I don’t believe in the supernatural.
I don’t believe in angels or miracles or a God who parts seas or opens graves. But I do believe in the natural world—its rhythm, its beauty, its precision. I believe in the turning of seasons, in breath and fire, in grief and renewal. And I believe in liturgy—not as divine command, but as human poetry. Not as magic, but as memory and motion and shape.
I am an agnostic who returns to church—not for answers, but for rhythm. For the quiet structure of the year. For the deep breath of Advent. The long, aching fast of Lent. The darkness of Good Friday. The hush of Holy Saturday. The soft morning light of Easter, whether or not anyone rose from the dead.
The church, at its best, does not demand belief. It invites attention. It teaches presence.
That’s why I’ve always been drawn to thresholds. They are not declarations. They are not final. They are the in-between spaces, the narrowings that make you pause. The place where the outside is not quite inside, and the inside still holds the echo of the world. Sacred architecture is built around these moments: the font at the entrance, the nave that holds you, the chancel that rises, the altar rail that draws a line—not to keep you out, but to help you notice the crossing.
“The threshold,” John O’Donohue once wrote, “is the place of expectation.” In liturgical churches, that expectation is built into the stones. You move through the space slowly, almost by design. You don’t walk into mystery—you arrive there one doorway at a time.
And time itself is a threshold. The liturgical calendar doesn’t operate on efficiency. It moves in cycles. Not toward productivity, but toward depth. Each season asks something of you. Not belief, but presence. It invites you to inhabit time differently. To mark grief and hope not as abstractions, but as returns. In this way, I’ve come to trust the calendar more than many doctrines. It has held me through years when belief was not possible—but ritual still was.
Recently, I spent time with Threshold Blue, a painting by Eldon Underhill. I hadn’t planned to find it. It found me. A quiet field of saturated blue, interrupted by a single portal—gold-edged, streaked in red. It offered no explanations. It didn’t speak of what lay beyond. It simply stood. Waiting. Like a doorway in a church. Like the pause before a prayer you no longer know how to say.
As I looked at it, I heard Bach’s Sinfonia from Cantata No. 156, “I Stand at the Threshold.” A melody that circles rather than climbs. It doesn’t crescendo. It breathes. It lingers in the space before commitment. It waits—like someone with their hand on the frame, not quite ready to step through.
This is what liturgy has become for me. Not a doorway to heaven, but a rhythm here on earth. A structure that honors mystery without pretending to solve it. A place where story matters—not because it is factual, but because it is human. I do not believe the Gospels are literal history. But I believe in the shape of their grief. Their longing. Their slowness. Their unexpected kindness. Their deep understanding of what it means to wait, to weep, to begin again.
“There is always one moment,” wrote Jeanette Winterson, “when the door opens and lets the future in.” I think the liturgical year opens that door again and again. It doesn’t ask me to walk through with certainty. It just says: Stand here awhile. See what returns.
So I do.
I don’t kneel because I think God is watching. I kneel because it teaches my body stillness. I light candles not because I expect intervention—but because something in me craves the flicker of small, steady hope. I cross the threshold not to escape the world, but to re-enter it differently.
That, to me, is sacred enough.
I may never believe in resurrection. But I believe in returning. In rhythm. In crossing and recrossing the thin places where time softens and we remember how to be human again.
That’s holy.
That’s mine.