Thin Places

Sunday, September 13, 2026

Padraig

LGBTQIA+ Person of Faith

Quote

“The heaven, even the heavens, are the Lord’s; but the earth he has given to human beings.”

~Psalm 115:16 (NRSV)

Devotion

My pre-Christian Celtic ancestors understood something that modern Christianity has forgotten: the sacred isn’t locked away in buildings or confined to Sunday mornings. There are places, thin places, they called them, where the boundary between the physical and the spiritual becomes nearly transparent. Where heaven and earth breathe together.

These thin places aren’t always dramatic. A particular bend in a river. A grove of old trees. The edge of the sea where water meets land. The moment just after dawn when the world is waking up. In Celtic spirituality, the Divine isn’t distant or removed; God is woven into the fabric of creation itself, present in the ordinary and the elemental.

I think about how many LGBTQIA+ people have found God more readily in thin places than in church buildings. Standing at the ocean’s edge. Hiking mountain trails. In gardens we’ve tended with our own hands. Maybe it’s because we've learned not to trust the walls people build, the walls that divide sacred from profane, acceptable from unacceptable, us from them. Maybe it’s because we know what it’s like to exist in the in-between spaces, neither fully one thing nor another in the eyes of those who need rigid categories.

Celtic Christians celebrate twilight, the liminal time between day and night. We honor thresholds and crossings. We understand that some of us are meant to dwell in the borderlands, the places where boundaries blur and something new becomes possible. We who cross gender boundaries, who love across expected lines, who refuse to be confined by binary thinking, we are the thin places. We are where heaven and earth meet, where the rigid walls crack open and God slips through.

The Celts prayed blessing prayers for everything: rising in the morning, lighting the fire, milking the cow, going to bed. Every ordinary moment was shot through with the sacred. That’s the kind of spirituality that makes room for us. One that finds God everywhere, that doesn’t need our love or our bodies or our identities to be “holy enough” before the Divine can be present.

Reflection

1.    Where have you experienced "thin places" - moments or locations where you felt the boundary between heaven and earth was especially permeable?

2.    How might your experience as an LGBTQIA+ person - living in between categories, crossing boundaries - give you unique access to the sacred?

3.    What ordinary moment in your daily life could become a thin place if you approached it with intention and openness?

Action

Find a threshold this week. Stand in a doorway, at the edge of a park, where forest meets field, where water meets shore. Pause there. Let yourself be present in the in-between space. Offer a simple prayer of blessing for yourself as someone who lives in the borderlands, someone through whom God’s presence moves in ways that make the gatekeepers nervous and make heaven smile.