SIMON PHIPPS

Last week I wrote about thin places and their importance inour busy lives . So often we associate thin places with physical space , so I want to write a post about people as thin places , specifically us. It starts with Christ. If thin places are about bridges between heaven and earth , where the divine feels more tangible, then Christ is the ultimate thin place , the ultimate conduit for the glory and presence of God.  In ancient Israel, the priesthood acted as the go-between for God and His people .  It was the priests who performed the ritual sacrifices, and the priests who entered the holy of holies in the temple where God’s presence dwelt. The writer of the book of Hebrews calls Jesus our  High Priest . When Christ died Matthew records that the curtain in the temple, separating the holy of holies from all else, was torn in two. Jesus is now the new mediator, the new thin place. The writer and apostle Peter makes bolder claims, that we are the ...

I live in a valley. I often make time to walk to the top of the valley, onto the hill. The wind stinging my eyes and ringing my ears, I look out across the whole valley. I see patches of sun breaking through the clouds illuminating fields and houses. I see a mass of rain falling on a patch of heather in the distance.  In this moment I gain a heightened sense of perspective about my place within reality.  I gain a heightened sense of self spatially as I realise just how small I am.  But I also gain a heightened sense of self temporally, about my time on earth.  This valley and hills were here long before I was, and will be there long after I am gone.  In this moment I am drawn close to God, seeing my life spread out before Him, I recognise that I am held in His hands, kept at bay from ultimate chaos. What Are Thin Places Celtic Christianity had a word for these kinds of places, they called them Thin Places . The saying goes: “ heaven and earth a...

My youngest son has now reached the age where we can start to go on walks as a family. So far we have made several trips up to the moors and countryside.  Whenever we go for one of these walks we always have a destination in mind, a goal , whether that be a certain rock or waterfall. We set our sights on this and get walking. We realised quite quickly that this is not the approach taken by our youngest child.  He has no interest in the end goal but instead is interested in everything else around him . We often have long excursions in the same area jumping in puddles or exploring plants. Many times we have had to trace our steps back to a place that he found particularly interesting. Initially this is frustrating for us because we want to get to our destination but before long we find ourselves enraptured in the same things he is, exploring the beauty around us . This can be seen as an analogy for modern life.  We all have destinations tha...

I have often struggled to find beauty in certain things. When I moved to Yorkshire I found it difficult to appreciate the darkness of the buildings, charred black by years of smoke from the factories. Now I find the buildings beautiful, wrapped up in so much history and set into the landscape of rugged moorland. I have a friend who challenges me greatly in seeing the beauty in things.  The latest two areas he has challenged me in are working men's clubs and brutalist architecture , two things I disliked strongly until recently. When speaking to me about them he draws me in with all that these structures represent to him. I feel his passion when he speaks. I am drawn into the deep sense of meaning that they carry within history and the formation of peoples. I recently read ViktorFrankl 's ' Man's Search For Meaning ', one of the main things that struck me was when Viktor wrote about how during his times in the concentration camps he,...

The ending to Mark’s Gospel is one of the most curious parts of the New Testament.  It is like missing the last chapter of a good novel you are reading, or not being able to complete that puzzle you’ve been working on for the last month.  It leaves something to be desired. The women arrive at the tomb only to find it empty. An angel tells them Jesus has risen, and tasks them with going and telling what has happened, instead they run away and the story ends. It looks like early readers of the gospel felt the same way about it’s ending. If you look in your bibles you will see two additional endings attached after the original ending of Mark’s Gospel: the shorter ending, and the longer ending. Unhappy with the ending the early churches added in these two additional endings. The official ending of Mark’s Gospel ends on verse 8 of chapter 16 . New Testament Scholars have come up with various solutions as to why the gospel ends this way, with one o...

In an experiment conducted in 2011, participants created Origami in a bid to assess the validity of “The IKEA Effect” – that people place a greater value on things that they have created , or expended effort on, than on things that were pre-built, or build by someone else, even if the pre-made items were of a higher quality. The participants created either an origami crane or frog, and were then asked how much they would pay for it. A group of experts also created origami. A group of non-participants were asked how much they would pay for the non-expert and expert origami. The participants assessed their own work at around 23 cents , whilst the non-participants assessed the same origami at around 5 cents . Finally the non-participants assessed the experts origami at around 27 cents . From this we can see that the participants assessed their own work (basically scrunched up paper) as being almost the same value as the origami that the experts made,...

A little while ago I listened to a podcast about Friedrich Nietzsche’s book " The Birth of Tragedy " . The speaker was discussing Nietzsche’s love of   Greek Tragedy . A form of play from over 2000 years ago that, in Nietzsche’s eyes, pulled back the veil of reality to give the viewer a glimpse of the chaos that lay behind. Greek Tragedy revealed the ultimate reality that life is meaningless , and that we are but froth tossed about on a cosmic ocean . Nietzche argued that art (in this case in the form of a play) created a safe way for people to explore this complete lack of meaning and total chaos in reality. Nietzsche hated the movement towards Platonism that took place just over 2000 years ago that believed that some kind of order lay behind life. Often times so much of life seems like random chaos . So much of life seems meaningless, and we are left to stare into the abyss, stare into the chasm that is left by so many tragic events. We ...