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When Fr Kieron and David Rang cycled to Lourdes, they were raising sponsorship funding for a needy parishioner. This year (2010) Fr Kieron joined the diocesan pilgrimage, but the journey gave rise to a characteristic homily. "I’ve just returned from Lourdes….on a very slow train and I’m not convinced by those who said that this year I had chosen the “easy way”, by not going on my bike!"

"At one point, the train made an unscheduled stop at Brive la Gaillarde, I like to think that it was a way of honouring the memory of Fr Andre Another Leceour (Brive was his home) – it was for me anyway!"

"Another novelty on this year’s pilgrimage was the introduction of the four minute limit for preachers – a rule that was only ever broken by Fr Ian Byrnes, who introduced the rule himself! I would like to keep up that tradition now, but I offer no guarantees!

Of course, there are many aspects to a pilgrimage and the physical journey is one of them, but much more profound is the sharing in people’s spiritual journey. There were certainly pilgrims for whom that journey was drawing to a close, others whose life was fragile but faith was strong, in both cases there was a real sense of God’s Kingdom being close. The apparently stark warnings in today’s gospel are about precisely that. It is because the lord has offered us the gift of His Kingdom, that he wants us to be ready for it. The parables of how to be prepared are prefaced by those reassuring and familiar words; “do not be afraid”.

In Celtic spirituality a centre of pilgrimage like Lourdes would likely be described as “a thin place”. This designation is given to somewhere where it seems that the gap between heaven and earth has been narrowed; where the experience of our own world and the world of the Kingdom, almost seem to merge. In such places, the Church as we know it becomes gloriously redundant as the Kingdom is breaking through all the time.

The island of Iona has been famously described in these terms; we can think perhaps of other places like community of Taize in France (described by Pope John Paul 11 as “that little spring time”) or other monastic or religious communities. A “thin place” is where the dividing line between how God wants us to live and how we actually live becomes blurred. It is where we find the treasure that will not fail us; where the faith of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob becomes real for us and where we have the courage to realise that all that we have and see is only provisional, because like our ancestors in faith, remembered in the letter to the Hebrews, we know that we are on a journey to somewhere else.

It is not everybody who can visit an Iona, a Taize or a Lourdes, but the welcome and the warnings about the Lord’s Kingdom are addressed to everyone who has ears to hear. Why should some be more advantaged than others? Surely it was not the intention of Jesus to make it easier for those with air miles or a passport to enter into his Kingdom?! The parables about vigilance and readiness are meant for us all because we are among those to whom much has been given and much will be demanded of. We have been anointed as priest, prophet and king from our baptism and so the challenge is to make that “thin place” our home. We cannot pretend to live somewhere else or to recreate the experience of a pilgrimage on a daily basis. Somehow the currency would be devalued and to live at that level of intensity may not be desirable or sustainable. But, there has to be a way, in our time and place, of transforming our experience of church into a real experience of Kingdom.

When the Lourdes train was being loaded, we were very conscious of the significant gap between the platform and the carriages, not least because those unable to walk have to be manually lifted into the train and over the gap. If we don’t find ourselves already living in “a thin place”, then we need to mind the gap.

This is the gap between how God wants us to live and how we are actually living. If we are willing to build upon the faith of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Sarah; if we seek out our real treasure and rise to the challenge of what is demanded of those who have been gifted much – then we can turn our parishes and our homes into “a thin place”.
And I think that might be just over four minutes!"