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Q & A
Q&A: Finding the sacred beneath our feet Mary Jacobs, Jan 29, 2009
Barbara Brown Taylor
Barbara Brown Taylor’s spiritual journey has taken her out of the church and into the world. Her last book, Leaving Church, described her transition from parish priest to a new career as a professor. In her latest book, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith (Feb. 10, 2009, HarperOne), she writes about finding meaning in everyday life.
She spoke recently with staff writer Mary Jacobs.
In the book’s introduction, you talk about how people say, “I’m spiritual but not religious.” When people talk about “being spiritual,” sometimes it seems so nebulous that it amounts to a kind of sentimental self-importance. Your thoughts?
You have got to find out what people mean by those two words. I hear “spiritual but not religious” said by people who are using those words and you don’t know how till you ask them. And I hear religious people who quote that phrase with scorn. It would be interesting to ask them what they mean. There’s a story behind every way people use that phrase. It’s more interesting to find what the story is than to take the phrase at face value.
When I work with people under 30, I find they equate “religion” with service to institutional goals. That’s fair. The church keeps itself in business, keeps its hospitals open, makes sure the story stays alive. I find people are disenchanted with serving institutional goals, who see religion as just being about that. It usually gets reduced to, “Every time I go to church, all they want to talk about is money.”
Spirituality is often about “feeling.” It’s relational, between someone and other people and very often creation. It’s something that warms them, excites them, turns them around, wakes them, gets their attention. But often “justice” does not come up on the list of things under spirituality. The call to take difficult stands for those with no voices—whether those are birds or trees or owls and frogs or immigrants or poor people in the community. It almost takes religion to take those concerns and keep them in front of human beings’ faces, because most of us would so much rather turn away.
What led you to write this book? Is there some spiritual shift from your last book behind it?
The last book was called Leaving Church, and it was about leaving parish ministry after 15 years of being at it full-time. The title alone was highly upsetting to some people. That led me intentionally in this book to a title, and I hope an entire book, that I hope deals positively both with church teachings and with what happens as those teachings are carried out the door and into the world. I do see this as a partner to the first book. If the first book confessed some brokenness in me, in my relationship with the institution of church, then this book confesses an ongoing love affair with God and the people of God and the creation of God, and offers at least a dozen ways to celebrate that.
Is there is a basic “how to” for ways of encountering the sacred in our daily lives?
I avoid a “how-to” approach like crazy. I don’t think there is a “how-to” to God. I don’t think there’s a “how-to” for approaching the sacred in life. I do think there are time-tested practices that people of many different faiths have found reliable over the centuries of history. And I do attend to those.
If I made clear my aversion to “how-to” instructions, then I would turn right around and say, “You can hardly go wrong if you pay exquisite attention to creation. You can hardly go wrong if you pay exquisite attention to your neighbor near and far. You can hardly go wrong if you will trust that what is happening to you every day carries within it the seeds of wisdom that you are in desperate need of. You can hardly go wrong if you learn to bless the most ordinary things that appear before you every day. You can hardly go wrong if you travel ready to be surprised by God, whether it’s across the world or just to your backyard.”
This is a practice-based book. I’m laying out some flagstones that I have found reliable to walk on in my deepening in God. Everything in it, you can do in your body; nothing in it is something you can do only in your mind. I worry a great deal about the intellectualization of Christian faith, the way in which a way of life gets reduced to nothing more than the acceptance of a set of beliefs or affirmations of certain principles. I worry that a physical, active, embodied way of life can get lost.
Why do we “miss” the sacred in our daily lives? Why are we often blind to it?
I think a number of us have been taught to look up into the sky for the divine instead of down at the ground under our feet. I also think a lot of us have been taught to devalue our daily experience as being secular, mundane, unholy, and yet the teaching I have received in my life points me to the earth and even encourages me not to draw such hard lines between heaven/earth, sacred/secular, everyday/mystical. I was trying to blur the lines between some dualities in spirituality that I don’t find helpful.
What convinced you that those dualities were unhelpful?
I was not raised in churches, but sought them out as teenager. In many of those churches, I was taught that only what was in the Bible was sacred. Anything that happened outside biblical reference, anything that happened outside of church or outside the self-defined community of God, was by definition not holy, not worthy. I think it took me a couple of decades to decide that wasn’t so. As I grew in faith and grew in knowledge of the Holy Spirit, I found other parts of Scripture—what scholars call wisdom literature—like Proverbs, Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, Job. And for that matter the parables of Jesus. Many teachings of Jesus are wisdom literature in that they point to ordinary lived experience: to fisherman emptying their nets, to women kneading bread, to laborers lining up for their pay. Proverbs can look at an ant and find a lesson in life.
There I found an alternate understanding of God’s presence that was very much rooted in the everyday, that wasn’t set aside in a sanctuary or shrouded only in sacred language, but was as available to me as bread or water or air.
Anything else you’d like to say to an audience of United Methodist readers?
I’d just want to say how grateful I am to Methodism for the historical emphasis on sanctification, on the idea that how we live and how we practice our faith really matters, really matters. That we can’t do it without God, but that God refuses to do it without us. I’ve always looked to Methodism as one of the mainline traditions that takes that seriously and lifts it up.
Barbara Brown Taylor
What led you to write this book? Is there some spiritual shift from your last book behind it? 
