An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

by Barbara Brown Taylor

The treasure we seek requires no lengthy expedition, no expensive equipment, no superior aptitude or special company. 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.

What is saving my life now is the conviction that there is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily experiences of human life on earth. 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.

We knew some things we could do to feel close to God inside the church, but after we stepped into the parking lot we lost that intimacy. The boundaries were not so clear out there. Community was not so easy to find.

That, at least, is how it looked to those of us who had forgotten that the whole world is the House of God.

The only reason to accept such a risk is because most of us need to hear what other people say before we decide what to say about those same things ourselves.

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?

Like all who write what they remember, I am inventing the truth. 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. The kissing of boys should stop at once, my new teachers told me, as should all other flirtations with the temptations of the flesh.

I rose to those teachings like a seedling to the sun. They tapped my secret wish to become gallant. They gave me important things to do. If they also drove a wedge between me and the world I so loved, then I do not remember noticing that at the time.

Yet I never entirely escaped the subtle teaching that the world of the flesh is not to be trusted.

What is true is what happens, even if what happens is not always right.

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

The practice of paying attention is as simple as looking twice at people and things you might just as easily ignore. To see takes time, like having a friend takes time.

Paying attention to it, she learned how God paid attention to her. Holding it, she learned how God held her.

For instance, I can say that I think it is important to pray naked in front of a full-length mirror sometimes, especially when you are full of loathing for your body.

Whether you are sick or well, lovely or irregular, there comes a time when it is vitally important for your spiritual health to drop your clothes, look in the mirror, and say, “Here I am. This is the body-like-no-other that my life has shaped. I live here. This is my soul’s address.” After you have taken a good look around, you may decide that there is a lot to be thankful for, all things considered.

No matter what I think of my body, I can still offer it to God to go on being useful to the world in ways both sublime and ridiculous. 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.

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.

When understanding finally came—not by reason but by faith—the first thing 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.

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.

Most of us spend so much time thinking about where we have been or where we are supposed to be going that we have a hard time recognizing where we actually are.

While none of these displacements was pleasant at first, I would not give a single one of them back. I have found things while I was lost that I might never have discovered if I had stayed on the path. I have lived through parts of life that no one in her right mind would ever willingly have chosen, finding enough overlooked treasure in them to outweigh my projected wages in the life I had planned.

The Bible is a great help to me in this practice, since it reminds me that God does some of God’s best work with people who are truly, seriously lost.

Faced with the solid reality of such loss, I know how to say thank you and mean it.

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.

The students who elect longer trips overseas come back changed for good. Having gotten lost in Dublin, Madrid, or Cairo, they come home both stronger at the edges and softer at the center.

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 great wisdom traditions of the world all recognize that the main impediment to living a life of meaning is being self-absorbed.

if you always do what you have always done, then you will always get what you have always got. Extreme measures are sometimes called for, and these measures sometimes even produce results.

to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it. All you have to do is recognize another you “out there”—your other self in the world—for whom you may care as instinctively as you care for yourself. To become that person, even for a moment, is to understand what it means to die to your self.

According to Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of Great Britain, “the Hebrew Bible in one verse commands, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ but in no fewer than 36 places commands us to ‘love the stranger.’” 6 Why should we do that? Because we have been strangers ourselves, the Bible says. Because if we have never been strangers, then that is because we have never left home. The people of Israel did leave home, repeatedly.

You shall love the stranger first of all because you know what it is to be a stranger yourself. Second of all, you shall love the stranger because the stranger shows you God.

Why should we love the stranger? Because God does.

WHERE ARTICLES OF BELIEF threaten to set people in opposition to one another, we may embody articles of peace.9

the God who made others different from us is revealed in them as well as us.

What better way for Christians to engage their commandment to love the neighbor than to learn what those neighbors hold most sacred?

WHAT WE HAVE most in common is not religion but humanity.

The point is to see the person standing right in front of me, who has no substitute, who can never be replaced, whose heart holds things for which there is no language, whose life is an unsolved mystery. The moment I turn that person into a character in my own story, the encounter is over. I have stopped being a human being and have become a fiction writer instead.

Then one night when my whole heart was open to hearing from God what I was supposed to do with my life, God said, “Anything that pleases you.” “What?” I said, resorting to words again. “What kind of an answer is that?” “Do anything that pleases you,” the voice in my head said again, “and belong to me.”

Whatever I decided to do for a living, it was not what I did but how I did it that mattered. God had suggested an overall purpose, but was not going to supply the particulars for me. If I wanted a life of meaning, then I was going to have to apply the purpose for myself.

People know when their gifts are being wasted, and this knowledge can eat away at the soul like a cancer. Call me a romantic, but I think most people want to be good for something. I think they want to do something that matters, to be part of something bigger than themselves, to give themselves to something that is meaningful instead of meaningless. And yet meaningful work is hard to come by.

Work connects us to other people.

Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.

Yet it is always possible that one’s true work in the world is not what one does for a living.

In a world where the paid work that people do does not always feed their hearts, it seems important to leave open the possibility that our vocations may turn out to be things we do for free.

At least part of the beauty of unpaid work is that we choose to do it. In the midst of lives driven largely by compulsion, the choice to take on more work simply because we love doing it is an act of liberation.

The point is to find something that feeds your sense of purpose, and to be willing to look low for that purpose as well as high.

SABBATH IS THE GREAT EQUALIZER, the great reminder that we do not live on this earth but in it, and that everything we do under the warming tent of this planet’s atmosphere affects all who are woven into this web with us.

Your worth has already been established, even when you are not working.