An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

by Barbara Brown Taylor

longing—for more meaning, more feeling, more connection, more life. When

when they visit the places where such knowledge is supposed to be found, they often find the rituals hollow and the language antique.

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.

“Come tell us what is saving your life now,”

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.

Each trusts that doing something is at least as valuable

as reading books about it, thinking about it, or sitting around talking about it.

that faith is a way of life.

To put it another way, my hope is that reading them will help you recognize some of the altars in this world—ordinary-looking places where human beings have met and may continue to meet up with the divine More that they

Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it.

VISION

All together, they announced that something significant had happened in that place. I was not the first person to be affected by it. Whoever had come

Reminds me of thin places

The first time I read Jacob’s story in the Bible, I knew it was true whether it ever happened or not.

woke while God’s breath was still stirring the air,

forgotten that the whole world is the House of God. Who had persuaded me that God preferred four walls and a roof to wide-open spaces? When had I made the subtle switch myself, becoming

With these people I learned how hard it was to do something as simple as loving our urban

neighbors a fraction as much as we loved our true-blue selves.

I encountered God in all of those places, which may explain why I began to spend more time in churches than I did in the wide, wide world.

We wanted More. We wanted a deeper sense of purpose. We wanted a stronger sense of God’s presence. We wanted more reliable ways both to seek and to stay in

that presence—not for an hour on Sunday morning or Wednesday afternoon but for as much time as we could stand.

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.

Somewhere along the line we bought—or were sold—the idea that God is chiefly interested in religion. We believed that God’s home was the church, that God’s people knew who they

were, and that the world was a barren place full of lost souls in need of all the help they could get. Plenty of us seized on those ideas because they offered us meaning. Believing them gave us purpose and

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.

What if God can drop a ladder absolutely anywhere, with no regard for the religious standards

“Thou Before Whom All Words Recoil.”

With a modicum of generosity, we can all pitch what we have on the fire and watch for the More to flame up. In the morning, when we wake up around a circle of glowing coals with warm stone pillows under our

heads, there is always a chance that one of us will sit up and say, “Surely the LORD is present in this place, and I did not know it!”

God stayed on the move.

The tent suited God just fine for hundreds of years. It suited God so well, in fact, that when King David proposed giving God a permanent

where people of faith meet to say their prayers, because saying them together reminds them of who they are better than saying them

alone. This is good, and all good things cast shadows. 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? Plus, what happens to the rest of the world when we

build four wa...

the Bible, even trees can clap their hands. Francis of Assisi loved singing hymns with his brothers and sisters—who included not only Brother Bernard and Sister Clare, but also Brother Sun and Sister Moon.

Francis had no

discretion. He did not know where to draw the line between the church and the world. For this reason among others, Francis is remembered as a saint.

Building it together gave people who were formerly invisible to each other meaning, purpose, and worth.

Francis’s church did not stand as a shelter from the world; it stood as a reminder that the whole world was God’s House. I knew that when I was young, and then I forgot.

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.

In the same way that the church was holier than the world, so was the spirit holier than the flesh. God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, but if the world had not been such a rotten place then that

Son need not have died. From many of those same churches I learned how important it was to love God and my neighbor as myself, to share what I had with those who had less, and to stand ready to lay down my life for my friends. I rose to those teachings like a seedling to the sun. They tapped my

All I had to do was trust the God of the church more than I trusted the gods of the world, living the kind of in-but-not-of-the-world life that announced where my true allegiance lay.

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

but the evidence is there. People encounter God under shady oak trees, on riverbanks, at the tops of mountains, and in long stretches of

barren wilderness. God shows up in whirlwinds, starry skies, burning bushes, and perfect strangers.

Whoever wrote this stuff believed that people could learn as much about the ways of God from paying attention to the world as they could from paying attention to scripture. What is true

falling to the ground as they can from reciting the books of the Bible in order. They can learn as much from a love affair or a wildflower as they can from knowing the Ten Commandments by heart. This is wonderful news. I do not have to choose between the

even those who present themselves as my enemies. I am allowed to resist them, but as long as I trust