Every Bridge is Sacred

Threshold Prayers (52 Ways to Pray)

I’ll never forget the moment that I crossed the Ashley River into Charleston this past December.

The sun was beginning to set, and the first orange glow was glazing the surface of the water. A few small boats lazily bobbed upriver. The marsh oaks on the other side seemed to welcome me home.

I rolled my windows down and drank in the salty air.

I’d driven across this bridge many times before. But this crossing had a different quality to it. This time I wasn’t visiting, I was relocating. This time, that same bridge became a liminal space—the fault line between an old life and a new one.

Transitions are the mile markers of our lives. Graduations. Weddings. Births. Deaths. New Year’s. New careers. Transitions are pregnant with meaning. They are like small symbols of the cyclical nature of creation, with its ebbing and flowing, its dying and rising.

Threshold prayer is a practice born out of Celtic Christianity that pays special reverence to the transitional moments of our lives. The Celts were famous, and sometimes infamous, for the earthiness of their spirituality. They saw all of creation alive with the glory of God. They made even the most physical and mundane aspects of daily life—washing, cooking, making a fire, milking a cow—into devotions. For the Celts, transitions—big or small—were sacred.

John O’Donohue, the great historian of Celtic spirituality, wrote:

“It is wise in your own life to be able to recognize and acknowledge the key thresholds; to take your time; to feel all the varieties of presence that accrue there; to listen inward with complete attention until you hear the inner voice calling you forward. The time has come to cross.”

Indeed, many of the most significant moments of God’s intervention take place at the crossing between places or seasons. Jesus’ baptism. The crossing of the Red Sea. The border of Canaan. In our normal, hurried way of life, we often rush through our transitions without pausing to consider their significance. But every bridge is sacred if we’ll slow down enough to see it.

---

Practice

Reflect

What transitions are taking place in your life right now? Perhaps they are large, like a move, or a new child, or a new job. But perhaps they are small, like the transition you make from waking to sleeping, or the transition from work to home. Call to mind the doorways you’re passing through.

John O’Donohue poses a handful of reflective questions we can ask ourselves regarding the thresholds of our lives:

• At which threshold am I now standing?

• At this time in my life, what am I leaving?

• Where am I about to enter?

• What is preventing me from crossing my next threshold?

• What gift would enable me to do it?

Pray

The Carmina Gadelica (Charms of the Gaels) is a collection of prayers, hymns, and poems from the Celtic tradition. It includes prayer for all sorts of moments in our lives, including thresholds. Here’s a simple threshold prayer for entering and leaving your home:

Here’s “The Blessing of the New Year,” a prayer that is as appropriate for each new day as it is for a new year:

You can lean on the tradition of the Carmina for your threshold prayers, or use others. Maybe you’ll recite the Lord’s Prayer each night before you go to sleep. Or maybe you’ll say St. Patrick’s Breastplate before you get out of the car at work. There are endless options of what to pray, but the power is in making the space to pray.

Prompt

Each transition is an opportunity to stop and make space in your attention for God to speak. Perhaps the most helpful aspect of threshold prayers is how they make transitions into prompts. What if every time you move from inside to outside, you prayed a short prayer?

It can be helpful to use visual symbols as a way to prompt our prayer. You could hang a quote or scripture above your door. You could place a small icon on your desk to pray with as you begin and end your workday.

Amen.

---

Comment below:

• What transition in your life right now feels most significant?

• What doorway or threshold in your daily life could become a place of prayer?

• Where do you sense God inviting you to cross a new threshold?

If this stirred something in you, share it with a friend who’s craving a deeper way to pray:

To receive more posts like this and join the community, subscribe now:

A Related Practice:

Grace and peace.

-gb