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.

They would be happy for someone to teach them how to spend more time in the presence of this deeper reality, but 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.

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.

Bethel, House of God. At least that is what Jacob called the place where he encountered God—not on a gorgeous island but in a rocky wilderness—where he saw something that changed his life forever. The first time I read Jacob’s story in the Bible, I knew

Having woken up to God, he would never be able to go to sleep again, at least not to the divine presence that had promised to be with him whether he could see it or not.

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. The physical boundaries of those houses were clear. The communities in them were identified.

we did things together in those sacred spaces that we did nowhere else in our lives: we named babies, we buried the dead, we sang psalms, we praised God for our lives.

Still, some of us were not satisfied with our weekly or biweekly encounters with God. We wanted more than set worship services or church work could offer us.

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.

AS IMPORTANT AS IT IS to mark the places where we meet God, I worry about what happens when we build a house for God.

The people of God are not the only creatures capable of praising God, after all.

Francis could not have told you the difference between “the sacred” and “the secular”

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.

MY FIRST CHURCH was a field of broom grass behind my family’s house in Kansas, where I spent days in self-forgetfulness.

But what I think I remember is that I learned in church to fear the world, or at least to suspect

In the same way that the church was holier than the world, so was the spirit holier than the flesh.

As lovely, startling, or disturbing as that world may be, it is a world of appearances, not of truth—or so I was taught. Only the Bible contains the real truth, the truth that sets people free.

Fortunately, the Bible I set out to learn and love rewarded me with another way of approaching God, a way that trusts the union of spirit and flesh as much as it trusts the world to be a place of encounter with God.

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.

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.

To gain wisdom, you need flesh and blood, because wisdom involves bodies—and not just human bodies, but bird bodies, tree bodies, water bodies, and celestial bodies.

How does one learn to see and hear such angels?

As with Jacob, most of my visions of the divine have happened while I was busy doing something else. I did nothing to make them happen.

Or I can set a little altar, in the world or in my heart.

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

hazelnut,

It lasts and always will, because God loves it; and thus everything has being through the love of God.

Tears of Saint Lawrence,

All I knew was that my father could be trusted when he told me there was something I needed to see.

I learned reverence from my father. For him, it had nothing to do with religion and very little to do with God. I think it may have had something to do with his having been a soldier, since the exercise of reverence generally includes knowing your rank in the overall scheme of things.

Above all, it required close attention to the way things worked, including one’s own participation in their working or not working.

This ritual, among many others, introduced me to the practices that nourish reverence in a human life: paying attention, taking care, respecting things that

can kill you, making the passage from fear to awe.

According to the classical philosopher Paul Woodruff, reverence is the virtue that keeps people from trying to act like gods.

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. God certainly meets those criteria, but so do birth, death, sex, nature, truth, justice, and wisdom.

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.

Woodruff posts a number of cautions for those ready to draw a straight line between reverence and religion.

Reverence may take all kinds of forms, depending on what it is that awakens awe in you by reminding you of your true size.

The easiest practice of reverence I know is simply to sit down somewhere outside, preferably near a body of water, and pay attention for at least twenty minutes.

If someone walks by or speaks to you, you may find that your power of attentiveness extends to this person as well. Even if you do not know him, you may be able to see his soul too, the one he thinks he has so carefully covered up. There is something he is working on in his life, the same way you are working on something. Can you see it in his face? You are related, even if you do not know each other’s names.

No one has time for this, of course. No one has time to lie on the deck watching stars, or to wonder how one’s hand came to be, or to see the soul of a stranger walking by. Small wonder we are short on reverence.

The practice of paying attention really does take time. Most of us move so quickly that our surroundings become no more than the blurred scenery we fly past on our way to somewhere else.

If anything, these devices sustain the illusion that we might yet be gods—if only we could find some way to do more faster.

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

The bush required Moses to take a time-out,

What made him Moses was his willingness to turn aside.

“Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” 5

Reverence for creation comes fairly easily for most people. Reverence for other people presents more of a challenge, especially if those people’s lives happen to impinge upon your own.