Famous Quotes & Sayings

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Barbara Brown Taylor.

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Famous Quotes By Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes 1354118

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

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Science is not metaphorical. Science is scientific. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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I can't help but note that God is being useful to a lot of people trying to do harm to one another. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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

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New life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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Kindness is not a bad religion, no matter what name you use for God. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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

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To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings. - Wendell Berry — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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

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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. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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Humanity can be pretty stinky. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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There is a light that shines in the darkness, which is only visible there. — 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

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They sounded different from the mouth of a young mother than they did from the mouth of a widow. This was because the words did not come straight off the page. They percolated up through the silt and gravel of real people's lives so that the meaning in them was fluid, not fixed. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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Our comfort or discomfort with the outer dark is a good barometer of how we feel about the inner kind. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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

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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

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If I have any expertise, it is in the realm of spiritual darkness: fear of the unknown, familiarity with divine absence, mistrust of conventional wisdom, suspicion of religious comforters, keen awareness of the limits of all language about God and at the same time shame over my inability to speak of God without a thousand qualifiers, doubt about the health of my soul, and barely suppressed contempt for those who have no such qualms. These are the areas of my proficiency. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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

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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

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Those of us who wish to draw near to God should not be surprised when our vision goes cloudy, for this is a sign that we are approaching the opaque splendor of God. If we decide to keep going beyond the point where our eyes or minds are any help to us, we may finally arrive at the pinnacle of the spiritual journey toward God, which exists in complete and dazzling darkness. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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

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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. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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

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People encounter God under shady oak trees, on riverbanks, at the tops of mountains, and in long stretches of barren wilderness. God shows up in whirlwinds, starry skies, burning bushes, and perfect strangers. When people want to know more about God, the son of God tells them to pay attention to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, to women kneading bread and workers lining up for their pay. Whoever wrote this stuff believed that people could learn as much about the ways of God from paying attention to the world as they could from paying attention to scripture. What is true is what happens, even if what happens is not always right. People can learn as much about the ways of God from business deals gone bad or sparrows falling to the ground as they can from reciting the books of the Bible in order. They can learn as much from a love affair or a wildflower as they can from knowing the Ten Commandments by heart. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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I would have to say that at least one of the things that almost killed me was becoming a professional holy person. I am not sure that the deadliness was in the job as much as it was in the way I did it, but I now have higher regard than ever for clergy who are able to wear their mantles without mistaking the fabric for their own skin. As many years as I wanted to wear a clerical collar and as hard as I worked to get one, taking it off turned out to be as necessary for my salvation as putting it on. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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

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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

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If you have ever belonged to such a community, however, you may have discovered that the trouble starts when darkness falls on your life, which can happen in any number of unsurprising ways: you lose your job, your marriage falls apart, your child acts out in some attention getting way, you pray hard for something that does not happen, you begin to doubt some of the things you have been taught about what the Bible says. The first time you speak of these things in a full solar church, you can usually get a hearing. Continue to speak of them and you may be reminded that God will not let you be tested beyond your strength. All that is required of you is to have faith. If you still do not get the message, sooner or later it will be made explicit for you: the darkness is your own fault, because you do not have enough faith. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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

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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

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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

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I'm leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." Those most likely to befriend strangers, in other words, are those who have been strangers themselves. The best way to grow empathy for those who are lost is to know what it means to be lost yourself. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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Who had persuaded me that God preferred four walls and a roof to wide-open spaces? When had I made the subtle switch myself, becoming convinced that church bodies and buildings were the safest and most reliable places to encounter the living God? — Barbara Brown Taylor

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But I know that I have an easier time loving humankind than I do loving particular human beings. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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To get God on your side is a great way to feel powerful. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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

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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

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I became so attentive to the souls of other people that I was not as attentive as I might have been to my own. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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

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The great wisdom traditions of the world all recognize that the main impediment to living a life of meaning is being self-absorbed. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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

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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

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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. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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

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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

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E. B. White once wrote, I can't decide whether to enjoy the world or improve the world; that makes it difficult to plan the day. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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.' — Barbara Brown Taylor

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To see takes time, like having a friend takes time. It is as simple as turning off the television to learn the song of a single bird. Why should anyone do such things? I cannot imagine - unless one is weary of crossing days off the calendar with no sense of what makes the last day different from the next. Unless one is weary of acting in what feels more like a television commercial than a life. The practice of paying attention offers no quick fix for such weariness, with guaranteed results printed on the side. Instead, it is one way into a different way of life, full of treasure for those who are willing to pay attention to exactly where they are. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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

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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

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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

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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. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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Even when light fades and darkness falls--as it does every single day, in every single life--God does not turn the world over to some other deity...Here is the testimony of faith; darkness is not dark to God; the night is as bright as the day. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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." — Barbara Brown Taylor

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To make bread or love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger - these activities require no extensive commentary, no lucid theology. All they require is someone willing to bend, reach, chop, stir. Most of these tasks are so full of pleasure that there is no need to complicate things by calling them holy. And yet these are the same activities that change lives, sometimes all at once and sometimes more slowly, the way dripping water changes stone. 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. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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I think we d like life to be like a train..but it turns out to be a sailboat. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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This is good, and all good things cast shadows. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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According to the Talmud, every blade of grass has its own angel bending over it, whispering, Grow, grow. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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Beliefs have become unimportant to me. Faith as radical trust became even more important to me. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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

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Salvation is not something that happens only at the end of a person's life. Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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

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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

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Sometimes I wondered if it even mattered whether our communion cups were filled with consecrated wine or draft beer, as long as we bent over them long enough to recognize each other as kin. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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

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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. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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Human beings have a hard time regarding anything beautiful without wanting to devour it. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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

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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

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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

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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

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God does some of God's best work with people who are seriously lost. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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I had arrived at an understanding of faith that had far more to do with trust than with certainty. I trusted God to be God even if I could not say who God was for sure. I trusted God to sustain the world although I could not say for sure how that happened. I trusted God to hold me and those I loved, in life and in death, without giving me one shred of conclusive evidence that it was so. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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Busy? The word loses all meaning under the canopy of this sky. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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I am not in charge of this House, and never will be. I have no say about who is in and who is out. I do not get to make the rules. Like Job, I was nowhere when God laid the foundations of the earth. I cannot bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion. I do not even know when the mountain goats give birth, much less the ordinances of the heavens. I am a guest here, charged with serving other guests - even those who present themselves as my enemies. I am allowed to resist them, but as long as I trust in one God who made us all, I cannot act as if they are no kin to me. There is only one House. Human beings will either learn to live in it together or we will not survive to hear its sigh of relief when our numbered days are done. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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

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I produced a fulsome sermon. When the appointed Sunday arrived, I used all of my best grooming skills. I picked the cat hairs off my most expensive suit, smoothed my hair, and put a Band-aid on the thumb I had chewed while working overtime on my sermon. Once I met the delegation at church I did my best to dazzle them, and after the service was over we sat for almost two hours in a Sunday School room as I answered question after question about my history, my beliefs, my weaknesses, and my strengths. One man on the committee noticed the Band-aid on my thumb. "What did you do to yourself?" he asked sympathetically. "I cut it while I was cooking, "I lied. — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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

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Even religious people are vulnerable to this longing. Those who belong to communities of faith have acquired a certain patience with what is sometimes called organized religion. They have learned to forgive themselves. They do not expect their institutions to stand in for God, and they are happy to use inherited maps for some of life's journeys. They do not need to walk off every cliff all by themselves. Yet they too can harbor the sense that there is more to life that they are being shown. Where is the secret hidden? Who has the key to the treasure box of More? — Barbara Brown Taylor

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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. — Barbara Brown Taylor