An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

by Barbara Brown Taylor

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.

“Remember, I am with you,” God said to him. “I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”

wondered how I had forgotten that the whole world is the House of God.

We wanted a deeper sense of purpose. We wanted a stronger sense of God’s presence. We wanted more reliable ways both to seek and to stay in that presence—

way most of us knew to get that was to spend more time in church.

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.

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.

the Bible

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.

am a guest here, charged with serving other guests—even those who present themselves as my enemies. I am allowed to resist them, but as long as I trust in one God who made us all, I cannot act as if they are no kin to me. There is only one House.

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—

According to the Talmud, every blade of grass has its own angel bending over it, whispering, “Grow, grow.”

reverence in a human life: paying attention, taking care, respecting things that can kill you, making the passage from fear to awe.

“worship is not always reverent; even the best forms of worship may be practiced without feeling (and therefore without reverence), and some forms of worship seem downright vicious.”

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

Georgia O’Keeffe,

“In a way, nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small, we haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.” 3

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

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it,” says Shug Avery, one of the wise women in Alice Walker’s book The Color Purple.

Simone Weil

Waiting for God.

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

life, with half a heart. As painful as reverence can sometimes be, it can also heal.

“What, do you wish to know your Lord’s meaning in this thing? 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

physical attraction—

for God.

God does not often enter the library of the soul with a ghost key and start reading psalms. God is much more likely to head straight to the bedroom.

Each of us has not only a set temperature but also a kinetic energy about us, a distinctive way of being physical that tells others more about us than anything we say.

“It is easier to lie with the lips than with the body,” goes an old proverb,

Where Christians are concerned, this leaves us in the peculiar position of being followers of the Word Made Flesh who neglect our own flesh or—worse—who treat our bodies with shame and scorn.

not possible to trust that God loved all of me, including my body, without also trusting that God loved all bodies everywhere.

we all wore skin. We all had breath and beating hearts. Most of us had wept,

impossible to increase the reverence I show mine without also increasing the reverence I show yours.

Wearing my skin is not a solitary practice but one that brings me into communion with all these other embodied souls. It is what we have most in common with one another.

called to honor the bodies of our neighbors as we honor our own.

Read from the perspective of the body, his ministry was about encountering those whose flesh was discounted by the world in which they lived.

DEEP SUFFERING makes theologians of us all.

love someone who is suffering is to learn the visceral definition of pathetic: 1) affecting or exciting emotion, especially the tender emotions, as pity or sorrow; 2) so inadequate as to be laughable or contemptible.

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.

Christianity is to have one’s body shaped, one’s habits determined, in such a way that the worship of God is unavoidable.”

We need the practice of incarnation, by which God saves the lives of those whose intellectual assent has turned as dry as dust, who have run frighteningly low on the bread of life, who are dying to know more God in their bodies. Not more about God. More God.

there are times when dancing on tables is the most authentic prayer in reach,

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. © Hope Publishing

hymn writer is Brian Wren,

All I know is that God was there, in the flesh, and that no one who saw it will ever forget

Divine Spirit took them further and everything was made new: