An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

by Barbara Brown Taylor

The last place most people look is right under their feet, in the everyday activities, accidents, and encounters of their lives.

All we lack is the willingness to imagine that we already have everything we need. The only thing missing is our consent to be where we are.

My life depends on engaging the most ordinary physical activities with the most exquisite attention I can give them.

What is saving my life now is becoming more fully human, trusting that there is no way to God apart from real life in the real world.

In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life.

the whole world is the House of God.

We wanted a deeper sense of purpose. We wanted a stronger sense of God’s presence.

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.

Without one designated place to make their offerings, people were free to see the whole world as an altar.

He read the world as reverently as he read the Bible.

There is only one House. Human beings will either learn to live in it together or we will not survive to hear its sigh of relief when our numbered days are done.

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.

Wisdom atrophies if it is not walked on a regular basis.

My only part is to decide how I will respond,

Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.

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,

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

I have an easier time loving humankind than I do loving particular human beings.

giving you something so important to do that you are entirely captured by the present moment for once.

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

The practice of paying attention is as simple as looking twice at people and things you might just as easily ignore.

He came back wearing skin. He did not leave his body behind.

I generally decide that it is time to do a better job of wearing my skin with gratitude instead of loathing.

Our bodies have shaped our views of the world, just as the world has shaped our views of our bodies.

I understood was that it was not possible to trust that God loved all of me, including my body, without also trusting that God loved all bodies everywhere.

Wearing my skin is not a solitary practice but one that brings me into communion with all these other embodied souls.

To spend one night in real pain is to discover depths of reality that are roped off while everything is going fine.

The daily practice of incarnation—of being in the body with full confidence that God speaks the language of flesh—is to discover a pedagogy that is as old as the gospels.

After he was gone, they would still have God’s Word, but that Word was going to need some new flesh.

I do not recall ever being told that my flesh is good in church, or that God takes pleasure in it. Yet this is the central claim of the incarnation—that God trusted flesh and blood to bring divine love to earth.

Do we dismiss the body’s wisdom because it does not use words? The practice of wearing skin is so obvious that almost no one engages it as spiritual practice, yet here is a place to begin: with tears, aches, moans, gooseflesh, heat. The body knows—not just the individual body, but the cathedral we make when we bend our bodies together over one as good as dead. Doing that, we act out the one thing we know for sure: it is God’s will that these bones live.

Spiritual practices are not like this. The only promise they make is to teach those who engage in them what those practitioners need to know—about being human, about being human with other people, about being human in creation, about being human before God.

Things like that can happen when you give your mind a time-out so your body can embark on the journey.

When your mind wanders, ride your breath back to the present moment.

SOMETIMES WE DO NOT KNOW what we know until it comes to us through the soles of our feet,

God loves bodies. I mean that in some way that defies all understanding, God means to welcome risen bodies and not just disembodied souls to heaven’s banquet table.

The body is a great focuser, whether the means is pain or pleasure. The body is a great reminder of where we came from and where we are going, on the one sacred journey that we all make whether we mean to or not.

Because he was moving slowly, they came into focus for him, just as he came into focus for them.

In my life, I have lost my way more times than I can count. I have set out to be married and ended up divorced. I have set out to be healthy and ended up sick. I have set out to live in New England and ended up in Georgia. When I was thirty, I set out to be a parish priest, planning to spend the rest of my life caring for souls in any congregation that would have me. Almost thirty years later, I teach school.

Even if the odds were against you, there is something holy in this moment of knowing just how perishable you are. It is part of the truth about what it means to be human, however hard most of us work not to know that.

To lie flat on the ground with the breath knocked out of you is to find a solid resting place. This is as low as you can go. You told yourself you would die if it ever came to this, but here you are. You cannot help yourself and yet you live.

To receive the hospitality of strangers changed me far more than providing it ever did.

The point is to give up on the sufficiency of your own resources. The point is to admit that you are lost, and maybe even to allow that you are in no hurry to be found.

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.

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

Liking to be alone can be interpreted as a judgment on other people’s company. Liking to be quiet can be construed as aloofness.

The deeper reason they needed one another was to save them from the temptation of believing in their own self-sufficiency.

At the very least, most of us need someone to tell our stories to. At a deeper level, most of us need someone to help us forget ourselves, a little or a lot.

The body moves by instinct instead of thought. Awareness blooms, as the individual self escapes its confines to become part of something bigger than the self.

Abbot Pastor, one of the most often quoted Desert Fathers, once said, “If you have a chest full of clothing, and leave it for a long time, the clothing will rot inside it. It is the same with the thoughts in our heart. If we do not carry them out by physical action, after a long while they will spoil and turn bad.”