A Thin Place

This is a story of broken bodies and imperfect love, of ancient music and unexpected courage, and of the rare, fleeting moment.. a thin place, when a veil lifts and we glimpse something holy rising from the cracks. A Thin Place In Ireland, you might hear them quietly mentioned after Mass or whispered in a pub, like a secret almost too fragile to say out loud. The Irish call them 'thin places.' Those moments where the ordinary and the sacred seem to collide. They are the cracks between world that surrounds us and something just beyond our reach…a momentary fracture in the everyday that allows something holy to spill thru. Years ago, traveling alone through the west of Ireland, I stumbled upon such a place. I was in the small Irish village of Dungloe. It was Sunday morning and I was waiting for a bus to Dublin. Mass had just let out and as the pews emptied I noticed everyone headed for the local town hall. As it turned out that day was the finals for the step dancing competition for the girls of Dungloe. In Ireland, most girls learn to step dance from the time they can walk. This contest, held once a year, is more than just a competition. It is a rite of passage, the first few tentative steps of these young girls toward womanhood and all it carries. I had a couple hours before the bus so I followed the crowd to the hall, then up two long stairways to the second floor. The town crowded around a dance floor, each girl in Gaelic costume, feet flying, completely still from the waist up, feverishly tapping out the ancient rhythms, like Ireland’s morse code. After a time I decided to leave. As I started down I saw a young girl alone, dressed to dance, clutching the stair rail and wondered why she wasn’t already in the hall competing. But as I grew nearer I could see that one of her legs was askew, bent at a terrible angle. Broken from birth I suppose. She saw my gaze, and ashamed, pretended that she was just resting before starting up the second flight. Then, seeing my worry, she tried to step up. It was a terrible struggle for her, a limp…a hobble really. Each step unbalanced and awkward. Her face filled with shame as I hesitated, then unsure, passed by. I was just a stranger waiting for a bus. Uncertain what to do I continued down the steps, then stopped, turned and looked back up at her. She was paralyzed, looking at the insurmountable stairs before her, worried I suppose that she would never be able to climb them. Never dance like the other girls. Never step beyond the unfairness of her birth. Embarrassed that anyone would hear, she began to cry softly to herself. Just then a man burst thru the door and stumbled by me. Seeing her he began calling out, apologizing for being late. Slurring about how he had lost track of time at the pub. As he started up toward her, he staggered and nearly fell. At first she hid her face from him. But reaching her he swept her into his arms and she buried her face into his shoulder and let go. Not like a child cries. Not the tender cry of small unfairnesses. It was more like a woman cries. From understanding the way the world and everything in it, even love, can seem flawed at its heart. And to know that, to be touched by the truth of it, demands only that you endure it. And always will. I watched as he whispered and gathered her, then carried her up. I stood alone for a long moment then turned and followed them back up into the great room. The competition was nearly over. A girl with frantic feet was just finishing her dance to polite applause. But as this father and his daughter stepped out onto the floor, the hall, unsure… embarrassed…even a little afraid, was drowned in silence. He carried her to the center of the room and set her down. Then turning toward the silent musicians he took a few steps and stumbled. He righted himself and called out “You played for all of them! Can’t you play for my little girl?” The girl embarrassed now called out to him, “Da…please.” “No!” he cried. “You played for them.” The musicians, uncertain of what to do, sat silent as stone, until a young man of about twenty with a fiddle stood. He seemed brave to me. Not in some grand way. More simply unwilling to be indecent. He stepped past the girl’s father and standing alone in the silence began to play an Irish air. The greatest Irish airs are touched, like all great works of art, with equal parts trouble and beauty. They require each other, like they were chained together at the beginning of time, and only those that have lived both halves into their hearts can understand. The terrible price of living and the glorious beauty of it are inseparable. As the fiddler descended past the sorrow of the air, something rare called out from beneath the sound. The girl listening hard to the loneliness of the strings, struck a pose. She seemed to recognize something in it, some beauty disguised as ache, and feeling some wounded grace in herself, she responded. It seemed impossible at first. Like one hand clapping. But as she began to dance, some part of her that was broken reached down until it gripped something holy and began to raise it, step by step, into view. This was something far beyond studied steps of the others. It was something of being injured by simply living. Then of being transformed by the wound of it. And then saved by it. And each of us witnessing, were also saved. It was like this little girl, transfigured, dancing alone, was changing wound and terror into some otherworldly grace. The fiddle player let the last note hang in the air, until the sound returned to the whisper from which it came. And the great and wounded dancer disappeared once more into the stillness of a small and stricken girl. The townspeople were quiet. Touched by a kind of awe at something each felt but none could understand. Then the awe seemed to swell until the quiet could no longer contain it. The silence moaned once then seemed to break open like thunder and roll away. And something else like joy rattled free from below, where it was chained. The townspeople, moments before so timid and afraid, exploded cheering and clapping and crying. The dancer, once again lame, limped away to her father’s imperfect love and whiskey arms. And I left. I caught the bus to Dublin. But I had that feeling I sometimes get that I was being shown something. Something hidden. Something veiled that burst into plain sight for just a moment. Whispering to me that I should remember. Remember That was many years ago. Sometimes now I think of myself as a blind man groping my way across the years. I have become a sightless surveyor feeling for these places...these thin places, where a wall I cannot see is suddenly narrowed. These places where the darkness bends itself for a moment into a kind of light. Where something of the sacred reaches across to the ordinary. Where grace rises suddenly from under all we endure, from beneath our bent legs and misshapen hearts and lives. And sometimes now when I listen, for just a moment I hear, all around me, the sound of a fiddle rising…rising…rising… From behind an unseen wall. WLM