Orville Peck is a Thin Place

I bought my first compact disc in 1986. I was 23 and had just moved to Dallas from Detroit. I had a new job and a new apartment and the cable installer had just left. I switched the channel to MTV – in those ancient days MTV was still showing music videos.

Almost immediately the U2 music video for “With or Without You” came on. Their album, “The Joshua Tree,” had recently been released. I still don’t know how to describe my response to that song. I felt like I had been punched in the gut. I experienced an enhanced sense of reality – and an awareness that there was more than meets the eye in that particular instance of space and time.

I don’t remember the order in which I purchased my first CD and first stereo. No matter – they were both soon in my living room. The stereo was a Kenwood component rack system with huge 4-way speakers purchased on credit. I bought “The Joshua Tree” at the record store in the mall. Thus began my lifelong affection for U2. I enjoy all of their music and find much of it inspiring. I have preached sermons based on U2 songs. Thirty-eight years later, however, “With or Without You,” is still the song that stops me in my tracks and keeps me in my car after I’ve parked.

At some point in my spiritual journey I learned about the Celtic concept of a “thin place.” A thin place is usually a geographic location where people experience a diminished barrier between the seen and unseen. In thin places, it is easier to sense the etherial and discern what is veiled. “Thin places” have always been a part of human existence. Many of them became holy sites that draw pilgrims to this day. In Hamlet, Shakespeare alludes to thin places with the line “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

I live near Sedona, Arizona. Sedona is a hauntingly beautiful manifestation of red rocks and canyons. The light itself is different. Artists go there to paint. It has long been a thin place for the Indigenous Peoples of this region. Today Sedona still welcomes spiritual pilgrims. They arrive seeking inner peace or clarity or wisdom or enlightenment or any number of things. Many come, I think, in simple hope of proving for themselves that Shakespeare is right.

I watched an interview with Orville Peck a few days ago. He talked about his experience in a Ayahuasca ceremony. I believe that was a pharmacologically induced occasion of a “thin place.” I would argue that experiences with psychoactive substances are another means of creating temporarily localized “thin places.”

My thin places have usually not been geographic – or chemical. The traditional location of Mount Sinai is a thin place for me. Standing on the edge of the brow on Signal Mountain with the wind racing up the face of the cliff is a thin place. My foundational thin experience, however, happened in my senior year of high school. All I did was read a single sentence in my physics textbook – “Light is both a wave and a particle.”

That was my Horatio moment. Light turns out to be a mysterious conundrum. Right before our eyes. Waves and particles are mutually exclusive. It is impossible for a physical phenomena to be both waves and particles. And yet for 100 years light has proven itself over and over again to simultaneously be both. My next thought was whether the same could be true of things we call “spiritual.” My Christian faith at the time made me wonder if saying Jesus was both God and man was just saying that Jesus came to us as both a particle and a wave.

I soon learned that my elders in The Episcopal Church were not amused by my meandering ideas.

What followed over the next 10 years was a series of similar “thin places.” On January 31, 1989, PBS broadcast a NOVA episode titled “The Strange New Science of Chaos.” It was a presentation based on James Gleick’s book, “Chaos.” Watching this episode was 52 minutes of theophany for me – an encounter with the divine. It turns out that the wave-particle duality of light is just the beginning of possible impossibilities. Almost every substance and phenomenon in the universe is inherently unknowable and chaotic. There are always patterns to be discerned. But certainty is never possible. I personally like the word mysterious in place of unknowable but physicists are unlikely to approve.

Weather is unpredictable. Water drops are unpredictable. Inherently unpredictable. No amount of gathered data can calculate a future state of these systems. Equations with 3 variables or systems with 3 objects are unpredictable. We call these “three body problems.” Heaven and earth are an ongoing, mysterious revelation.

Seeing Feynman diagrams of quantum particle interactions in a Washington Post book review was the next thin moment I recall. After this I was gobsmacked upon reading St Augustine’s very modern views of science and faith flushed out early in the 4th century. I wrote a long paper pulling these together as part my M.Div. degree. I never found much of an audience for my “insights” but at least I can claim an entry in the library catalogue at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia.

My most recent experience of a “thin place” happened while watching depressing news on YouTube. It is 2025 so I suppose enlightenment through YouTube was bound to happen eventually. In my case, the Google algorithm had taken notice of my affinity for gay musicians. When my “recommended” line included a music video by Orville Peck, I played it. I had read a few articles about Peck but I’m not overly fond of country music. I also found the whole mask thing odd. This was the first time I had taken the time to listen to Orville Peck’s music.

I do not remember which video was presented to me from whatever providential algorithm chose it. I do, though, remember my jaw dropping and my gut feeling mildly punched as I listened. It was a completely unexpected momentary thin place. I was drawn in initially by the haunting beauty of the voice and lyrics. The more I listened, the thinner the encounters became.

Some songs, such as the duets with Kylie Minogue and Beck, are a blast. The thinnest of his songs for me so far is “The Curse of the Blackened Eye.” The first gut punch came when Peck sang the line “It ain’t the letting go it’s more about the things that you take with.” Simple. Profound. Poetic. The phrase precisely describes the world’s fundamental flaw. Resentments. Grudges. Wounds. Regrets. Things we so easily “take with” on our various journeys. Things that harm the self and the world about us.

I was, to use a Blues Traveler line, hooked.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve listened to “The Curse of the Blackened Eye.” During one iteration, the opening verses hit me as a painfully accurate description of domestic violence. I don’t know this to be the songwriter’s intent. Nonetheless, the imagery manifested within me one of the things that truly “follows me around.” It has followed me around since I was 13.

I was spending the summer with my aunt and her husband at their lake property in northern Indiana. My room was right off of the kitchen. On this particular morning, the shouting and sounds of punching woke me up. I cracked the door to look into the kitchen. I saw my aunt knocked to the floor. My uncle then started kicking her in the ribs, pushing her around the floor in a circle with each blow. I have never been able to get completely rid of the nausea I felt in that moment. “It’s true – True it follows me around.”

The pitch and melody of the “true” refrain reminds me of a wail or lament. It brought front and center one more thing that follows me around.

I knew I was attracted to men by the 5th grade. That was the year we joined the YMCA so that my dad could play racket ball. I felt the deepest and fulfilling sort of longing the first time I saw a naked man in the locker room.

I was terrified. And ashamed. I did not come out until 2010 at age 47. That was 37 years of chronic anxiety while hiding and suppressing my being gay. I was not afraid of being caught at anything – I never did anything catching. I held onto celibacy until I finally hit a brick wall. I had reached a level of depression where I had to choose between killing myself and coming out. I was married. I was a pastor of a parish. I assumed I would lose everything when I came out. I finally accepted that I was not going to medicate my way out. And with a 10 year old daughter, I couldn’t abide what my suicide would do to her.

On this occasion, I turned to face and embrace the thing following me around. The encounter made me whole to the extent wholeness is possible. All that lingers is a shadow of regret when I wonder what my life could have been if I had said “yes” to Gordon when I was 22. To go back in time and make a different choice means I give up the family that I now have. I would not knowingly make that choice in spite of the years of pain. The regrets, in this case, do not follow me around so much as they tag along once in a while.

I’ve tried to listen to as much of Orville Peck’s music as I can. I have ordered LP vinyl copies of Pony, Bronco, and Stampede. Show Pony is on back order. The songs – his voice, his lyrics – continue to create “thin places” for me.
I am truly grateful.

Peace to all,
Mike