Barbara Brown Taylor

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The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self - to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Spiritual
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Jesus was not killed by atheism and anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion, which is always a deadly mix. Beware those who claim to know the mind of God and who are prepared to use force, if necessary, to make others conform. Beware those who cannot tell God's will from their own. Temple police are always a bad sign. When chaplains start wearing guns and hanging out at the sheriff's office, watch out. Someone is about to have no king but Caesar
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Jesus
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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.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Ideas
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Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Inspirational
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Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Chance
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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.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Practice
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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.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Waiting
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When I forget the power of the word, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget the deep relief of telling the truth, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget to look for the holiness all around me, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget why the gospel matters, I read Frederick Buechner.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Relief
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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.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Believe
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No one longs for what he or she already has, and yet the accumulated insight of those wise about the spiritual life suggests that the reason so many of us cannot see the red X that marks the spot is because we are standing on it. The treasure we seek requires no lengthy expedition, no expensive equipment, no superior aptitude or special company. All we lack is the willingness to imagine that we already have everything we need. The only thing missing is our consent to be where we are.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Wise
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If churches saw their mission in the same way, there is no telling what might happen. What if people were invited to come tell what they already know of God instead of to learn what they are supposed to believe? What if they were blessed for what they are doing in the world instead of chastened for not doing more at church? What if church felt more like a way station than a destination? What if the church’s job were to move people out the door instead of trying to keep them in, by convincing them that God needed them more in the world than in the church?
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Jobs
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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.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Dark
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It does seem to me that at least some of us have made an idol of exhaustion. The only time we know we have done enough is when we are running on empty and when the ones we love most are the ones we see the least.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Running
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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.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: People
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What is saving my life now is the conviction that there is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily experiences of human life on earth. My life depends on engaging the most ordinary physical activities with the most exquisite attention I can give them. My life depends on ignoring all touted distinctions between the secular and the sacred, the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul. What is saving my life now is becoming more fully human, trusting that there is no way to God apart from real life in the real world.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Spiritual
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I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Religious
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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.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Children
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Having been brought up with a definition of faith as adherence to a set of beliefs, I have more and more begun to turn instead toward a definition of faith as openness to truth, whatever truth may turn out to be.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: May
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Kindness is not a bad religion, no matter what name you use for God.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Kindness
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All I am saying is that anyone can do this. Anyone can ask and anyone can bless, whether anyone has authorized you to do it or not. All I am saying is that the world needs you to do this, because there is a real shortage of people willing to kneel wherever they are and recognize the holiness holding its sometimes bony, often tender, always life-giving hand above their heads. That we are able to bless one another at all is evidence that we have been blessed, whether we can remember when or not. That we are willing to bless one another is miracle enough to stagger the very stars.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Stars
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God does some of God's best work with people who are seriously lost.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: People
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So if waiting is an aggravation, it is at least partly because we do not like being reminded of our limits. We like doing -- earning, buying, selling, building, planting, driving, baking -- making things happen, whereas waiting is essentially a matter of being -- stopping, sitting, listening, looking, breathing, wondering, praying. It can feel pretty helpless to wait for someone or something that is not here yet and that will or will not arrive in its own good time, which is not the same thing as our own good time.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Breathing
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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.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Believe
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Salvation is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk, regardless of how they got there or whether they know God's name. Sometimes it comes as an extended human hand and sometimes as a bolt from the blue, but either way it opens a door in what looked for all the world like a wall. This is the way of life, and God alone knows how it works.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Wall
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With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Religious
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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.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Jesus
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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.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Jobs
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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.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: People
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I didn't want to be a priest. I wanted to do the work that priests do, and that required becoming a priest.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Want
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I miss the hot spots. I miss the hospital calls. I miss the nursing homes. I miss the really intimate human contact with other people, which I did nothing to earn.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Home
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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.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Sorry
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The beauty in the losing is a loss finally of self-consciousness. There's a gorgeous moment that can happen in all kinds of places. It can happen with people, it can happen with nature, and it can happen with my eyes shut anywhere I am.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Eye
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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.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Silence
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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.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Real
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Prayer is happening, and it is not necessarily something that I am doing. God is happening, and I am lucky enough to know that I am in The Midst.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Prayer
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Because I'm a "strong person," the symptoms hit me by surprise. It was, as I write in the book, stinging in my eyes after Sunday that I thought was an allergy, until one day I sat in the car and decided to just let my eyes tear up so that whatever was in them would come out, and what came out were tears that wouldn't stop. It was literally a physical reaction that was my first indication there was anything wrong.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Strong
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I'm leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Successful
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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.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Christian
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I read more widely. I made friends more widely. I wore more red. I stayed home on Sundays. I did things that were never in the realm of possible things to do before. That was a real desert experience for me.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Real
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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.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Way
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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.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Jobs
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I'm in a mainline church, I'm very aware, especially as I move through community churches and new-start churches that are making real efforts not to associate themselves with traditional denominations - very often they have no history. They have no institutional memory.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Memories
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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.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Aunt
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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.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: People
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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.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Religious
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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.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Community
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Church can be extremely boring. It can be very meaningful, it can be character forming, but can be have very little fizz in it.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Meaningful
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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.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Community
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It's difficult for me to ignore how many conflicts locally and worldwide have religion tagged to them.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Conflict
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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.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Collection: Reality