An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

by Barbara Brown Taylor

God decided to visit Jacob right where he was, though Jacob had not been right about anything so far and never would be.

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

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

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.

If you do not start choosing to get lost in some fairly low-risk ways, then how will you ever manage when one of life’s big winds knocks you clean off your course?

Popular religion focuses so hard on spiritual success that most of us do not know the first thing about the spiritual fruits of failure.

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.

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.

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

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. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity.

On one side of the paper, list all of the things you know give you life that you never take time to do. Then, on the other side, make a list of all the reasons why you think it is impossible for you to do those things. That is all there is to it.

feeling pain is something else that can be handled in a variety of ways. I can try to avoid pain. I can deny pain. I can numb it and I can fight it. Or I can decide to engage pain when it comes to me, giving it my full attention so that it can teach me what I need to know about the Really Real.

Pain burned up the cushions you used to keep from hitting bottom. Pain popped your clutch and shot you into the next gear. Pain landed you flat in bed, giving you time to notice things you never slowed down enough to notice before.

Pain happens in the flesh. Suffering, on the other hand, happens in the mind. The mind decides what pain means and whether it is deserved. The mind notices who comes to visit and who does not. The mind remembers how good things used to be and are not likely to be again. The mind makes judgments, measures loss, takes blame, and assigns guilt.

Here, then, is another feature of pain, including the pain of suffering. At its worst, it can erase most of what you thought you knew about yourself. People who live with chronic pain usually know more about this than those who may reasonably look forward to feeling better soon.

Pain is so real that less-real things like who you thought you were and how you meant to act can vanish like drops of water flung on a hot stove.

Job suffers from God’s silence, which hurts him worse than his boils, worse than his poverty, worse even than the death of his children. Without an answer, his life is meaningless. How does meaninglessness feel? It is like falling through outer space without an oxygen mask on.

This is how faith looks, sometimes: a blunt refusal to stop speaking into the divine silence.

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

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.

I have seen pain twist people and those who love them into exhausted rags with all the hope squeezed out of them. I have also seen people in whom pain seems to have burned away everything extra, everything trivial, everything petty and less than noble, until they have become see-through with light.

Paying attention also helps: just that, just paying attention to the pain. Pain can hurt so badly that it begs a reason, causing people to drum up all sorts of guilt and debt to go with it. Even those who may be on the right track will never get the proportions right, so I wish they would just give it up. Better they should stop doing the math and take a look around, since they may never see as clearly as they do when pain clears their sight.

the light was my life and I knew it. Paying attention to it, I lost my will to control it. Watching it, I became patient. Letting it be, I became well.

Prayer, according to Brother David, is waking up to the presence of God no matter where I am or what I am doing. When I am fully alert to whatever or whoever is right in front of me; when I am electrically aware of the tremendous gift of being alive; when I am able to give myself wholly to the moment I am in, then I am in prayer. 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.

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

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.

No one ever taught them how to hold still enough long enough for the shy deer-soul inside of them to step into the clearing and speak.

All of these visits have aided my sense that there are real things I can do, both in my body and in my mind, to put myself in the presence of God. God is not obliged to show up, but if God does, then I will be ready.

No one’s spiritual practice is exactly like anyone else’s. Life meets each of us where we need to be met, leading us to the doors with our names on them.

To learn to look with compassion on everything that is; to see past the terrifying demons outside to the bawling hearts within; to make the first move toward the other, however many times it takes to get close; to open your arms to what is instead of waiting until it is what it should be; to surrender the justice of your own cause for mercy; to surrender the priority of your own safety for love—this is to land at God’s breast.

Anyone can ask and anyone can bless, whether anyone has authorized you to do it or not. All I am saying is that the world needs you to do this, because there is a real shortage of people willing to kneel wherever they are and recognize the holiness holding its sometimes bony, often tender, always life-giving hand above their heads. That we are able to bless one another at all is evidence that we have been blessed, whether we can remember when or not. That we are willing to bless one another is miracle enough to stagger the very stars.