An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor

Author:Barbara Brown Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

ONE COMMON PROBLEM for people who believe that God has one particular job in mind for them is that it is almost never the job they are presently doing. This means that those who are busiest trying to figure out God’s purpose for their lives are often the least purposeful about the work they are already doing. They can look right through the people they work with, since those people are not players in the divine plan. They find ways to do their work without investing very much in it, since that work is not part of the divine plan. The mission to read God’s mind becomes a strategy for keeping their minds off their present unhappiness, until they become like ghosts going through the motions of the people they once were but no longer wish to be.

Since I have felt that way myself, I have had to come up with ways to combat the ghostliness. The best cure is to find someone else’s feet to wash, but failing that, washing almost anything will do. When old work has become meaningless and new purpose is hard to find, I recommend cleaning baseboards. In the first place, the warm water feels good on your hands. In the second place, you have to get down on your knees to do it. In the third place, the baseboards look terrific afterward, sometimes for as long as three months.

Washing a dog also works, although large dogs may require more despondence than you actually have to work off. Washing windows is also good. After drought sucked all the water out of my shallow well earlier this year, I began taking my dirty clothes to the Laundromat in town. The last time I did this was in 1978, which means that I took about a dozen quarters with me this time. After I had loaded up the biggest washer with bedsheets and added the detergent, I stared at the lit red number 18 by the coin slot. What could it mean? Was this the eighteenth washer in the Laundromat? Did the wash cycle require eighteen minutes? After a brief period of meditation I realized that I was meant to put eighteen quarters in the slot. Eighteen quarters. As it turned out, I got a whole afternoon of playing children, new neighbors, honest work, and sweet-smelling sheets for just a little over $4.50.

I no longer call such tasks housework. I call them the domestic arts, paying attention to all the ways they return me to my senses. When the refrigerator has nothing in it but green onions that have turned to slime and plastic containers full of historic leftovers, I know my art is languishing. When I cannot tell whether that is a sleeping cat or an engorged dust ball under my bed, I know that I have been spending too much time thinking. It is time to get down on my knees. After I have spent a whole morning ironing shirts, folding linens, rubbing orange-scented wax

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