Category Archives: Christianity

An Altar in the World

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An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith is a beautifully written contemplation on the ways ordinary living can intersect with the divine. Barbara Brown Taylor writes about the everyday disciplines that become portals into God’s presence: paying attention, wearing skin, getting lost, encountering others, feeling pain. It was not surprising to discover late in the book that Brother Lawrence is one of Taylor’s spiritual mentors, because in one important way her perspective resembles his: no earthly activity is too humble to be a meeting place with God.

An Altar in the World is an eminently practical book. Each chapter proposes not a theory or teaching, but a practice. I liked this feeling of being anchored in the good world God made. Taylor writes poetically, and with a wit that reminded me a little of Anne Lamott without the shock value. Taylor is an Episcopal priest who left parish ministry to teach college, and though I come from a different theological background I found her to be a delightful guide — honest, wry, and at times profound.

I’ve quoted several passages from the book over the last few days. But I wanted to include another from the chapter on feeling pain, where Taylor discusses the book of Job. She comments,

One night of real pain is enough to strip away your illusions about how strong you are, how brave, how patient and faithful. Who would have thought that a torn cornea could hurt all the way down to the soles of your feet? Who would have imagined that a really bad case of food poisoning could make you doubt the mercy of God? You do not need a torturer standing over you to recognize the direct link between pain and truth. Pain is so real that less-real things like who you thought you were and how you meant to act vanish like drops of water flung on a hot stove. Your virtues can become as abstract as algebra, your beliefs as porous as clouds.

See what I mean? Over and over as I read, I felt the pull to buy the book (I read a library copy) just for the pleasure of owning words like that. The chapters on pain, Sabbath, paying attention, and wearing skin were favorites out of the dozen practices addressed.

The chapter on prayer didn’t resonate with me as well; I felt a little lost. I couldn’t really relate to Taylor’s reluctance to say that God answers prayer:

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. Are you still waiting for God to answer you, or is your life the answer you have been seeking, hiding in plain view?

While I would agree that God’s dialogue with us is personal — a fact that Jesus illustrates over and over in the gospels by answering other questions than the ones people are actually asking him — I don’t think it’s helpful to open up a question about whether he answers at all. Scripture seems pretty plain on that: he does. Even though we all struggle at times with what seems like his silence.

I also think that though Brother Lawrence was onto something in offering his activities and bodily life to God — we are to do “everything in word or deed as unto God” — there is also a verbal component to prayer that I certainly need. I get tired of it sometimes; it’s a burden to be always having to formulate words in prayer, and I will lapse into phases of wordless, rather vague meditation “in God’s presence.” But then I’ll wake up in the middle of the night some night — as happened recently — and realize, “I miss you, God.” It’s my words that somehow form a bridge, a meeting ground. They offer some terms in which God’s answers can be recognized, whether through insight or solution or event or transformed perspective. I need the mundane labor of words, and I need the commitment of words, in my relationship with God — even though temperamentally, I’m someone who seems always to be craving silence.

An Altar in the World engaged me on several levels and I found it deeply satisfying. It sends me back into my life with a heightened sense of its richness. It is full of altars, and full of purpose — something I know, but which seems more real after having read this.

Marvelous luggage

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Whether you are sick or well, lovely or irregular, there comes a time when it is vitally important for your spiritual health to drop your clothes, look in the mirror, and say, “Here I am. This is the body-like-no-other that my life has shaped. I live here. This is my soul’s address.” After you have taken a good look around, you may decide that there is a lot to be thankful for, all things considered. Bodies take real beatings. That they heal from most things is an underrated miracle. That they give birth is beyond reckoning. (Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Practice of Wearing Skin”)

Am I the only one who has to do this more than once in my life?

When I was in high school, I worried so much about my weight that I developed bulimia. In graduate school, I took up running and slimmed back down, but I still bear the aches and pains of my foolish refusal to stretch out those muscles before or after running. Then I went through pregnancy twice — which was really not bad; I liked the fact that my body changed, and was supposed to. (I certainly liked the outcome of pregnancy!)

Now I’m in my forties and it’s wrinkles, fading hair, freckles, slower metabolism, and other strange developments that tempt me to dissatisfaction at least, loathing at worst. It seems to be a lifelong process, this coming to peace with one’s body. I seem to depart into this or that other vision at every phase, a vision of some other Janet with some other body. But my own body never departs. There it is, patiently waiting in the mirror to be noticed and accepted.

Barbara Brown Taylor proposes that choosing to live contentedly within one’s own body can be a spiritual discipline, an act of worship — not worship of our bodies, but of the God who made and loves them. It can reveal knowledge of God, who quite purposefully took on a body himself in the pivotal moment of human history, and he keeps it still. “Here we sit,” she writes, “with our souls tucked away in this marvelous luggage, mostly insensible to the ways in which every spiritual practice begins with the body.”

These are good words. Today I choose again to accept this “marvelous luggage” as God’s gift to me. Let that be a starting point to whatever new knowledge of him he wants to impart.

Learning Curve

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I’m trying to learn how to photograph birds in flight. I’ve taken so many pictures, and few if any have turned out. Today I’ve done some reading on the subject and feel encouraged; there are some things I can do, some adjustments I can make, to improve.

Meantime, I’ve been reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World, so far a very satisfying book about cultivating a sacramental approach to life. She talks a fair amount about nature, and about the need to be willing to stop and pay attention. She sounds a little bit like Brother Fowles in The Poisonwood Bible when she writes,

Like anyone else, I do some picking and choosing when I go to my holy book for proof that the world is holy too, but the evidence is there. People encounter God under shady oak trees, on riverbanks, at the tops of mountains, and in long stretches of barren wilderness. God shows up in whirlwinds, starry skies, burning bushes, and perfect strangers. When people want to know more about God, the son of God tells them to pay attention to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, to women kneading bread and workers lining up for their pay.

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.

I have been learning to pay attention with a camera, and it’s strange the hold it has taken on me. Who needs so many pictures of birds and butterflies and flowers and landscapes when we can look around and see them all with our naked eyes? I don’t know. But there is something about the camera around my neck that has improved my naked eyes — or improved the nerve pathways from eye to heart. I believe that God loves it when we admire his world, and I have reaped the benefit in sheer pleasure as I notice things I never noticed before.

It’s a learning curve of sorts — learning to see, and to capture what I see, and to read it. Yesterday I watched this young hawk for awhile, and it seemed to be experiencing a learning curve as well, navigating the breezes and trying to decide whether I was friend or foe. The pictures are not sharp, but even so they give the sense of the bird’s grandeur even in its indecision and awkwardness. Maybe next time, I’ll capture it better. Meantime, it’s a picture of young royalty — a red-tail whose tail is not yet red, whose instincts are not yet wise to humans, but whose symmetry and strength inspire all the same.

 

The introvert and the altar call

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Where there is too much input, the introvert misses his mind, his subjectivity, his freedom, his very potential… He can’t wait to be free — to get out and away from the noise, the talk, the interference with his inner process. (Laurie Helgoe)

I dislike altar calls.

There. I’ve said it.

Frequently in our church, there is a call for some kind of external response to what has been presented. From time to time I find myself reflecting on this phenomenon in evangelicalism. It seems to reflect the desire to see immediate, measurable results. But there is little of importance that happens in my life immediately and measurably. The mustard seed gets planted, and grows into the tallest tree in the garden, but it’s seldom immediately recognizable as such, and the planting is never public.

The engine of my spiritual life is my personal time with God, not corporate worship. Church is where I learn and am kept on track doctrinally. Church is where I find fellowship and inspiration and opportunity to serve. But it’s not where the heartbeat of my relationship with God is. As I delve into Introvert Power by Laurie Helgoe, I wonder if this is partly temperamental.

In my morning time, I have some space and quiet to interact with God — to talk, hear, read, discuss, confess, dream. At church, it’s like a conveyor belt: there is a schedule. The allotted time for “response” is hemmed in by whatever needs to happen next in the service. Maybe this is why I pretty much never hear prompting from God to “go forward” and pray. There isn’t much that he wants to say to me or hear from me that can be said in a few minutes at the altar.

The public altar is not a quiet place. There is usually music, and I find this distracting. Along with the music is the verbal suggestion of whoever is making the altar call — a prayer, or further exhortation, or whatever. But I need space and quiet to formulate my own thoughts. In the times I do go forward to pray, I often find myself simply waiting for a quiet moment that never comes. Once, we went forward as a family, and this happened. It made me sad.

Of course many folks love the chance to go to the altar as often as possible. They aren’t bothered by the things I see as constraints, and maybe the public element makes the experience seem more real for them. But I have an uneasy relationship with the altar call and frequently find myself sitting in my seat wondering if I’m being judged for it. I think that for certain personalities, passing up the opportunity to go forward can be a valid way of keeping one’s private business with God safe and real.

Recent Reading: George MacDonald

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How do I characterize George MacDonald’s sermons? I’ve been thinking about this question off and on for several days. I’ve been reading his Unspoken Sermons for a couple of years now, a little at a time, because it’s inconceivable to take them in more than the smallest bites. There is a prophetic depth and unity to George MacDonald’s comprehension of God that demands every bit of intellectual effort I have to offer, every bit of concentration. It’s like he’s tapped into the underground stream of living water running under the whole ground of Scripture. Reading these sermons is a beautifully stern corrective to all kinds of little contaminations and blurry spots in my understanding of God — false steps and inconsistencies that I didn’t know were there.

It’s well known that C.S. Lewis was deeply influenced by George MacDonald, writing about the Unspoken Sermons, “My own debt to this book is almost as great as one man can owe to another: and nearly all serious inquirers to whom I have introduced it acknowledge that it has given them great help — sometimes indispensable help toward the very acceptance of the Christian faith.” No wonder it’s two scenes from Narnia that my hand falls upon as I grope for a picture of how I feel when reading these sermons. One is when Jill, Eustace, Puddleglum, and Prince Rilian look down into the kingdom of Bism in The Silver Chair — a chasm deeper than they ever imagined, glowing with heat from its ever-burning fires and its living jewels waiting to be picked and eaten like grapes. The other is in Dawn Treader, when Eustace feels the at once terrible and exquisite pain of his dragon-skin coming off. Every time I read in Unspoken Sermons, I have those feelings of hitherto unimagined sights coming before the eye of my heart, and the birth pains of change tingling in my life.

These last few weeks I’ve read two sermons, “The Consuming Fire,” and “The Higher Faith.” It’s the first one I want to think about here, because it has been the most “consuming” in my thoughts. MacDonald begins with Hebrews 12:29, “Our God is a consuming fire,” and meditates on the significance of fire as an emblem of God’s character throughout the Bible: the burning bush, Mt. Sinai, the burning of purification, even hell and the lake of fire. The primary thing about God’s burning, MacDonald urges, is his love — love which is inexorable. When we cooperate, the burning of God may be painful, but it has a gentleness. God doesn’t give us more revelation than we can bear. But if we set ourselves against it, the burning continues, because God continues to love, and to burn away all that is unlovely. In this way even hell, even the casting of death and hell into the lake of fire, are reconciled with, and are expressions of, God’s love.

Never would this have occurred to me. In our limited understanding it can be difficult to reconcile God’s tenderness and his wrath, but this sermon reveals the unity of God’s nature and the pervasiveness of his love.

This sermon has stayed in my thoughts lately, not just because of its transforming insight, but because of the number of coincidences that have brought it to mind. MacDonald speaks of Moses’ partial revelation of God on Sinai, when he asks to be blotted out of God’s book because of the sins of his people. Then God reveals himself again to Moses, partially — only his back, because no one can look on his face and live. After reading MacDonald’s discussion of it, this same passage came up in the girls’ and my Bible reading this week. We talked about why “no one can look upon God’s face and live.” A few days later, Younger Daughter came out of her room, where she was listening to the audiobook of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and told me that she had been reminded of the story again because when the Pevensie children meet Aslan for the first time, they find his face too beautiful to look upon.

I love it when this happens — when God develops a theme steadily over a period of time in different ways.

By far the most important revelation this sermon gives me is of God’s love. There are several passages I underlined, and I’d like to quote them all, but they are all better in context. So in the end I regretfully resist my impulse to insert long excerpts from “The Consuming Fire” here, and instead I recommend it in its entirety — along with the rest of the sermons in the book, to be taken in small doses as our ears are ready to hear.