Barbara
Brown Taylor in her magnificent book An
Altar in the World makes this observation: “To detach the walking from the
destination is in fact one of the best ways to recognize the altars you are
passing right by all the time.” In today’s world that is not always easy to do.
Even more the thought probably never occurs to us so much in a hurry that we
all seem to be.
The
destination, the end of the journey, almost always seems to be foremost on our
mind from the time we set out till the time we arrive. Everything and everyone
else along the way are rarely ever observed. Granted, when driving we should
never take our eyes off the road. But the point is that there is so much to see
between here and there and that we are in so much of hurry to get there that we
never consider the thought of taking more time to get there so that we can see
what is along the way.
And
what we would see along the way, no matter how long or how short the journey,
are altars to God, places to worship, places and people to see God and God at
work. We know this to be true whenever we have taken the time to get somewhere
and pull off the road to see the wonders of creation. When we get back into the
car we sometimes wonder why we don’t do this more often.
Those
altars, of course, are not simply places here and there along the way. They are
everywhere ,
everywhere we look. But we first have to stop and look and then look deeper. A
casual look around, a quick glance, won’t do it. Just as a first impression of
another doesn’t really tell us much if anything about that person and, in fact,
may be the complete opposite of what we think we see, so, too, do quick
glances.
We
know all this, of course. We know we need to slow down. We know we almost
always move too fast through life. We often wonder why we are in such a hurry
to get somewhere especially when we have more than enough time to do so. Yes,
yes, yes: there are times when we just do not have time to stop and smell the
roses, to see God in all of God’s creation. I get that. We all get that.
Yet
the truth still remains, as Taylor reminds, there are two parts to any journey:
the destination itself and what awaits us once we arrive and the trip along the
way there. I wonder what life, my life, everyone else’s life, would be like
today had we taken our time over the years getting to our many and varied
destination to stop at those altars we’ve hurriedly passed along the way.
I
have to believe that our own lives and the world itself would be so much
better. We would be so much more at peace with ourselves and with one another
because we would have seen both our God in all of creation and, more
importantly, in one another. The truth is creation is God’s altar and so is
each one of us.
No comments:
Post a Comment