Barbara Brown Taylor
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.Collection: Meaningful
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.Collection: Mean
In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of lifeCollection: Thinking
Beliefs have become unimportant to me. Faith as radical trust became even more important to me.Collection: Important
When I say I trust Jesus, that is what I mean: I trust that the way of life leads through perishability, not around it.Collection: Jesus
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.Collection: Air
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.Collection: Ideas
I live by the simplest, perhaps facile command that Jesus ever gave, which is to love God with the whole self and the neighbor as the self, and I find that's entirely consuming. To do those two things leaves me very little time to do much else.Collection: Jesus
The church grew, and I gained a reputation for preaching, and people came, and it was a wonderful community. But we had a building that seated 82 people, and with a congregation then approaching 400 we were up to four services on Sunday, and everyone was tired.Collection: Tired
I can't help but note that God is being useful to a lot of people trying to do harm to one another.Collection: People
Humanity can be pretty stinky.Collection: Humanity
I know that the Bible is a special kind of book, but I find it as seductive as any other. If I am not careful, I can begin to mistake the words on the page for the realities they describe. I can begin to love the dried ink marks on the page more than I love the encounters that gave rise to them.Collection: Mistake
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.Collection: Real
I went to the little church in the country after ten years in the city. And part of my dream was to sit on people's front porches with glasses of iced tea, and all that happened. I was able to send birthday cards to everyone in the parish and able to know everyone who was there on Sunday by name. And that was what I'd been looking for.Collection: Dream
There was no time anymore to be quiet or still or pray. So, in many ways, that's what led to my downward spin.Collection: Way
I decided I got to say whether I was Christian or not, and so I've relaxed enormously since then. I'm the one who gets to say that, and not someone else.Collection: Christian
Science is not metaphorical. Science is scientific.Collection: Metaphorical
I became so attentive to the souls of other people that I was not as attentive as I might have been to my own.Collection: People
I love being alone. I learned that from my father, I think, who loved his own company.Collection: Father
I found myself in a maze where I'd taken the wrong turn. In my wish to do well for that congregation I wasn't doing particularly well for myself or my friends or my family, and I even found that the work for God was taking me away from God.Collection: Taken
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.Collection: Heart
To get God on your side is a great way to feel powerful.Collection: Powerful
I think we d like life to be like a train..but it turns out to be a sailboat.Collection: Thinking
I thought being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was...it wasn't until I failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness.Collection: Faithful
With all the conceptual truths in the universe at His disposal [Jesus] did not give them something to think about together when He was gone. Instead, He gave them concrete things to do - specific ways of being together in their bodies - that would go on teaching them what they needed to know when He was no longer around to teach them Himself ... "Do this" He said - not believe this but do this - "in remembrance of me.Collection: Jesus
I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place. We are a motley crew, distinguished not only by our inability to explain ourselves to those who are more certain of their beliefs than we are but in many cases by our distance from the centers of our faith communities as well.Collection: Religious
Contrary to popular opinion, Christians are not nice polite people who never get angry with one another. Those are not the virtues of God's people. Our virtues are truth-telling, kindness, forgiveness and yes, even anger-as long as it is the anger that is part of true love-through which we move closer to one another and to the God who has shown us how it is done.Collection: Christian
Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead.Collection: Keys
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.Collection: Names
There comes a time when it is vitally important for your spiritual health to drop your clothes, look in the mirror, and say, ‘Here I am. This is the body-like-no-other that my life has shaped. I live here. This is my soul’s addressCollection: Spiritual
The great wisdom traditions of the world all recognize that the main impediment to living a life of meaning is being self-absorbed.Collection: Self
The only real difference between Anxiety and Excitement was my willingness to let go of Fear.Collection: Letting Go
As hard as I have tried to remember the exact moment when I fell in love with God, I cannot do it. My earliest memories are bathed in a kind of golden light that seemed to embrace me as surely as my mother's arms. The divine presence was strongest outdoors, and most palpable when I was alone.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Daughter
To be fully human is perhaps why I'm Christian, because I see in the life of Jesus a way of being fully human.Collection: Christian
The poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent.Collection: Church
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.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Hard Times
The great thing about civility is that it does not require you to agree with or approve of anything. You don't even have to love your neighbor to be civil. You just have to treat your neighbor the same way you would like your neighbor to treat your grandmother, or your child.Collection: Children
It can be difficult to be an introvert in church, especially if you happen to be the pastor. Liking to be alone can be interpreted as a judgment on other people's company. Liking to be quiet can be construed as aloofness. There is so much emphasis on community in most congregations that anyone who does not participate risks being labeled a loner.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Believe
I think a toxic message in a lot of Christianity has been that the self has to be annihilated in order for God to be found. I think that has been a toxic message.Collection: Thinking
I discovered a version of the sinner's prayer that increased my faith far more than the one that I had said years earlier...In this version, there were no formulas, no set phrases that promised us safe passage across the abyss. There was only our tattered trust that the Spirit who had given us life would not leave us in the wilderness without offering us life again.Collection: Prayer
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.Collection: Long
The value for me being in a mainline tradition is history and memory, which is not just Christian tradition but denominational tradition, and characters, you know, with real distinct flavors of ways to be Christian.Collection: Christian
Once I gave up the hunt for villains, I had little recourse but to take responsibility for my choices.... Needless to say, this is far less satisfying that nailing villains. It also turned out to be more healing in the end.Collection: Healing
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.'Collection: Feet