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 This has been a very special free verse poem to me for years; I first posted it here in March of 2006.

Thin Place

The road turns right almost as soon as it leaves the village, and
twists again in the other direction at a place where a

bit of lake-edge swamp comes up close to the pavement. That’s
where something changes, at that spot. I don’t know

what it is: but each time I come here, I get that same feeling
whenever I pass that stand of reeds: that I have left one

part of this particular world and stepped into another.

It’s the woods in part: woods almost always get to me, especially
when they’re near water. I know that. I do indeed

have a “thing” for woods and hills, because that’s where I first
sampled this particular taste, in taller forests and

bigger mountains, many years ago. But people report the same
feeling in deserts and dunes, on the top of barren

screes, on buttes, at wide silver water, along a shore at low
tide. There are sacred rocks well known to the people

who live close to them, and holy springs, and clearings that have
a certain radical peacefulness. Who knows? Maybe

there’s some phone booth on a Manhattan street corner that has
something special about it. I’m not willing to rule it out.

Up here in the Madawaska Valley there are miles and miles of wood,
and miles and miles (although not as many) of

riverside and lake edge. It’s lovely, wild, bony country. When
you’re here, you get clonked with the realization that

this is the civilized, highly populated fringe of the Canadian
Shield, and the Real Thing goes on and on, largely

unpeopled, for, oh, something like a thousand kilometers to the
north and west: a huge mass, terrifying in its

immensity. Is that vastness spotted, as this country is, with
places with this feeling? Or do you have to have people

there to notice the feeling? It’s the old tree-
falling-in-the-forest problem. (Would God be in this world if we weren’t here too? I think too highly of moose to believe otherwise.)

But there is that feeling here, just at the turn in the road and
on. It’s somewhat thicker and stronger where the

community has its white-painted house and its working buildings,
and thicker and stronger still on the island among

the reeds, where the log chapel stands. A sense of something
peaceful and yet gloriously alive Of Joy lurking

somewhere in the landscape.

The Celtic tradition had a phrase for it (Celtic tradition would,
of course!): it call places like this “thin places,” or so

I’ve been told. There are spots where this world and the realm of
the spirit come close together, some claim. That

may be; or it may be that there are some places, like some chords
in music, that evoke something spiritual in

people, as the smell of burning leaves can bring back childhood to
many of us; and that some places have more of

that power of evocation than others. Whatever. I don’t know, and
I’m not sure it’s all that important anyway. Even if

scientists could pin down the loci of the brain centers involved
and isolate the requisite stimuli, would it really make

any difference?

The important thing about this particular thin spot (or whatever
you want to call it) is that it fetched a holy woman — a

brilliant, passionate, fiercely courageous woman whose Godlove was
huge and whose energy was boundless — and

she found her own particular Madonna in these sandy pine woods.
Her cabin is on the island and the feeling there is

so thick you could almost slice it and use it for shingles. She
founded a community that keeps going through hard

work and cheerful begging and that has tendrils reaching far out
into the world. I come to visit this community

sometimes, partly for the community itself, but largely because
this place feels like a drink of cold water when you’re

really thirsty.

I was talking about all this to an old priest who lives here, one
who’d been close to the holy woman and had known

this place almost from the first days of the community. I asked
him the tree-falling-in-the-forest question: did that

woman find Mother Mary already here in the woods, or did her
prayers bring Mother Mary here? Mary had always

been here, he said; the woman had only named her and had taken
root here because of Mary’s presence. Question

answered.

But, he said, while there are places that call us toward holiness,
maybe it’s a two-way street. Maybe there are places

that we can help make holy. That felt right: I have known places
(my home church is one such) that seem to seep

the same feeling from their walls as I got from this place, as
though the prayers and joy and pain and angel-wrestling

of the people who had worshipped here had, in some fashion, sunk
into the very fabric of the joint. The priest said (he

had known her very well) that the woman’s cabin was like that; it
was, for him, full of the scent of her agony. What

had that agony been? I asked him. “That Love goes so unloved,” he
answered.

Maybe — I don’t know — if we could be completely open to God’s
love, as we never seem to be able to do, maybe we

could *make* more thin places. Maybe by love and prayer we could
clear some of the rust and debris that evil has left

spotted on the face of this earth, the scars on the faces of God’s
children, by facing them front-on and loving them as

best we can.

A more radical thought: maybe we could work on becoming ourselves
the thinnest places we can manage to be. Not

thin in the sense of meagerness, as fashion models are thin — in
fact, now that I think about it, the “thin place”

people I know are as often as not quite comfortably upholstered –
but thin in the sense of transparency: being as full

as we can hold of the love of God, and leaking it like crazy.
Highly permeable membranes. The priest himself was

like that; he leaked a deep and quiet peace.

Sounds simple, becoming a thin-place person; but in fact, it’s not
easy at all. Our notion of love often isn’t Love but

ego, and it needs to be stripped down to the chassis and rebuilt.
It means giving God leave to do whatever we need to

undergo if we’re to become the vessels God wants us to be. That
may involve being opened and stretched in ways

that I, for one, find terribly painful at times. God’s hand is
very tough on the clay at times, and if you think that’s

rough, you should see what he does to brass.

And sometimes it seems like it’s all for nothing. Listening to the
priest talk about the woman who had lived here, I felt

like a scant and wavering taper next to a glowing potbellied
stove. I feel muffled off from God’s love so much of the

time. I can take only a sip at a time of all the living water on
offer, however much I want to gulp it down. I’ve got my

areas of indifference or cruelty, spite and self-serving. I too
don’t want to see or be seen too much or with any real

accuracy. I too don’t love Love, or at least not often or nearly
well enough.

But the thin-place places and the thin-place people don’t judge
us; they call us, fetch us, offer us the startling gift of

grace, get lodged deep in our inmost selves. They tell us, here,
this is what Love tastes like, this is what Love’s

supposed to be. And nothing else ever really feels the same –
which is good, really; it keeps us from looking for

God’s Love in things and people that aren’t equipped to give it.
It helps if you can see that the idols are only plaster;

you can even feel sorry for them.

God-love is alive and active in this world; God’s fingerprints are
all over the landscape. That love bubbles through

among these particular pines and rocks and in communities like
this, but it also surfaces in all love: in a mother’s

gaze on her sleeping child, in the affection of friends or care
for strangers, for all love is ultimately God’s, love passed

on. It’s in the stillness of contemplation and in the action that
flows out from it. It’s yeasty and unstoppable and willing

to suffer anything to get through our stubborn unlovingness to
reach us. It’s here. You just have to be willing to step

into your particular woods, stand still, breathe deep, and open
your soul to it.

Combermere, Ont.

For Fr. Emile

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