Book Review: An Altar in the World

Barbara Brown Taylor has long been such a favorite author that I often drool with envy, wishing I had written exactly what she just said. This Episcopal priest is in touch with scripture, liturgy and the hard work of a four-day power outage, when she breaks the water in the horses’ trough with a hammer twice a day. The focus here will be on one of her books, but all are a delight.

An Altar in the World begins in wonder “about what happens when we build a house for God…What happens to the rest of the world when we build four walls—even four gorgeous walls—cap them with a steepled roof, and designate that the House of God? What happens to the riverbanks, the mountaintops, the deserts, and the trees? What happens to the people who never show up in our houses of God?”

For an example of her broad vision, she cites St. Francis of Assisi who “read the world as reverently as he read the Bible.” (p. 9) She then piles on abundant evidence to help us pay attention to God in the world: through our own bodies, through saying no, through physical labor, and pain “which leads to the ground floor of all real things: real love, real sorrow, real thanks, real fear,” an altar to discover “life as full of meaning as it is of hurt.” (173)

Her description of discovering her vocation is delightful for its earthiness. She repeatedly climbs a fire escape wobbling from a Victorian mansion next door to the Divinity School. There in her prayer spot, she asks God what to do with her life, receiving the answer, “anything that pleases you.” Hence, she had a career that included cocktail waitressing, newspaper reporting, teaching horseback riding, preaching and pastoring—with one tantalizing possibility still hovering on the horizon: being a member of Cirque de Soleil.

Not the least bit churchy, irreverent, open-minded, quick to admit flaws, a superb writer who’s a stickler for the precise word, Taylor would make a marvelous companion for brunch. Or travel. Or anywhere else she might wander, with her conviction that “life is unmitigated gift.” She brings spirituality a much missing dimension: humor. Sometimes, she even prompts a delicious chuckle aloud. She questions the sacrosanct and tweaks the easy assumption, getting by with it in her creamy Georgia accent. (Podcasts also abound.) Her grounded priorities help us lose our appetite for social media gossip and shopping bargains. I will try to carry and continue her practice of “saying thank you now, while I still approve of most of what is happening to me, [so] then that practice will have become habit by the time I do not like much of anything that is happening to me.” Sound advice for aging!