We Weren't Supposed to Be There
A Thin Place
This essay was inspired by a prompt from the writing workshop I'm currently attending:
'Write a scene where you experienced something powerful (fear, joy, apprehension, wonder) without saying, “I feel/felt.”'
I was fifteen, on a school trip aboard a navy-owned converted fishing boat cruising around the Clyde Estuary in Scotland. We were moored in Lamlash Bay, between the Isle of Arran and the much smaller Holy Isle, to do a little fishing, when I managed to get a fishhook stuck in my finger. The crew established that the island's doctor was in Brodick, on the other side, so we headed in to Lamlash and waited for him to drive around.
I didn't love the school, nor the program, the Combined Cadet Force, that had brought me there, but I did love the Clyde Estuary. The school, an all-boys school housed in a converted Victorian army barracks, has us spend three years of Mondays dressed up as soldiers, sailors, or airmen, marching around with old World War Two rifles. The silver lining was the opportunity to take this trip. It had taken five trains and almost twenty-four hours to get from Portsmouth, via London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow, to Helensburgh, where we boarded MFV1219, our home for the next week.
The doctor appeared in due course, gave me a local anesthetic, pushed the barb through and out, snipped it off with the wire cutters he kept in his Gladstone bag for such mishaps, and pulled out the rest of the hook. By then it was too late to motor on to our scheduled stop, so the crew determined we'd stay overnight in Lamlash Bay. The teachers were not happy, but the students were delighted, as it meant we could go into town and find a pub. Yes, we were fifteen and sixteen and yes, the drinking age was eighteen, and yes, the teachers were in the other bar in the same pub. They were different times.
I'd enjoyed all the magically named places we'd stopped so far—Tighnabrauich on the Kyles of Bute, Tarbert and Machrihanish on the Mull of Kintyre, and Lochranza on the north end of Arran—but I was grateful to spend time in one place, and especially in that one place. Grateful, I suppose, for the fishhook.
I woke early the next morning, the first one up on deck. Holy Isle was right there, waiting for me. I drank it in, peering at it, looking for signs of life and seeing none. For a moment there, in the lea of the island, my angsty teenage self forgot about friends, teachers, parents, and school, the bullying, the hormones, the drama, even the bandage on my finger, as a calm peace settled over me. I just wanted to jump overboard, swim ashore, and spend the rest of my life right there on that island, in that moment, in that peace.
The spell broke as one of the crew came up on deck. I asked him if anyone lived on the island. He thought there was maybe a farm at the north end, out of sight from our mooring. A couple of us took a rowboat out, but the crew instructed us to stay close to the mothership and not go ashore on the island, and we weren't really in a position to argue. I did manage a photo on the cheap Instamatic my parents had given me for the occasion, showing the boat moored with the island in the background.
Back on board I learned that there had been a monastery there once, hence the island's name. It didn't mean much to me. I knew monasteries only as the ruins of the buildings sacked by Henry VIII. Growing up in England, where the official religion is Church of England, and the de facto one apathy, I lacked a spiritual language with which to describe the experience. It had to stay my secret, for I had no way to tell it. I took away a dream of one day living on an island, a dream which took another forty-five years to manifest, and perhaps the dormant seed of a spiritual curiosity.
Forty years later, when my parents passed, I realized that I was not so much floating through life as drifting, unmoored on the stormy seas of an existential crisis, spiritually shipwrecked. Searching for a lifebuoy, I tiptoed into unfamiliar and alien territory, clutching at spiritual books and radio shows. I chanced upon a Krista Tippett interview with the now late Celtic mystic John O'Donohue. A thirst for more led me to his description of Thin Places, where the veil between the material and spirit worlds becomes so thin that is disappears. I finally had a name for my experience with Holy Isle. It had been my first Thin Place.
Although Holy Isle was my first, I was not its first. The island's spiritual significance goes back at least to the 6th century, when it was home to the hermit cave of the monk St Molaise, remembered in the Gaelic name for the island, Eilean MoLaise.
Many thin places have come into my life since then, not least on my island home in Puget Sound. Not surprisingly, they all have water in them, although sometimes frozen, and many are islands. Still, we always have a special affection for first times. That farmhouse at the north end of the island is now The Center for World Peace and Health, a Buddhist retreat center, open during the summer season from April to October.
Perhaps Holy Isle has more yet to teach me.
Thanks, as always, for reading, or listening. Are the thin places in your life?
Where I grew up, at the end of our block was woods. If you walked through them, about a mile or maybe a little more, you'd get to the beach. There was a clearing partway there. That was my first thin place. Not water, but proximity to it. The promise of it.
How lucky you are, and I once was, to live where thin places are plentiful.
I remember that interview with O'Donahue! I'd forgotten about it. I should go listen again.
What a lovely encounter. Thank you for sharing this.