Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes
Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.
The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do.
Whoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it.
Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails.
Our waiting is not nothing. It is something -- a very big something -- because people tend to be shaped by whatever it is they are waiting for.
We are born seekers, calling strange names into the darkness from our earliest days because we know we are not meant to be alone, and because we know that we await someone whom we cannot always see.
As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.
Day by day we are given not what we want but what we need. Sometimes it is a feast and sometimes...swept crumbs, but by faith we believe it is enough.
That's enough, and I have a ministry as a neighbor as well. A ministry as a friend and a ministry as an aunt and a godmother, and family is very much in the circle of my vocation.
I've got a hold of something that won't move. It's a willingness to keep walking into the next day, open to whatever may turn out to be true that day.
Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead.
Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.
Most of us spend so much time thinking about where we have been or where we are supposed to be going that we have a hard time recognizing where we actually are.
To be fully human is perhaps why I'm Christian, because I see in the life of Jesus a way of being fully human.
The great wisdom traditions of the world all recognize that the main impediment to living a life of meaning is being self-absorbed.
Divine reality is not way up in the sky somewhere; it is readily available in the encounters of everyday life, which make hash of my illusions that I can control the ways God comes to me.
When I say I trust Jesus, that is what I mean: I trust that the way of life leads through perishability, not around it.
In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life
When I talk about losing myself, which I did, it's losing my idea of who I was and my idea of what I was supposed to be doing and the idea of what my value was to God. I lost all of that at least.
I can't help but note that God is being useful to a lot of people trying to do harm to one another.
I'm a follower of the Christ path, and that opens a huge discussion about what we even mean by words like "Christian."
I became so attentive to the souls of other people that I was not as attentive as I might have been to my own.
The poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent.
Beliefs have become unimportant to me. Faith as radical trust became even more important to me.
For a long time I listened to other people to decide whether I was still Christian or not, and I would sort of vet myself by the traditional formulae.
Most of us will have more than one job in our working lives, which means we will have more than one opportunity to seek meaningful work at different stages of our own deepening humanity.
The abundance of our lives is not determined by how long we live, but how well we live. Christ makes abundant life possible if we choose to live it now.
When someone asks us where we want to be in our lives, the last thing that occurs to us is to look down at our feet and say, 'Here, I guess, since this is where I am.'
We're children of God through our blood kinship with Christ. We're also sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, with a hereditary craving for forbidden fruit salad.
The only real difference between Anxiety and Excitement was my willingness to let go of Fear.
I'm leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.
I love being alone. I learned that from my father, I think, who loved his own company.
I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place.
I'll do my best to always put God and neighbor ahead of ego, but I want to find myself, and if finding myself means losing my ego self, I'll go there.
I didn't want to be a priest. I wanted to do the work that priests do, and that required becoming a priest.
It's difficult for me to ignore how many conflicts locally and worldwide have religion tagged to them.
You only need to lose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live.
The real problem has far less to do with what is really out there than it does with our resistance to finding out what is really out there.
I think my idea of God was much more directive than my idea of God now, that is, a God who had one plan in mind for me, perhaps, and my job was to find out what it was and obey.
The boundaries became constrictive in what I was doing, and if my faith grew, it was because I pressed some of the boundaries in ways I hadn't felt comfortable or responsible doing that before.
If God is about putting God ahead of myself then I've just quit being religious, because that's what got me into such deep trouble.
The tradition piece is so embedded in me I don't know that I can see it any more, but the community piece is one I've been in danger of losing.
Church can be extremely boring. It can be very meaningful, it can be character forming, but can be have very little fizz in it.
To be in the mainline is to have a history and not simply to be an amalgam, a community church of who knows what that came from who knows where.
I don't miss the ministry, because I'm completely engaged in it. In terms of parish ministry, I miss the intimacy with a group of people.
