Quotes from Barbara Brown Taylor

The last thing any of us needs is more information *about* God.

I remained aware enough of social sins to be surprised when religious people wanted to focus on sexual sins instead. I suppose that when poverty, crime, and degradation of the environment start looking unbeatable, then it is predictable that people will shift their attention to an enemy who seems easier to attack.

So of course when it came time to decide what to do with my life, I decided to go to seminary. What else do you do when you are in love with God?

How wonderful of [Jesus] to come back undercover, so that even the people who knew him best had to look, then look again, before they got the crawly feeling that they had seen him somewhere before. It was the perfect setup for people who wanted to know what made him different from anyone else they had met: his ability to reflect their humanity back to them, both familiar and strange, so that they never got tired of searching each other's faces for some sign of him.

If I trust what I see on my phone more than what I see out my window, what does it mean to believe that the real world is not where I live?

An unguarded face is a deep well; you don't go there casually, without ropes or lamps.

It just seems helpful to admit that Christianity is as complicated and conflicted as any other religion, with groups of followers who can believe in the unity of their faith even as they refuse Communion to one another.

Somewhere along the line we bought—or were sold—the idea that God is chiefly interested in religion. We believed that God's home was

The Franciscan father Richard Rohr had his eye on a different planetary body when he said, 'We are all of us pointing toward the same moon, and yet we persist in arguing about who has the best finger.

It was when your partner left you that you remembered what else you meant to do in your life beyond staying together.

A priest is a priest, no matter where she happens to be. Her job is to recognize the holiness in things and hold them up to God. Her job is to speak in ways that help other people recognize the holiness in things too.

I had refused the body and blood of Christ because it was painful to the person beside me. I had chosen to abstain with him rather than to participate without him. Though I knew full well that he did not expect that of me - that it was possible for a full-fledged Christian and a full-fledged Jew to stand together in their difference - at that moment I did not want to celebrate any Communion that did not include him.

I had lived so long in the mainstream that I never even though about how I sounded from the margins

I spent a great deal of time trying to be good, but was good the same as whole?

I was so busy serving the Divine Presence that we never got any time alone anymore.

Anyone who stands up in front of other human beings to speak knows what a frightful gift it is. This power of ours has no safety catch on it. We are as likely to make nothing out of something as the other way around.

People ask me: why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way the others do? The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. —M. F. K. Fisher

I am not sure whether the virtue of holy envy requires holy humility or creates it, but the two are clearly related. After you have allowed the other to define herself, listening carefully to all the ways in which she is not you, it is hard to overlook the fact that you and she are made of the same basic material. You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Tame worship is easier to agree on than any other kind, and bringing fire requires a lot more energy than simply showing up. When life is pretty good and church is pleasant enough, who needs resurrection?

Without benefit of maturity or therapy, I had no way of knowing that the darkness was as much inside me as it was outside me, or that I had any power to affect its hold on me.

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. Wise people do not have to be certain what they believe before they act. They are free to act, trusting that the practice itself will teach them what they need to know.

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people. —Carl Jung

Here is a law as reliable as gravity: The degree to which we believe our faith is makes us human is the same degree with which we will question the humanity of those who do not share our faith.

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. So welcome to your own priesthood, practiced at the altar of your own life. The good news is that you have everything you need to begin.