An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

by Barbara Brown Taylor

the whole world is the House of God.

The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do.

I have discovered that people who want to speak to me about God generally have an agenda.

their speech tends to serve as a means to their own ends. They have a clear idea about how I should respond to what they are saying. They have a clear destination in mind for me, and nine times out of ten it is not some place I want to go.

too much speech about God strikes me as ...

No matter how hard I try to say something true about God, the reality of God will eclipse my best words.

Do we build God a house so that we can choose when to go see God? Do we build God a house in lieu of having God stay at ours?

What happens to the people who never show up in our houses of God?

So I joined their church to find out, and quickly learned that my love of the world was misplaced. The church taught me that only God was worthy of my love, and that only the Bible could teach me about God. For the first time in my life, I was asked to choose between God and the world.

But what I think I remember is that I learned in church to fear the world, or at least to suspect it. I learned that my body was of the world and that my bodily shame was appropriate.

Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails.

Wise people do not have to be certain what they believe before they act. They are free to act, trusting that the practice itself will teach them what they need to know.

Reverence is a little like that. It is difficult to define, but you

know it when you feel it.

reverence is the virtue that keeps people from trying to act like gods.

reverence is the recognition of something greater than the self—something that is beyond human creation or control, that transcends full human understanding.

An irreverent soul who is unable to feel awe in the presence of things higher than the self is also unable to feel respect in the presence of things it sees as lower than the self,

The practice of paying attention really does take time.

Reverence requires a certain pace. It requires a willingness to take detours, even side trips, which are not part of the original plan.

Stop and smell the roses.

What made him Moses was his willingness to turn aside.

Human beings have a hard time regarding anything beautiful without wanting to devour it.

Regarded properly, anything can become a sacrament, by which I mean an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual connection.

ignore. To see takes time, like having a friend takes time. It is as simple as turning off the television to learn the song of a single bird.

At the very least, I can practice a little reverence right there in front of the mirror, taking some small credit for standing there unguarded for once. This is no small thing, in a culture so confused about the body that most Americans cannot separate the physical from the sexual.

I am not sure when Christian tradition lost confidence in the body, but I have some guesses. Although Jesus was a Jew, many of his earliest interpreters were Greeks, who divided body and soul in ways that he did not. Descartes did not help matters by opposing nature and reason in his philosophy. Then along came the Protestant Reformation, with its deep suspicion of physical pleasure, followed by Freud’s dark insights into human sexuality. Add to that the modern scientific reduction of the body to biological matter, overlaid by Victoria’s Secret ads, and it is small wonder that so many of us are uncomfortable in our flesh.

We would rather lock up our bodies than listen to what they have to say. Where Christians are concerned, this leaves us in the peculiar position of being followers of the Word Made Flesh who

neglect our own flesh or—worse—who treat our bodies with shame and scorn. I came late to the understanding that God loved all of me—not just my spirit but also my flesh. Like many young people raised in the fifties, I grew up with a lot of questions and unearned shame about my ripening body, which was not ripening in a way that matched any of the movie posters or Playboy magazines by which female beauty was measured in those days. Barbie dolls did not help.

While we might not have one other thing in common, we all wore skin. We all had breath and beating hearts. Most of us had wept, although not for the same reasons. Few of our bodies worked the way we wanted them to. The vast majority of us were afraid of dying.

One of the truer things about bodies is that it is just about impossible to increase the reverence I show mine without also increasing the reverence I show yours.

Read from the perspective of the body, his ministry was about encountering those whose flesh was discounted by the world in which they lived.

To hold a sleeping child in your arms can teach you more about the meaning of life than any ten books on the subject.

To lie in the yard at night looking up at the stars can grant you entrance into divine mysteries that elude you inside the house.

he did not give them something to think about together when he was gone. Instead, he gave them concrete things to do—specific ways of being together in their bodies—that would go on teaching them what they needed to know when he was no longer around to teach them himself.

So Jesus gave them things they could get their hands on, things that would require them to get close enough to touch one another.

Asia, Gaza, and Iraq, most of us could use a reminder that God does not come to us beyond the flesh but in the flesh,

“Do this,” he said—not believe this but do this—“in remembrance of me.”

Christianity “is not a set of beliefs or doctrines one believes in order to be a Christian,” he says, “but rather Christianity is to have one’s body shaped, one’s habits determined, in such a way that the worship of God is unavoidable.” 2 In our embodied life together, the words of our doctrines take on flesh.

We need the practice of incarnation, by which God saves the lives of those whose intellectual assent has turned as dry as dust, who have run frighteningly low on the bread of life, who are dying to know more God in their bodies.

Not more about God. More God.

I find myself rebelling against any religious definition of goodness that leaves the body behind.

God trusted flesh and blood to bring divine love to earth.

I keep my eyes open for opportunities to get slightly lost, so that I can gradually build the muscles necessary for radical trust.

Anything can become a spiritual practice once you are willing to approach it that way—once you let it bring you to your knees and show you what is real, including who you really are, who other people are, and how near God can be when you have lost your way.

Of course for this last to be true you have to be willing to recognize God in your neighbor.

The best way to grow empathy for those who are lost is to know what it means to be lost yourself.

However you choose to do it, the practice of getting lost is both valuable and undervalued, at least by the North American culture most of us know best.

The best preparation for a life of prayer is to become more intensely human.

The only way I have found to survive my shame is to come at the problem from both sides, exploring two distinct possibilities: 1) that prayer is more than my idea of prayer and 2) that some of what I actually do in my life may constitute genuine prayer.

there were seven different kinds of prayers: adoration, praise, thanksgiving, penitence, oblation, intercession, and petition.

prayer is not the same thing as prayers.