Advent season.
God presents us with this thin place --- do you hear the whispered invitation? Dare we step in?


...so here we stand, whoever we are,
bathed in the light of a star...