An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

by Barbara Brown Taylor

This ritual, among many others, introduced me to the practices that nourish reverence in a human life: paying attention, taking care, respecting things that can kill you, making the passage from fear to awe.

reverence is the virtue that keeps people from trying to act like gods.

No one has time to lie on the deck watching stars, or to wonder how one’s hand came to be, or to see the soul of a stranger walking by. Small wonder we are short on reverence.

If anything, these devices sustain the illusion that we might yet be gods—if only we could find some way to do more faster.

I had a bag full of fleas to attend to. While I made that my first priority, the fire moved on in search of someone who would stop what she was doing, take off her shoes, and say, “Here am I.”

Every one of these people has come from somewhere and is going somewhere, the same way I am. While I am sitting here thinking I am at the center of this subway scene and they are on the edges, they are sitting there at the center of their own scenes with me on their edges.

Human beings have a hard time regarding anything beautiful without wanting to devour it.

I saw what dies so that I may live, and while I did not stop eating chicken meat, I began cooking it and eating it with unprecedented reverence.

The sacrament of the catalog creates more than reverence in me; it creates painful awareness of my part in the felling of the forest. It weaves me into the web of cause and effect, reminding me of my place in the overall scheme of things.

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

even something as small as a hazelnut can become an altar in this world.

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.

Why are you so afraid of what people may think about you? Since when did looking good become your god?

Once, when I took the wrong train to the New York Botanical Gardens and ended up walking through a pretty scary neighborhood in the Bronx, a bus driver stopped and opened his doors just for me. “I don’t have the right change,” I said, my eyes huge with fear. “Get in,” he said. God drove a bus in the Bronx that day.

to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.

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.

People know when their gifts are being wasted, and this knowledge can eat away at the soul like a cancer. Call me a romantic, but I think most people want to be good for something. I 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.

Your motive is to lose your self in your work, understanding that it is possible to stack cans of beans on a grocery store shelf with the consciousness of a spiritual master.

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