An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

by Barbara Brown Taylor

One remedy for my condition is to pay attention

to them when I can, even when they are in my way.

Just for a moment, I look for the human being instead...

Every one of these people has come from somewhere and is going somewhere, the same way I am.

Every one of them is dealing with something, the same way I am. We are breathing the same air, for this little time at least. Sometimes I say the Lord’s Prayer under my breath while I look from one of them to the next, but this is optional. Paying attention to them has already shifted my equilibrium. For all I know, one of them is practicing reverence on me.

So is the laying on of hands, the anointing of the sick, and the bathing of the dead. If you have ever done any of these things, then you know that it is just about impossible to do them without suffering a sudden onset of reverence.

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

Reverence can be a pain.

As painful as reverence can sometimes be, it can also heal.

The practice of paying attention is as simple as looking twice at people and things you might just as easily ignore.

The practice of paying attention offers no quick fix for such weariness, with guaranteed results printed on the side. Instead, it is one way into a different way of life, full of treasure for those who are willing to pay attention to exactly where they are.

Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love. Remain in this, and you will know more of the same. But you will never know different, without end.” 7

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

Like all the other practices in this book, paying attention requires no equipment, no special clothes, no greens fees or personal trainers. You do not even have to be in particularly good shape. All you need is a body on this earth, willing to notice where it is, trusting that even something as small as a hazelnut can become an altar in this world.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of too much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

I have no defense for this largely frivolous list except that every job I have ever worked has brought me into contact with a crowd of people I might never have discovered any other way. Every job has required me to learn things that have opened up whole new dimensions of reality to me. Every job has revealed some ability I did not know I had, just as it has exposed some clumsiness I was pretty sure I had.

While I was a hospital chaplain I discovered that the sicker people were, the more they forgave my ineptness.

Earlier in my life, I thought there was one particular thing I was supposed to do with my life. I thought that God had a purpose for me and my main job was to discover what it was.

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.”

“Do anything that pleases you,” the voice in my head said again, “and belong to me.”

it was not what I did but how I did it

If I wanted a life of meaning, then I was going to have to apply the purpose for myself.

Every one of these tools gave me ample opportunity to choose kindness over meanness. Every one of them offered me the chance to recognize the divine in human form, inviting me out of myself long enough to engage someone whose fears, wants, loves, and needs were at least as important as my own.

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. Not everyone can teach school or cure illness. Plenty of us do not get the kind of work we want, and plenty more can find it difficult to stay focused on the meaning of what we are doing.

In Buddhist teaching, right livelihood is one of the flagstones on the Noble Eightfold Path.

The Indian philosophy from which Buddhism sprang includes the notion of karma yoga—literally, the work path to God—one of the many paths human beings have found that lead them deeper into the divine.

Someone else told me that Mother Teresa was not a pleasant person, which helped keep volunteers focused on what they were doing instead of on her.

Karma yogis approach their work as spiritual practice, whether it is something as menial as spinning thread or something as exalted as running a hospice.

Work connects us to other people.

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

Work even connects solitary workers to other people. The writer sitting all alone in her room labors to choose exactly the right words for people she will never see.

No work is too small to play a part in the work of creation.

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.

While it is sometimes possible to turn your love into your work—especially if you can figure out how to live on less—that is not always the best idea.

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.

In my case, that knowledge helped me take risks I might not otherwise have taken. It also reminded me that while my chosen vocation gave me a really good job in the divine work of creation, it remained a subset of a larger vocation, which was the job of loving God and neighbor as myself. Over the years I have come to think of this as the vocation of becoming fully human.

become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good.

It means receiving the human condition as blessing and not curse, in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality.

“The glory of God is a human being fully alive,”

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.

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.

I no longer call such tasks housework. I call them the domestic arts, paying attention to all the ways they return me to my senses.

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.

God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by subtracting.

Yes is one of those words capable of changing a life through the utterance of a single syllable.

Saying yes is how you enter into relationship. It is how you walk through the door into a new room. It is how you create the future.

Or maybe you are one of those people who has to hide the fact that you are not all that busy, since being busy is how our culture measures worth.

Effective people are busy people. Religious people are busy people. For millions and millions of people, busy-ness is The Way of Life.

And there was evening and there was morning, the seventh day.