Altar
The altar as a site of waiting, sacrifice, and unfulfilled promise - operating simultaneously as wedding altar, sacrificial altar, and sacred refuge. In Taylor's writing the altar holds the tension between devotion and destruction: the speaker stands at the altar in faith or in offering, often while the partner refuses to meet her there.
Devotion-as-sacrifice: the speaker's willingness to offer herself in commitment or in religious surrender, met by absence, refusal, or destruction rather than completion.
Appears in 2 songs
“I died on the altar waitin' for the proof”
The altar operates with lexical ambiguity across three registers: a wedding altar (she waited for a marriage proposal that never came), a sacrificial altar (she gave herself up for the relationship), and the altar of the Catholic priest in Odd Man Out (where the characters seek refuge).
“Cross your thoughtless heart”
The cross-your-heart gesture operates as a twisted cliché with religious undertones, the act of making a cross on one's heart as a promise, connected to the Catholic sign of the cross. Uncle Jerry discusses the 'X' as the Greek chi (first letter of Christ's name), connecting the gesture to sacred promise-making. The word 'thoughtless' shifts meaning across the song: initially ironic (the wise men are thoughtless in their condemnation), later positive (one must be 'thoughtless', unguarded, to give one's heart away).