Country Music and Celtic Spirituality
The balcony level tickets read that our velvety seats could be located just out of range from the chandelier’s landing were it to plummet into the audience in a firework of mesmerizing and lethal crystals. I’d noted it like I’d noted the exits, like I’d noted the space between aisles should I hear gunshots and need to blanket my body over my four year old. Theaters have made me anxious ever since the Baton Rouge cinema shooting that occurred during and haunted my postpartum.
December 1st had been a highlighted bar in our calendars since my family found out Home Free, an a capella country band, was coming to Louisiana. Home Free had been a steady soundtrack for my dad and brother since my brother was bed ridden after his wreck last year. The most I expected of the evening was a cathartic raise of my glass to music that accompanied a time we weren’t sure we’d get with him and maybe a feel-good moment against the Home Free rendition of the Johnny Cash darling, Ring of Fire. We were all there on one row, knowing in an alternative timeline of seconds and slip ups, we could have not been. That truth alone would have been enough to call the day good. But it was more than good. How do I explain this?
That concert made me feel alive. Maybe it’s because I was there with my people who get to be my people a bit longer. Maybe it was because the room throbbed with wall to wall energy of folks mouthing the same words to an experience having migrated off of their phone screens and into their real lives. Maybe it was because it was country music and that felt like a storied siren calling to my piney woods raising. Maybe it was because of the harmonies. Good Lord, I think it was probably because of the harmonies, and the range, and the runs, and the riffs, and the ability for human bodies to create all that they can create, to call out in others all that they can call out with their creation. Maybe it was because I remember what it’s like to make music with people, a uniquely human rightness. Maybe it was because it looked like the musicians might love their honest to God lives—at least in that moment—and that mess must be contagious, because it made me want to love my honest to God life a little more without apology. Does this sound dramatic? So be it. I had a moment Sunday night at a country a cappella concert that felt pretty damn sacred.
And what does this have to do with celtic spirituality? Well, isn’t it obvious? ...No?
Ancient Celts believed that there are only ever three feet in between heaven and earth, but that in this life there are places where they’re much closer. And these are called thin places.
Thin places are happened upon and not sought out, they are experienced through openness and not expectation. They call to our aches and sense of purpose and send tremors through our held patterns of thinking and living. They are simultaneously settling and unsettling; thin places make us feel connected to the smallness within and the bigness without. They remind us of Love.
I have encountered thin places at altars and on death beds, on rooftops overseas and around fires in the backyard. In so many instances have thin places been ushered with live music. I have known places so thin while making eye contact and while making love. I think the edge of my couch where the light teases the blinds, where I write, must be quite thin. I have watched the space between heaven and earth collapse with the cascade of an applause for a released asylum seeker, felt the straddle of two worlds while driving with a sunroof-framed moon overhead or reading a freaking good sentence. They have found me alone and within a crowd; I have found that they are a pretty decent metric for measuring a good life. It seems that people who know both their own need and resilience live in thin places, which makes time with poor folks and diagnosed folks and heartbroken folks quite a powerful thing. I have been reminded of goodness and purpose, intimacy and connection in spaces like these that I have, maybe without exception, done nothing to orchestrate. In fact, my egocentric efforts to do and to be almost certainly ensure the absence of these experiences. Thin places are gifts for those paying attention, those willing to be surprised, and mercifully even sometimes for those who aren’t.
Sunday’s concert was an ode to openness and a reminder that heaven is here among the things that matter.
Can thin places be manufactured? Ancient Irish people, weigh in, because I’m not sure. But I would guess maybe not. I would also guess that maybe what we can do is take part in the kind of creating that helps us pay attention, that opens us up, that makes us soft. Then thin places will find us in the way that they find us.
érthei i Vasileía is Greek for kingdom come. érthei i Vasileía is all I could think after the encore faded and the lights went up.
