About half way through the movie The Shawshank Redemption, the main character, inmate Andy Dufresne, is taken to the warden’s office. For years Andy has been writing the state for donations to a prison library and now, finally, the state has responded with boxes and boxes of books and records.
While the guard uses the bathroom, Andy begins searching through the boxes to see what treasure has been sent to him. He pulls out a record of The Marriage of Figaro, stares at it for a moment and then calmly grabs the key and locks the guard in the bathroom and then locks the door to the office.
Then, though he knows he will be punished severely, he puts the record on the player and then turns on the microphone to the intercom system. In seconds the voices of two women singing plaintively fills every inch of the prison.
In the prison yard, everyone stops. Everyone stands silent staring off into the sky, listening to something beautiful in a place where they have only known loneliness and horror and seclusion. In a place where everything is gray, this music, in a moment of synesthesia, brings color to their world. Color in the form of notes that rise and fall, that ache and yearn.
For a moment, every one of the prisoners escapes. While before they were dead in spirit, now they are alive.
They touch something in that moment, something real and ethereal and meaningful and heavenly.
I remember when I was a kid having those kind of moments with music. I remember getting lost in the emotion of the piece. I remember getting goose bumps. I remember listening to Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet and feeling the music, not just hearing it.
Even now in church each Sunday, certain hymns seem to burrow their way into my soul and make me cry though I hardly can reason why it’s happening.
There just seem to be moments when I listen to music, when I can connect to something … to God perhaps … and feel a presence that is not always visible to me.
In her book Leaving Church, Barbara Brown Taylor writes about an Irish spiritual term—thin places. They are “places on earth where the Presence is so strong they serve as portals between this world and another.”
They are places where the boundary between the earth and Heaven seem almost transparent, where the boundary fades away and the things of God and Heaven are readily visible or felt.
And for the most part, thin places are found in nature. I am convinced, for example, that the bridge in the woods behind the church is a thin place because the Presence of God seems to fill every atom, every molecule of air and earth and sky.
But there are other thin places, places within us, sparked by music, by words, so that we don’t have to wander out into the woods to feel God, all we have to do is sing … or listen to someone else sing … or sit and be still and listen to our own souls sing.
We may not live in a physical prison as Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, but the figurative prisons that we fight and rail against can be breached in much the same way.
By finding those thin places.
