An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

by Barbara Brown Taylor

To detach the walking from the destination is in fact one of the best ways to recognize the altars you are passing right by all the time. Most of us spend so much time thinking about where we have been or where we are supposed to be going that we have a hard time recognizing where we actually are. When someone asks us where we want to be in our lives, the last thing that occurs to us is to look down at our feet and say, “Here, I guess, since this is where I am.”

labyrinth is a kind of maze. Laid out in a perfect circle with a curling path inside, it rarely comes with walls.

includes switchbacks and detours, just like life. It has one entrance, and it leads to one center.

path goes nowhere.

The journey is the point. The walking is the thing.

Spiritual practices

only promise they make is to teach those who engage in them what those practitioners need to know—about being human, about being human with other people, about being human in creation, about being human before God.

When someone comes to Plum Village in a wheelchair, an instructor finds a comfortable place for that person to sit and watch the walkers. He asks her to pick one of the walkers, focusing intently on what that person is doing as she deepens her own breathing. Watch the movement, he tells her. Notice the exact moment each foot leaves the ground. See the shape of the arc the foot makes as it finds its way back down. When your mind wanders, ride your breath back to the present moment. After about twenty minutes of this, most people discover at least two things: first, that they can do walking meditation without leaving their chairs; and second, that their bodies are not as localized as they had thought. Watching the walkers, they sometimes lose track of whose foot is in the air.

husband decided to hold down the center, giving thanks for her life while she found her way out. “I began to feel at peace in my body again after being very angry that it had let me down,”

Walking, she found herself remembering all the people who had walked with her through her surgery and treatment.

God loves bodies. I mean that in some way that defies all understanding, God means to welcome risen bodies and not just disembodied souls to heaven’s banquet table. The resurrection of the dead is the radical insistence that matter matters to God.

One of the Five Pillars of Islam is the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca,

twelfth month of the lunar year. Dressed only in a white cloth that many will use later for their shrouds, pilgrims walk seven times around the ancient Ka’ba in the center courtyard of the Great Mosque. They walk counterclockwise, against the march of time,

The body is a great focuser, whether the means is pain or pleasure. The body is a great reminder of where we came from and where we are going, on the one sacred journey that we all make whether we mean to or not.

Take off your shoes and feel the earth under your feet, as if the ground on which you are standing really is holy ground. Let it please you. Let it hurt you a little. Feel how the world really feels when you do not strap little tanks on your feet to shield you from the way things really are.

give your full attention to where you are, for once. Walk as if your life depended on it, placing your heel before

you put on the grass, the clover—watch out for the honeybee!—the slick river stones, the silted streambed, the red clay, the pine bark on the woodland path, the black earth of the vegetable garden. As you press down on these things, can you feel them pressing back?

Done properly, the spiritual practice of going barefoot can

halfway around the world

As long as you are on the earth and you know it, you are where you are supposed to be. You have everything you need to ground yourself in God.

use of narrow paths through wide swaths of unpredictable territory.

once you leave the cow path, the unpredictable territory is full of life.

Leaving the known path turns out to be such a boon to my senses—such a remedy for my deadening habit of taking the safest, shortest route to wherever I am

If you do not start choosing to get lost in some fairly low-risk ways, then how will you ever manage when one of life’s big winds knocks you clean off your course? I am not speaking literally here, although literal lostness is a good place to begin since the skills are the same: managing your panic, marshalling your resources, taking a good look around to see where you are and what this unexpected development might have to offer you.

God does some of God’s best work with people who are truly, seriously lost.

lover leaves. The baby dies. At this level, the advanced practice of getting lost consists of consenting to be lost, since you have no other choice.

The point is to give up on the sufficiency of your own resources. The point is to admit that you are lost, and maybe even to allow that you are in no hurry to be found.

Anything can become a spiritual practice once you are willing to approach it that way—once you let it bring you to your knees and show you what is real, including who you really are, who other people are, and how near God can be when you have lost your way.

Those most likely to befriend strangers, in other words, are those who have been strangers themselves.

Walk joyfully on the earth and respond to that of God in every human being. —George Fox

Awareness blooms, as the individual self escapes its confines to become part of something bigger than the self.

divine union. It can happen all alone with God, but it can also happen with other people and sometimes

even with trees.

ach...

escaping the small self long enough to glimpse a wholeness more real than th...

Abbot Pastor,

“If you have a chest full of clothing, and leave it for a long time, the clothing will rot inside it. It is the same with the thoughts in our heart. If we do not carry them out by physical action, after a long while they will spoil and turn bad.” 5

Watch how this rabbi practices what he preaches and you will note that his teaching is not limited to people who look, act, or think like him. He does the same eye-to-eye thing with Roman centurions, Samaritan lepers, Syro-Phoenician women, and hostile Judeans that he does with his own Galilean disciples. He does it with slaves and rulers, twelve-year-old girls and powerful men, people who can be useful to him and people who cannot. With the possible exception of his own family, no one is dismissed from his circle of concern, for no one made in God’s image is negligible in

the practice of encounter shows up most often as the practice of hospitality, or philoxenia.

philo,

one of the four Greek word...

xenia, for st...

Love of st...

“the Hebrew Bible in one verse commands, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ but in no fewer than 36 places commands us to ‘love the stranger.’”

You shall love the stranger first of all because you know what it is to be a stranger yourself. Second of all, you shall love the stranger because the stranger shows you God.

It is a life-saving practice in a world where religious difference and identity have become more important than anyone could have guessed even five years ago.

the degree to which we believe our faith is what makes us human is the same degree to which we will question the humanity of those who do not share our faith.

Exclusion & Embrace, Bosnian-born theologian Miroslav Volf says, “It may not be too much to claim that the future of our world will depend on how we deal with identity and difference.”

washing our hands,

It was not really about germs anyway, she explained. It was about coming before God with a clean heart.