Barbara Brown Taylor "An Altar In the World"

The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two, different operations.  Human beings have a hard time regarding anything beautiful without wanting to devour it.  (Simone Weil “Waiting For God”)

Upanishads: Two winged companions, two birds, are on the branch of a tree.  One eats the fruit.  The other looks at it.  Those two birds, Weil says, are the two parts of our soul.  (Barbara Brown Taylor, “An Altar In The World”

AN ALTAR IN THE WORLD

Barbara Brown Taylor

In biblical terms, it is wisdom we need to live together in this world.  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.  Wise people do not have to be certain what they believe before they act.  They are free to act, trusting that the practice itself will teach them what they need to know.  If you are not sure what to think about washing feet, for instance, then the best way to find out is to practice washing a pair or two.  If you are not sure what to believe about your neighbor’s faith, then the best way to find out is to practice eating supper together.  Reason can only work with the experience available to it.  Wisdom atrophies if it is not walked on a regular basis.

Such wisdom is far more than information.  To gain it, you need more than a brain.  You need a body that gets hungry, feels pain, thrills to pleasure, craves rest.  This is your physical pass into the accumulated insight of all who have preceded you on this earth.  To gain wisdom, you need flesh and blood, because wisdom involves bodies – and not just human bodies, but bird bodies, tree bodies, water bodies, and celestial bodies.  According to the Talmud, every blade of grass has its own angel bending over it, whispering, “Grow, grow.”

How does one learn to see and hear such angels?

(pg.14)

AN ALTAR IN THE WORLD

Barbara Brown Taylor

Since at least one of the reasons I remain Christian is because of the seriousness with which Christian tradition honors flesh and blood, I am always surprised at how easy it is for me to become an oaf – usually by saying something obvious about the human body in the presence of those devoted to the soul.  In the case at hand, it was saying something about Jesus’s body that got me in trouble, but I can just as easily descent into oafdom by saying something about my own body or the bodies of other people when we are supposed to be speaking of spiritual things.

For instance, I can say that I think it is important to pray naked in front of a full-length mirror sometimes, especially when you are full of loathing for your body.  Maybe you think you are too heavy.  Maybe you have never liked the way your hipbones stick out.  Do your breasts sag?  Are you too hairy?  It is always something.  Then again, maybe you have been sick, or come through some surgery that has changed the way you look.  You have gotten glimpses of your body as you have bathed or changed clothes, but so far maintaining your equilibrium has depended upon staying covered up as much as you can.  You have even discovered how to shower in the dark, so that you may have to feel what you presently loathe about yourself but you do not have to look at it.

This can only go on so long, especially for someone who officially believes that God loves flesh and blood, no matter what kind of shape it is in.  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. 

When I do this, I generally decide that it is time to do a better job of wearing my skin with gratitude instead of loathing.  No matter what I think of my body, I can still offer it to God to go on being useful to the world in ways both sublime and ridiculous.  At the very least, I can practice a little reverence right there in front of the mirror, taking some small credit for standing there un-guarded for once.  This is no small thing, in a culture so confused about the body that most Americans cannot separate the physical form the sexual.  Comment on the beauty of a child’s body and you risk being viewed as a potential predator.  Make an observation about your own and you risk being called seductive. 

(pp 37-38)

AN ALTAR IN THE WORLD

Barbara Brown Taylor

Deep suffering makes theologians of us all.  The questions people ask about God in Sunday school rarely compare with the questions we ask while we are in the hospital.  This goes for those stuck in the waiting room as well as those in actual beds.  To 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.  To spend one night in real pain is to discover depths of reality that are roped off while everything is going fine.  Why me?  Why now?  Why this?

These are natural questions to ask when you are in pain, but they are just as relevant when you are in pleasure.  Who deserves the way a warm bath feels on a cold night after a hard day’s work?  Who has earned the smell of a loved one, embracing you on your first night back home?  To hold a sleeping child in your arms can teach you more about the meaning of life than any ten books on the subject.  To lie in the yard at night looking up at the stars can grant you entrance into divine mysteries that elude you inside the house. 

The daily practice of incarnation – of being in the body with full confidence that God speaks the language of flesh – is to discover a pedagogy that is as old as the gospels.  Why else did Jesus spend his last night on earth teaching his disciples to wash feet and share supper?  With all the conceptual truths in the universe at his disposal, he did not give them something to think about together when he was gone. Instead, he gave them concrete things to do – specific ways of being together in their bodies – that would go on teaching them what they needed to know when he was no longer around to teach them himself. 

(pp 42-43)

AN ALTAR IN THE WORLD

Barbara Brown Taylor

Duke ethicist Stanley Hauerwas finds most Christians far too spiritual lin the practice of their faith.  Christianity “is not a set of beliefs or doctrines one believes in order to be a Christian,” he says, “but rather Christianity is to have one’s body shaped, one’s habits determined, in such a way that the worship of God is unavoidable.”  In our embodied life together, the words of our doctrines take on flesh.  If one of our orthodox beliefs has no corporeal value, if we cannot come up with a single consequence it has for our embodied life together, then there is good reason to ask why we should bother with it at all.  The issue Hauerwas raises is not whether there is any such thing as purely spiritual holiness, but “whether there is anything beside the body that can be sanctified.”

In far more pungent language, Daniel Berrigan once said, “It all comes down to this: whose flesh are you touching and why?  Whose flesh are you recoiling from and why?  Whose flesh are you burning and why?  (Samuel M. Powell & Michael E. Lodahl, “Embodied Holiness”)

(pp 44-45)

GOOD IS THE FLESH THAT THE WORD HAS BECOME

Brian Wren

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)

John Donne, Holy Sonnet 14

HOLY SONNET
John Donne

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for You

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurped town, to another due,

Labor to admit You, but O, to no end;

Reason, Your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love You, and would be loved fain,

But am betrothed unto Your enemy.

Divorce me, untie or break that knot again;

Take me to You, imprison me, for I,

Except You enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.

Conscience (Anna Kamienska

CONSCIENCE

Anna Kamienska

(transl.  Grazyna Drabik & David Curzon)

You are alone with yourself

It’s not true

A whole court is with you

A prosecutor and a counsel for the defense

They quarrel about you

Guilty not guilty

Guilty says the prosecutor

You admit he is right

It’s natural

But the counsel for the defense

Talks quite sensibly too

The head turns from side to side

And only you don’t know

What to think of yourself

Always sentence yourself to death

And grant a reprieve

Finally you get bored

With the game of conscience

Sleep

In the morning God

Will give you back your soul

Freshly mended and laundered

Let’s just hope

You won’t get somebody else’s

"You need to hold the pot to see how it works.........Here hold that."

"I'm afraid to drop it."

"Nonsense.  You've got good hands.  Remember?"

Dorothy stood with the pot in her hands, which held the cool light weight of the shell.  The moment it was between her fingers she felt it three-dimensional.  It was a completely different thing if you measured it with your skin instead of your eyes.  Its weight - and the empty air inside it - were part of it.

A.S. Byatt The Children's Book

ANNUNCIATION
(Anna Kamienska)

He stood wrapped in air
said as angels do
       Have no fear
Then he proclaimed something in a language
I didn't comprehend
Lord how much we don't understand
of the most important things
then I was left alone

No one can know
how lonely it is
when an angel departs
The world is then immense open and empty
you lack voice to describe it
no hand is friendly enough
words are all mute and tethered

From now on even an eternity
is too short for awaiting

(translated by Grazyna Drabik & David Curzon)

THE OTHER WORLD
(Anna Kamienska)

I don't believe in the other world

but also I don't believe in this world
unless it is pierced by light

I believe in the body of a woman
hit by a car in the street

I believe in bodies
stopped in a hurry
in a gesture in mid-pursuit
as something long-expected
was about to happen
as if in an instant
sense was to lift up
its finger

I believe in a blind eye
in a deaf ear
in a lame foot
in a crease at the temple
in red fire on the cheek

I believe in bodies lying
in the trust of sleep
in the patience of old age
in the weakness of the unborn

I believe in a hair from the dead
left on a brown beret

I believe that brilliance
is multiplied miraculously
onto all things

Even the May bug
which fumbles about on its back
helpless as a little puppy

I believe that the rain
stitches sky to earth
and with the rain the angels
visibly descend
like winged frogs

I don't believe in this world
empty
like a railway station before dawn
when all the trains have gone
to the other world

The world is one
especially when it wakes up in dew
and the Lord walks about
among the bushes
of animal and human dreams

(translated by Tomasz P. Krzeszowski & Desmond Graham)

Eckhart Tolle

Inner resistance to whatever arises in the present moment pulls you back
into unconsciousness. Inner resistance is some form of negativity,
complaining, fear, aggression, or anger. This is important because
whenever you complain about what somebody else does you're already
beginning to fall into that trap of unconsciousness.

After

(Karen Enns)

After she was gone and the house emptied of her books

and calendars, her pots, the tins and vegetables,

after the combs had been gathered

from her dresser drawers and the sweater

hanging on the back of her chair

was taken off by someone as a gift or keepsake

and the chair pushed in, I went into her room.

I lay down on her bed and felt the shape of her.

The maple leaves were shaking in the yard,

the sky a clear, steel blue. July.

Only weeks between her thoughts and mine,

there on the bed, the window open and the maple tree.

And I remembered how she always thought of summer sadly

as the slow beginning of less light.

In Memory

(Karen Enns)

We see them at the table pouring tea

or bending down among the roses.

Their tall shadows pass along the sidewalks of a town,

through the openings in trees, the low hedges.

Sometimes we listen for their voices in the evening,

sometimes in dreams or when we read.

We hear them as a conscience, soft, insistent,

as if air were medium enough for the dead.

After all they never ask us to remember,

but leave their doors unlocked at night

expecting us, a lamp left on.

And we imagine winters without solace,

stars, we imagine loss, repentance, mercy.

Love, we wonder at the old poverty,

the heavy stoop. They only watch us

with the tired, clear eyes of chess players,

who have thought out every move behind them,

every move ahead and lost.

Want less, they say, or nothing.

          TOLSTOY           

God knows you don't make it easy.            

SOFYA           

Why should it be easy? 

I'm the work of your life. You're the work of mine. 

Its what love is.

(The Last Station)