An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

by Barbara Brown Taylor

seven different kinds of prayers: adoration, praise, thanksgiving, penitence, oblation, intercession, and petition.

The categories in the prayer book were for sharpening my intention, not for winning God’s attention.

Prayer, according to Brother David, is waking up to the presence of God no matter where I am or what I am doing. When I am fully alert to whatever or whoever is right in front of me; when I am electrically aware of the tremendous gift of being alive; when I am able to give myself wholly to the moment I am in, then I am in prayer. Prayer is happening, and it is not necessarily something that I am doing. God is happening, and I am lucky enough to know that I am in The Midst.

But he did do it, and his abbot did publish it, in a volume called The Practice of the Presence of God, which has become a spiritual classic.

he resolved to give himself wholly to God no matter what he was doing, “and out of love for Him to renounce everything that was not Himself.” 3

He would have understood what Brother David meant when he wrote, “pain is a small price to pay for freedom from self-deception.”

The only way to answer such questions is to engage a long-term habit of prayer. The virtue of such practice is that the questions change as the practice deepens, and no two people travel the exact same route.

“Honestly,” he said, “I don’t think it through, not now. I tell God what I want. I’m not smart enough or strong enough to do anything else, and besides, there’s no time. So I tell God what I want and I trust God to sort it out.”

The problem, I think, is that divine response to prayer is one of those beauties that remain in the eye of the beholder.

The meaning we give to what happens in our lives is our final, inviolable freedom. Only you can say whether God answered you. If you have any sense, you will ask someone with more experience than you to help you decide what the answer means, but even then the choice is yours.

WAITING IS CERTAINLY a kind of prayer, especially if you can stand howling, wide-open spaces.

Waiting, I found speechless intimacy with other people who were living in such wide-open spaces themselves. We lived in a whole different world from those who thought they were fine.

Our lives are inextricably bound up with the lives of other people. So much depends on things we can never control. A butterfly beats its wings in Beijing, making it impossible to predict the weather in New York.

Even the decisions we make for ourselves seldom take us where we meant to go.

They have quashed all my illusions of control, leaving me with no alternative but to receive my life as an unmitigated gift.

am willing to thank God for my life even before I know how it turns out. This is brave talk, I know, while I can still pay the bills, walk without assistance, and talk someone into going to the movies with me.

The plan is to replace approval with gratitude. The plan is to take what is as God’s ongoing answer to me.

was not just in prayer; I was under prayer, entirely submerged in the act of surrendering my whole self to God.

All of these visits have aided my sense that there are real things I can do, both in my body and in my mind, to put myself in the presence of God. God is not obliged to show up, but if God does, then I will be ready.

The longer I practice prayer, the more I think it is something that is always happening, like a radio wave that carries music through the air whether I tune in to it or not.

No matter what life pitched at her, Mary did not duck. She endured a difficult pregnancy to bear a singular child, whom she loved reliably through all the years of his controversial life. When her son was cut down, she was there. When it came time to prepare his body, she was there. When he was not in his tomb, she was there. As much as I hate to presume on her reliability, I know she will remember the people whose names I have placed in the brass box, even when I forget.

Then comes a night when I am in deep need, deep fear, deep thanks, or deep want—either for myself or for someone I love—and I light every candle on the altar.

Prayer overtakes me there. I am utterly swamped by the presence of the Holy. I would bend my head to the ground if I could take my eyes off the beauty. As it is, I do not even know for sure if I am breathing. The altar is giving me more life than I know how to ask for. I can no longer tell the difference between need, fear, thanks, and want. In this light, I see how they are all facets of the same sparkler. I see how they are all faces of the same love. This answer to my prayer is so far beyond my doing that I cannot find the words to forswear my own input.

It is forbidden to taste of the pleasures of this world without a blessing.

think it is a big mistake to perpetuate the illusion that only certain people can bless things.

Yet there remain a great many people who excuse themselves when asked to pronounce a formal blessing. They are not qualified, they say.

I think that the best way to discover what pronouncing blessings is all about is to pronounce a few. The practice itself will teach you what you need to know.

To pronounce a blessing on something, it is important to see it as it is.

He calls them “The Sabbath Poems,” which is a good thing to call them since they are as full of reverence as any worship service.

Reading him, you come gradually to understand that the key to blessing things is knowing that they beat you to it. The key to blessing things is to receive their blessing. You do not always have to use the magic words, either. Sometimes it is enough to see the world through a tree’s eyes.

My point is how often we are embarrassed to do and say the things that really affect us.

In Hebrew, a blessing prayer is a brakha. Brakoth is the plural form of the word,

As many different brakoth as there are, they all start out this same way: “Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe.”

It may be enough to see the thing for what it is and pronounce it good. For most of us, that is as close to God as we will ever get anyway.

To participate in a house blessing, all you have to do is to care about the people who live there. You constitute a blessing simply by showing up.

Not many people know it, but both Martin Luther and Julian of Norwich did some of their best thinking on the toilet.

God has no hands but ours, no bread but the bread we bake, no prayers but the ones we make, whether we know what we are doing or not. When Christians speak of the mystery of the incarnation, this is what they mean: for reasons beyond anyone’s understanding, God has decided to be made known in flesh. Matter matters to God. The most ordinary things are drenched in divine possibility. Pronouncing blessings upon them is the least we can do.

The same is true of other people. The next time you are at the airport, try blessing the people sitting at the departure gate with you. Every one of them is dealing with something significant.

Pronounce a silent blessing and pay attention to what happens in the air between you and that other person, all those other people.

No one’s spiritual practice is exactly like anyone else’s. Life meets each of us where we need to be met, leading us to the doors with our names on them. Yet because we are human, we almost never go where no one has gone before.

The first piece of wisdom is that a blessing does not confer holiness. The holiness is already there, embedded in the very givenness of the thing.

Find out how much humility is required, followed by how much mercy.

In Jewish tradition, every blessing prayer begins by blessing God.

Rightly or not, they decide that given a choice between a blessing and a curse, a blessing will do more to improve air quality.

A second piece of wisdom about pronouncing blessings, directly related to the first, is that the practice requires you to ease up on holding the line between what is bad for you and what is good. Once you get into the blessing business, you give up thinking you are smart enough always to tell the difference between the two.

The blessing covers your ignorance and seeds your curiosity all at the same time. So this is what life has brought you! How will this change things? What can you make of this?

To pronounce a blessing on something is to see it from the divine perspective. To pronounce a blessing is to participate in God’s own initiative. To pronounce a blessing is to share God’s own audacity. This may be why blessing prayers make some people uncomfortable.

They did not need anyone to tell them that blessings confer meaning. They could feel it when a blessing landed on them, like warm oil poured on their crowns of their heads.

“I asked him to bless me,” Ed said. “I asked him to give me his blessing.”

THIS KIND OF blessing prayer is called a benediction. It comes at the end of something, to send people on their way. All I am saying is that anyone can do this.