Prayer as Cracking Shins on Altars

Part 1 of 6 in a series on prayer

Religious folks all too often relate to God through divided categories: sacred/secular, church/world, body/soul, matter/spirit, purity/impurity. This comes from a religious vision in which encountering God can only take place for certain people in certain places under certain conditions. The word “holy,” for example, has often designated beliefs or practices that are divided or “set-apart.”

Take the ancient Judaism of Jesus’ day. In those times, the entire Jewish religious system oriented itself towards the Jerusalem Temple. That’s where God dwelled; that’s where heaven met earth. The temple was organized in varying gradations of sacred space. If you were a Gentile, you could only go so far into the Temple. If you were a Jewish woman and you weren’t menstruating, you could go a bit further. If you were a Jewish man and you hadn’t recently had sex, you could go a bit further and offer animal sacrifice on behalf of your family. If you were the High Priest, on one day a year you could enter the Holy of Holies, the set apart central place where God was thought to live. It’s not that first century Judaism was any more stringent or obsessed with purity than other religions of the day, it’s simply that religion itself often has functioned according to various degrees of separation or division from God.

If God is separate, then, in order to relate to God, the priest or people have to become as separate as possible to be in God’s presence. A friend of mine grew up in a conservative denomination with the words “Be Ye Separate” etched under the church’s stained glass window. This is the logic of so much religion today, most glaringly manifested in fundamentalism. If you want to encounter God: separate yourself from the world.

The biblical patriarch Jacob is an unlikely teacher to help us knit these divisions back together. He was a self-serving crook—a grifter and get-ahead fugitive who nevertheless stumbled into a gripping and direct realization of God. Jacob lived up to his name, which means to supplant or “take by the heel.” Wily Jacob grabbed brother Esau’s heel on the way out of the womb, as if he knew intuitively that the firstborn Jewish son would receive the father’s blessing and inheritance. He was trying to get ahead even before he was born. Ever since that day, he supplanted, swindled, and lied to gain the upper hand. In the ancient Near East, household finances, as well God’s covenantal favor, were transferred to the eldest son by the words of the father’s final blessing. All the power, it was thought, lay in those words. With mom Rebekah’s help, Jacob disguised himself as Esau, pulled a fast one over his blind and ailing father Isaac, and compelled his father to offer his sickbed blessing for the firstborn’s future. No wonder Esau wanted to kill him.

Yet it’s this fugitive Jacob who, in the middle of nowhere, had a vision of God. He didn’t do or go anywhere special to receive his glimpse of holiness. Which is exactly the point, because it means that everyday, imperfect people can access God whoever and wherever we are. Long before Solomon built the Jerusalem Temple, Jacob bumped into the gateway of God, the place where heaven and earth meet. The angels of God appeared to Jacob in an anonymous, mundane, insignificant place.

It’s easy to extol God’s glory in a Temple, Cathedral or the Grand Canyon, but Jacob awakened to God’s presence at none of these places. Genesis 28:11 only tells that Jacob “came to a certain place.” He was tired, he lay down in the dirt, he pulled up a rock for a pillow, he slept, he had a vision, and then he woke. In his vision he saw angels ascending and descending a ladder.  This ladder is much more than a ladder, however: it’s an image borrowed from Babylonian imperial religion, a picture of a pyramid or ramp structure that climbed from earth to heaven, a temple that the ancient Babylonians called a ziggurat. Only priests were able to enter the ziggurats, the dwelling places of the gods, but YHWH’s boundary breaking, grace-filled presence launched Jacob’s swindling self to the temple’s holy gate.

The next morning, he woke up and exclaimed: “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it.” In other words, God’s presence is everywhere; it simply has to be recognized. There is no place where God is not. The world is a temple.

That morning Jacob built what preacher-writer Barbara Brown Taylor calls an “altar in the world.” With this vision in his bones, Jacob took the stone that served as his pillow, he poured oil on top of it, and fashioned an altar right then and there to God. This unknown altar in the world became known and named as Bethel, El Shaddai, the very name for God.

Barbara Brown Taylor writes in her book An Altar in the World that: Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish—separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world. But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two. Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.

Jacob’s pillar honors and remembers the sacred nature of all reality. The original intention and purpose of religion is not to divide, but rather to reconnect and unite. Jacob’s vision, then, is religion at its best: threading heaven and earth together. God is here in this place, this place, this place, and I did not know it.

Prayer becomes, then, both the posture and practice of recognizing God’s already-present presence. If we are reconnected to God, to Life, to Reality, then Jacob is our forebear and we are inhabiting the original intention of religion. We are cracking our shins on altars and re-uniting with the Holy One.