Thin Places

Betwixt and between heaven and earth, where the veil is thin, is a place that has been called a “Thin Place” by the Celts. It is an experience of the Holy, as close as your breath. Where suddenly the weight of time flies away, and all you are left with is the present moment—sweet and precious and tender. Peace. Calm. The sacred veil between worlds is rent. Eternal timelessness prevails. We know we are in the presence of the Great Love. It happens when we stand at the threshold of death or birth. We remember falling in Love with a child, a partner, a place, a song, the Divine.

This past week was just that sort of week for me.

I came to Albuquerque to participate in and rehearse Karl Jenkin’s The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace with 125 voices and a 50 piece orchestra. The Quintessence choral festival happens annually and I have done it most of the past 10 years. This year, I found myself in that thin place as I climbed vistas of joy and plummeted to valleys of sorrow within a singing community. The music is a study in the insatiable human hunger for the brutality of war, as well as our specie’s penchant for resilience, joy and light. As Matthew Greer, our conductor said many times, this piece is needed more than ever in these times.

I often long to fly out of the heaviness of my body and the low level dread as I watch the police state emerging, a rampant, greedy centralization of power, and the destruction of so much goodness in our shared American culture. Or is it just driving that goodness underground, into fierce resistance? Either way, it feels like an iron fist on the body, a gut level dread, waiting for state sponsored terrorism to show up in our communities.

Instead, this long choral festival week, which stretched from July 11 to July 20, was an oasis in time. This particular year it felt like oxygen. Singing is one of my survival skills for staying sane. Singing for hours on end fills up and nourishes my body and soul as nothing else can. I am laser-focused on notes, breath, patterns, rhythms, sounds, and balance with my neighbor. It is an exercise in the contemplative practice of being absolutely in the Present Moment. I wrap around me like a big fluffy comforter, this conviviality of a community of singers, volunteering countless hours just for the love of it. The hospitality of friends who welcome me into their homes.

To stand in a room filled with goodwill, excitement and so many friendly, familiar faces surrounding me from my decades of cultivating a singing community, is like no other whole body and soul experience of delight.

In stark contrast to the engineered divisiveness, meanness of spirit and diminishment of our humanity by the power that be, I drank in the many voices and sheer human potential. We came together under the watchful, skilled and gifted conductor’s baton. By day, we were there to create sound and harmonies that lifted us up as a human race. By evening, we gathered in beer halls and studios and public places to sing. The soul force and power of human community flourishing together was not lost on me. It was a thin place. It was a labor of love. It was a gift from Quintessence. I felt the love of ancestors and how music sustained them through terror filled times of persecution—from the Motherland to immigrants in this country.

Each night I fell into bed, soul-satisfied and exhausted. Another day of friendship, of love, hospitality, of healed and soothed bodies and souls.

I am grateful.

I realized how much I need thin places these days. Friends, singing, nature, writing, are just a few of mine. Inherent in all these thin places are beauty, connection, stillness, breath, imagination.

I hope you are finding those thin places of soul tending in your life, dear readers. Savor them. Drink them in for hard times. Go there often.

I leave you with the Benedictus.(click here)

Valdez, New Mexico July 21, 2025