An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

by Barbara Brown Taylor

The difficulty, Simone Weil says, is to look upon them with love. Succeed at that, and you can be sure that what you love is Real, leading you deeper into the More that is your heart’s desire.

There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.

I had been teaching world religions for several years before I realized how many of them grew out of suffering.

His death on a Roman cross became both the epitome of human suffering and the proof that even suffering such as that could not force one chosen by God to leave the path of love.

Pain is provocative. Pain pushes people to the edge,

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.

the spikes in your pain bear some relationship to the leaps in your growth.

These are not the ways you would have chosen to become more than you were, but they worked. 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 makes theologians of us all. If you have spent even one night in real physical pain, then you know what that can do to your faith in God, not to mention your faith in your own ability to manage your life.

I found myself turning away from the God in charge of pain removal toward the God who had stayed with me through the pain no matter what I said.

The pain had not only changed the way I prayed. It had also changed my ideas about the One to whom I prayed.

Pain is one of the fastest routes to a no-frills encounter with the Holy, and yet the majority of us do everything in our power to avoid it.

Later, I learned that it is often harder to sit with someone in pain than it is to feel pain yourself.

One was that after a while there is no reason to talk about it. When pain is as ubiquitous as air, why comment on it? Better to go where the pain leads, down to the ground floor where all the real things are: real love, real sorrow, real thanks, real fear.

The second thing I learned is that there is a difference between pain and suffering, which I have used as synonymous until now.

Pain happens in the flesh. Suffering, on the other hand, happens in the mind.

It is difficult to bear or even to be near either one without entertaining grave questions about divine justice. Theodicy is the oldest religious question in the book:

If anyone has ever lacked the words to lodge a fluent complaint against the Almighty, the script is right there in the Bible. Job is one of pain’s most eloquent poets.

As painful as it is, pain cannot be communicated except by approximation, which means that any description of pain requires imagination.

“Why me?” That is all Job wants to know.

People who live with chronic pain usually know more about this than those who may reasonably look forward to feeling better soon. To live with pain on a daily basis is to be involved in a high-maintenance relationship. To make peace with the pain can require as much energy as fighting it. Things you once did without thinking—rising, dressing, eating, walking—now take concerted effort, if not paid help. Who is this person who cannot do such simple things? Who is this person who cannot help anyone, not even herself?

One night of real pain is enough to strip away your illusions about how strong you are, how brave, how patient and faithful.

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. Your virtues can become as abstract as algebra, your beliefs as porous as clouds.

When everything begins falling apart for Job, so does his sense of reality.

Without an answer, his life is meaningless.

Job should just go ahead, say he is sorry, and let God apply the repentance wherever it is due.

As ancient as these arguments are, they are as existential as they are theological.

The sad hole in this logic is the illusion that pain can be controlled—if not by the self, then by the love or manipulation of some power greater than the self.

Job turns from his friends, who in any case are more invested in defending God than they are in defending him.

“This longing you express is the return message,”

The enormity of his pain has made him huge in his own eyes, so that he suffers not only from his losses and from the silence of God but also from the self-centeredness that comes naturally to those in great pain.

Pain can propel the hurting self to the center of the universe.

Job is not God. His pain does not set him apart from other living creatures. If anything, it secures his communion with them. God cares enough about Job to show him things no human has ever seen, but this does not place Job at the center of God’s universe. God has other things to do, some of them quite important. Job may watch, but only if he keeps quiet.

The dust and ashes are for burying that smaller life, beloved as it was, and stepping into the larger life he has just seen in God’s face.

Like him, they have given up asking the question of why bad things happen to good people. They know that the real question is when. What do you do when pain and its attendant suffering finally show up at your door? How can breakdown become breakthrough? How does a love dog moan for its master?

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.

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.

Generosity seems to help.

When Pat could no longer rise from her bed, she asked for her jewelry box to be set beside her.

She worked hard to give everything away before she died, but people kept bringing her new things to replace those she had dispatched.

Rituals seem to help too.

Paying attention also helps: just that, just paying attention to the pain.

Rumi said that it lops off the branches of indifference.

Whatever else it does, pain offers an experience of being human that is as elemental as birth, orgasm, love, and death. Because it is so real, pain is an available antidote to unreality—

Not to put too fine a point on it, 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.

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 best preparation for a life of prayer is to become more intensely human.

To say I love God but I do not pray much is like saying I love life but I do not breathe much. The only way I have found to survive my shame is to come at the problem from both sides, exploring two distinct possibilities: 1) that prayer is more than my idea of prayer and 2) that some of what I actually do in my life may constitute genuine prayer.

The first is Brother David Steindl-Rast, an Austrian Benedictine who joined a monastery in New York while I was still in diapers. Years later he wrote a book called gratefulness, the heart of prayer,

Wake up!