Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes
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I am always surprised by people who speak of faith as if it happens in the air somewhere. Our bodies are God's best way of getting to us. Revelation begins in the flesh.
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I'm leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.
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I'm a follower of the Christ path, and that opens a huge discussion about what we even mean by words like "Christian."
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To get God on your side is a great way to feel powerful.
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Most of us like thinking we are God's only children...At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.
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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.
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When I say I trust Jesus, that is what I mean: I trust that the way of life leads through perishability, not around it.
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The only real difference between Anxiety and Excitement was my willingness to let go of Fear.
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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.
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There was no time anymore to be quiet or still or pray. So, in many ways, that's what led to my downward spin.
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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.
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What I noticed at Grace-Calvary is the same thing I notice whenever people aim to solve their conflicts with one another by turning to the bible: defending the dried ink marks on the page becomes more vital than defending their neighbor. 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. In the words of Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas, 'People of the Book risk putting the book above people.
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I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.
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I wanted to be as close as I could to the Really Real, and I'll capitalize both of those R's, because God is a word that means different things to different people, but we might all agree it's what is most real.
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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.
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I began to get notes from people saying they were sorry to hear I'd left ministry. And for a while, I halfway believed they were right, that I'd left.
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To be fully human is perhaps why I'm Christian, because I see in the life of Jesus a way of being fully human.
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I don't have time for a job that doesn't leave me time to be quiet or still or to pray.
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I love being alone. I learned that from my father, I think, who loved his own company.
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You can create an intimate community of about 20 or 25 people, and beyond that you're into a different kind of relationship.
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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.
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It's difficult for me to ignore how many conflicts locally and worldwide have religion tagged to them.
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You probably can't get much closer to God than serving a congregation 24/7. At the same time, there's a different kind of closeness in this present life I have in which I have much more freedom to come and go and to engage some of the silence and stillness and solitude that I was missing before.
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The effort to untangle the human words from the divine seems not only futile to me but also unnecessary, since God works with what is. God uses whatever is usable in a life, both to speak and to act, and those who insist on fireworks in the sky may miss the electricity that sparks the human heart.