An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

by Barbara Brown Taylor

I think I know what they mean by “religious.” It is the “spiritual” part that is harder to grasp. My guess is they do not use that word in reference to a formal set of beliefs, since that belongs on the religion side of the page. It may be the name for a longing—for more meaning, more feeling, more connection, more life. When I hear people talk about spirituality, that seems to be what they are describing.

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. My life depends on ignoring all touted distinctions between the secular and the sacred, the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul. 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.

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 worth. They gave us something noble to do in the midst of lives that might otherwise be invisible. Plus, there really are large swaths of the world filled with people in deep need of saving. 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.

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.

Reverence stands in awe of something—something that dwarfs the self, that allows human beings to sense the full extent of our limits—so that we can begin to see one another more reverently as well. 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,

Particular human beings rarely do things the way I think they should do them, and when they prevent me from doing what I think I should be doing, then I can run short on reverence for them.

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

I understand why people snort at thoughts like these. I have laughed the same kind of laugh when people start talking earnestly about things I would rather not talk about. Reverence can be a pain. It is a lot easier to make chicken salad if you have never been stuck behind a chicken truck. It is easier to order a cashmere sweater if you do not know about the Chinese goats. And yet, these doors open onto the divine as surely as showers of falling stars do. To open only the doors with stars on them while leaving shut the doors covered with chicken feathers is to live half a life, with half a heart.

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. Why else did Jesus spend his last night on earth teaching his disciples to wash feet and share supper? With all the conceptual truths in the universe at his disposal, he did not give them something to think about together when he was gone. Instead, he gave them concrete things to do—specific ways of being together in their bodies—that would go on teaching them what they needed to know when he was no longer around to teach them himself.

God does not come to us beyond the flesh but in the flesh, at the hands of a teacher who will not be spiritualized but who goes on trusting the embodied sacraments of bread, wine, water, and feet. “Do this,” he said—not believe this but do this—“in remembrance of me.”

Sometimes, when people ask me about my prayer life, I describe hanging laundry on the line. After a day of too much information about almost everything, there is such blessed relief in the weight of wet clothes, causing the wicker basket to creak as I carry it out to the clothesline. Every time I bend down to shake loose a piece of laundry, I smell the grass. I smell the sun. Above all, I smell clean laundry. This is something concrete that I have accomplished, a rarity in my brainy life of largely abstract accomplishments.

Good is the flesh that the Word has become, good is the birthing, the milk in the breast, good is the feeding, caressing and rest, good is the body for knowing the world, Good is the flesh that the Word has become. Good is the body for knowing the world, sensing the sunlight, the tug of the ground, feeling, perceiving, within and around, good is the body, from cradle to grave, Good is the flesh that the Word has become. Good is the body from cradle to grave, growing and ageing, arousing, impaired, happy in clothing or lovingly bared, good is the pleasure of God in our flesh. Good is the flesh that the Word has become. Good is the pleasure of God in our flesh, longing in all, as in Jesus, to dwell, glad of embracing, and tasting, and smell, good is the body, for good and for God, Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

SOMETIMES WE DO NOT KNOW what we know until it comes to us through the soles of our feet, the embrace of a tender lover, or the kindness of a stranger. Touching the truth with our minds alone is not enough. We are made to touch it with our bodies. I think this is why Christian tradition clings to the reality of resurrection, even when no one can explain it to anyone else’s satisfaction. The immortality of the soul is much easier to conceive than the resurrection of the body. What? You mean a stopped heart suddenly starts again? You mean a dead body gets up with a growling stomach? No, I mean 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 resurrection of the dead is the radical insistence that matter matters to God.

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.

In the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, there is a command that runs through Torah like a hymn refrain. There are many variations on it, given in very many contexts, but the basic gist of it is, “You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Those most likely to befriend strangers, in other words, are those who have been strangers themselves. The best way to grow empathy for those who are lost is to know what it means to be lost yourself.

In the Christian mystical tradition, one name for this phenomenon is divine union. It can happen all alone with God, but it can also happen with other people and sometimes even with trees. It is not achieved as much as it is given—the often fleeting but fully memorable gift of escaping the small self long enough to glimpse a wholeness more real than the most real brokenness. In the light of this wholeness, it can become impossible to make meaningful distinctions between God and other people, trees, or anything else in creation. Everything that exists, exists in this wholeness. Everything that lives, lives in this light. This is the one community that matters, the one toward which all others reach.

The wisdom of the Desert Fathers includes the wisdom that the hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self—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. This can be as frightening as it is liberating. It may be the only real spiritual discipline there is.

At its most basic level, the everyday practice of being with other people is the practice of loving the neighbor as the self. More intricately, it is the practice of coming face-to-face with another human being, preferably someone different enough to qualify as a capital “O” Other—and at least entertaining the possibility that this is one of the faces of God.

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.’”

WHERE ARTICLES OF BELIEF threaten to set people in opposition to one another, we may embody articles of peace.9 Where difference is demonized, we may host suppers with surprising guest lists. Where religious identity is wedded to political power, we may resist, although never by adopting the tactics of those in charge. We may test the premise that God uses the weak to confound the strong, as well as the promise that the God who made others different from us is revealed in them as well as us. “The supreme religious challenge,” says Rabbi Sacks, “is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image,” 10 for only then can we see past our own reflections in the mirror to the God we did not make up.

WHAT WE HAVE most in common is not religion but humanity. I learned this from my religion, which also teaches me that 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. Paradoxically, the point is not to see him. 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.

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.

Later, I would find the work of Martin Luther helpful in this regard. A monk who became convinced that no livelihood was dearer to the heart of God than any other, he left the monastery to proclaim the priesthood of all believers. Whatever our jobs in the world happen to be, Luther said, our mutual vocation is to love God and neighbor. “None of the things with which you deal daily are too trifling to tell you this incessantly,” he wrote, “if you are but willing to hear it; and there is no lack of such preaching, for you have as many preachers as there are transactions, commodities, tools and other implements in your house and estate, and they shout this to your face: ‘My dear, use me toward your neighbor as you would want him to act toward you with that which is his.’” 1

“Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working,” says the Bhagavad Gita.3 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.

Since some people consider being human a liability, and “fully” would only make things worse, I should perhaps explain what I mean. 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. It means living so that “I’m only human” does not become an excuse for anything. It means receiving the human condition as blessing and not curse, in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality.

When I ask people to tell me how Jesus could be both fully human and fully divine, they often describe a kind of laminating process, in which his humanity was encased in divine plastic. The last thing to occur to most of us is that to be fully one is to be fully the other. What is it about “fullness” that we do not understand? My advice is not to think about this too much, since thinking about it will not only make you crazy but will also take you out of the world where you can practice being fully human yourself. Jesus clearly thought this was the best plan. When people wanted him to tell them what God’s realm was like, he told them stories about their own lives. When people wanted him to tell them God’s truth about something, he asked them what they thought. With all kinds of opportunities to tell people what to think, he told them what to do instead. Wash feet. Give your stuff away. Share your food. Favor reprobates. Pray for those who are out to get you. Be the first to say, “I’m sorry.” For those who took him as their model, being fully human became a full-time job. It became a vocation in itself, no matter what they happened to do for a living.

ONE COMMON PROBLEM for people who believe that God has one particular job in mind for them is that it is almost never the job they are presently doing. This means that those who are busiest trying to figure out God’s purpose for their lives are often the least purposeful about the work they are already doing.

THE GREAT SWISS theologian Karl Barth once wrote, “A being is free only when it can determine and limit its activity.”

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. Just because the land and the livestock cannot hire lawyers does not mean they have not been violated. Their biblical rights are written down right there in the Bible, but other gods go on getting in the way.

Sabbath is the true God’s gift to those who wish to rest and to be free—and who are willing to guard those same gifts for every living thing in their vicinity as well. Remember the commandment? It is not just for you. It is for your children, your employees, your volunteer helpers, your hunting dogs, your plow horses, your fields, and your migrant workers. It does not matter in the least whether they believe in your God. You do, so they get the day off. Anyone who engages this practice discovers saving habits of work and rest that promise life not only for each of us individually but also for our families, our communities, our far-flung neighbors, our systems of justice, our human economies, and our planet.

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. That way, when our turn comes, the rest of us will not be clueless. We will recognize at least some of the territory and remember what those who went before us told us about what comes next.

There will always be people who run from every kind of pain and suffering, just as there will always be religions that promise to put them to sleep. For those willing to stay awake, pain remains a reliable altar in the world, a place to discover that a life can be as full of meaning as it is of hurt. The two have never canceled each other out and I doubt they ever will, at least not until each of us—or all of us together—find the way through.