Quotes from Barbara Brown Taylor

Another favorite hymn mourns Israel's lonely exile from the Son of God. Another years for a future in which every knee will bow to Jesus. Another urges Christian soldiers onward, marching as to war. When I imagined singing it with a Muslim or Hindu student sitting next to me, my voice dried up. It was a song for insiders, not outsiders. If I had learned anything from going on all of those class field trips, it was how religious language sounds to outsiders, and how much that matters.

The soul does not grow by addition but by subtraction," wrote the fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart.

As much as I admire the brilliance of the Jewish Talmud—especially the way it hallows sacred debate across the centuries—I cannot have it. It belongs to those in whose lifeblood it was written. As much as my soul leans toward the whirling of the Sufis who bring heaven to earth with their ethereal spinning, I cannot have that either. It belongs to those who have devoted their lives to the love of Allah.

This kind of holy envy comes with its own safeguard. Although I am allowed to admire what is growing in the well-tended fields of my religious neighbors, I am not allowed to pull off the road and help myself. The things I envy have their own terroir, their own long histories of weather and fertilization. They do not exist to serve me, improve me, or profit me.

In my case, the attention deficit was all mine. I had moved to the country in order to lie down in more blessed fields, to live closer to the Divine Presence that had held me all my life, but I had once again become so busy caring for the household of God that I neglected the One who had called me there. If I still had plenty of energy for the work, that was because feeding others was still my food. As long as I fed them, I did not feel my hunger pains.

It is a great thing to see something familiar from an unfamiliar angle for the first time, even if it is because you have been worried and lost for longer than you would have liked.

We wanted More. We wanted a deeper sense of purpose. We wanted a stronger sense of God's presence.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

This is one of the reasons why I remain a devoted student of the Bible: because what it says is so often not what I have been taught it says, or what I think it says, or what I want it to say.

AS IMPORTANT AS IT IS to mark the places where we meet God, I worry about what happens when we build a house for God.

To be human is to live by sunlight and moonlight, with anxiety and delight, admitting limits and transcending them, falling down and rising up.

Although I am allowed to admire what is growing in the well-tended fields of my religious neighbors, I am not allowed to pull off the road and help myself. The things I envy have their own terroir , their own long histories of weather and fertilization. They do not exist to serve me, improve me, or profit me. They have their own dominion.

And when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left, your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, "This is the way; walk in it." —Isaiah 30:21

Is Christian faith primarily about being Christian or becoming truly human?

Because we cannot stand the God-shaped hole inside of us, we try stuffing it full of all sorts of thing, but only God may fill.

Come tell us what is saving your life now

I know that when religious people are feeling overwhelmed by a world with little use for their ancient truths, they can find new meaning by identifying a great evil to oppose.

However you define the problematic present-day stranger—the religious stranger, the cultural stranger, the transgendered stranger, the homeless stranger—scripture's wildly impractical solution is to love the stranger as the self.

if you always do what you have always done, then you will always get what you have always got. Extreme measures are sometimes called for, and these measures sometimes even produce results.

about that too, ma'am," he said, writing up her citation, "but what made

The problem was that I could not teach other people's religions without loving them as I loved my own, or at least giving it my best shot.

Prayer, according to Brother David, is waking up to the presence of God no matter where I am or what I am doing. When I am fully alert to whatever or whoever is right in front of me; when I am electrically aware of the tremendous gift of being alive; when I am able to give myself wholly to the moment I am in, then I am in prayer. 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.

Think hard before you do this," one said to me when I told him I wanted to be ordained. "Right now, you have the broadest ministry imaginable. As a layperson, you can serve God no matter what you do for a living, and you can reach out to people who will never set foot inside a church. Once you are ordained, that is going to change. Every layer of responsibility you add is going to narrow your ministry, so think hard before you choose a smaller box.

Most of us prefer to remain on our cow paths, where we know the language and we do not need maps because we know the way by heart. Some of us even stay behind our own fences because we do not want to be mistaken for interlopers in other people's pastures