Back from San Antonio

Wife and I visited my sister and her husband in San Antonio over the weekend. Had a great time being with them. Saturday we trekked a little north of there to Fredericksburg, a place settled by Germans in the 1800's. A place of charm and gemutlichkeit. The main street has many interesting places to eat and shop. This caught my attention.



As did this.

Embodied Spirituality

Re Barbara Brown Taylor's An Altar in the World I found an interesting snippet from a review Here when my search strategy was 'embodied spirituality' and her name.

One of her goals is to abolish the distinctions we make between church and world, sacred and secular, spirit and flesh, body and soul. Any place or thing can mediate the sacred, and so we can make an altar in the world as well as in the church......

From these sources and her own experiences Taylor commends twelve spiritual practices, but to call them "spiritual" can be misleading, for most of all she commends a fleshly, embodied spirituality. She writes one chapter each on vision, reverence, incarnation, groundedness, wilderness, community, vocation, sabbath, physical labor, breakthrough, prayer, and benediction. Taylor's book raised a cluster of interesting questions for me.

I chose that search strategy because of getting a similar feel in the Cornel West reader. Am half way through that book. I am captivated by occasional snippets like this

"..always viewing oneself as embedded and embodied and also indebted to those who came before.."

"In short, a deep blues sensibility that highlights concrete existence, history, struggle, lived experience and joy."

The above is instructive to me because too often I'm like the people for whom Randy Olson wrote Don't Be Such a Scientist. Living in the cold, remote, dull and abstract.