An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

by Barbara Brown Taylor

you shall love the stranger because the stranger shows you God.

The church was not a place but a people—

the degree to which we believe our faith is what makes us human is the same degree to which we will question the humanity of those who do not share our faith.

combative piety.

The issue was not the ritual but the relationships.

encountering another human being is as close to God as I may ever get—in the eye-to-eye thing, the person-to-person thing—which is where God’s Beloved has promised to show up.

This practice is not designed to place you or those you love in danger, although it may help you discover how dangerous your own fear can be. The assignment is to get over your self. The assignment is to love the God you did not make up with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and the second is like unto it: to love the neighbor you also did not make up as if that person were your own strange and particular self.

Do this, and the doing will teach you everything you need to know. Do this, and you will live.

Whatever I decided to do for a living, it was not what I did but how I did it that mattered.

Of course, they also gave me ample opportunity to act like a jerk, missing my purpose by a mile. Yet even this turned out to be helpful, since recognizing my jerkdom is how I remember that is not who I want to be.

work is a social reality as well as an individual one.

Your motive is to lose your self in your work, understanding that it is possible to stack cans of beans on a grocery store shelf with the consciousness of a spiritual master.

Kindness is not a bad religion, no matter what name you use for God.

To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else’s hourly failures to live up to divine standards.

God is revealed in humankind—not just in human form but also in human being.

successful people are busy people. Effective people are busy people.

Some busy people cannot even tell the difference between relaxation and narcolepsy, because the minute they sit down in a quiet place alone, they nod off.

“More.” One day each week, More God is the only thing on my list.

But to close restaurants, shut up amusement parks or clear the airwaves when Americans with money were trying to spend it that day was impossible.”

But in the seventh year the land shall have a sabbath of complete rest, a sabbath of the LORD:

It is hard to be a lone revolutionary,

Pines do not belong in the mountains. They should all move to Florida, where they can grow old in peace.

It was no longer enough for me to be aware of my own bodily distress. Other lives depended on my awareness of their distress as well.

Long for the light you cannot procure for yourself, and feel your heart swell with gratitude—every single morning—when the sun comes up.

I choose to labor, of course, which sets me apart from those who have no such choice.

God made a mud-baby, a dirt-person, a dust-creature.

choose the work, and it becomes your spiritual practice.

Pain strips away all the illusions required to maintain the status quo. Pain begs for change, and when those in its grip find no release on earth, plenty of them look to heaven—

Pain burned up the cushions you used to keep from hitting bottom.

Suffering, on the other hand, happens in the mind.

Apparently they too recognized that an uncensored account of the depth of human pain and suffering is more to be valued than any correct doctrinal answer to it.

The sad hole in this logic is the illusion that pain can be controlled—if not by the self, then by the love or manipulation of some power greater than the self.

While Job’s suffering may be extraordinary, his self-absorption is not. Pain can propel the hurting self to the center of the universe.

No one who is not in pain is allowed to give advice to someone who is. The only reliable wisdom about pain comes from the mouths of those who suffer it, which is why it is so important to listen to them.

Prayer, according to Brother David, is waking up to the presence of God no matter where I am or what I am doing.

Prayer is happening, and it is not necessarily something that I am doing. God is happening, and I am lucky enough to know that I am in The Midst.

Most of the people I know hunger for some evidence that God hears their prayers. Plenty of them would settle for a divine “no” as long as it was a clear one.

So I tell God what I want and I trust God to sort it out.” Maybe that is what Jesus meant about coming to God like a child.

Are you still waiting for God to answer you, or is your life the answer you have been seeking, hiding in plain view?

whether the market will recover.

My hope is that if I can practice saying thank you now, when I still approve of most of what is happening to me, then perhaps that practice will have become habit by the time I do not like much of anything that is happening to me. The plan is to replace approval with gratitude. The plan is to take what is as God’s ongoing answer to me.

Not knowing the language turns out to be a kind of blessing. We can listen to the music without worrying about the words. We can let the prayers wash over us without analyzing their content.

Sitting on the floor has all kinds of virtues. In the first place, it is a great equalizer. When everyone is on the ground, no one’s seat is higher than anyone else’s.

They would rather jump off a high diving board than try to say something holy in front of a bunch of other people.

The key to blessing things is to receive their blessing.

how often we are embarrassed to do and say the things that really affect us.

I am not sure that you have to believe in God to pronounce a blessing.

Practice blessing something simply because it exists alongside you and find out what your mind does with that exercise.