Top 95 Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes

#1. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #21892
#2. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #36309
#3. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #75833
#4. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #87436
#5. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #99779
#6. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #116629
#7. Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish - separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world. But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #117801
#8. 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.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #126605
#9. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #145702
#10. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #166090
#11. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #168526
#12. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #179117
#13. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #192674
#14. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #215302
#15. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #217969
#16. But I know that I have an easier time loving humankind than I do loving particular human beings.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #231693
#17. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #237860
#18. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #250386
#19. It's difficult for me to ignore how many conflicts locally and worldwide have religion tagged to them.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #273213
#20. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #293646
#21. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #298271
#22. There is a light that shines in the darkness, which is only visible there.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #301771
#23. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #321119
#24. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #335741
#25. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #345821
#26. I love being alone. I learned that from my father, I think, who loved his own company.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #351720
#27. This is good, and all good things cast shadows.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #374856
#28. Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #376256
#29. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #392295
#30. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #395389
#31. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #405248
#32. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #410270
#33. 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.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #414293
#34. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #417200
#35. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #439554
#36. 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.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #452003
#37. During the day it is hard to remember that all the stars in the sky are out there all the time, even when I am too blinded by the sum to see them

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #532011
#38. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #541113
#39. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #552602
#40. Beliefs have become unimportant to me. Faith as radical trust became even more important to me.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #563916
#41. 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.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #651265
#42. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #664410
#43. Humanity can be pretty stinky.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #666618
#44. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings. - Wendell Berry

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #684711
#45. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #741466
#46. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #816720
#47. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #837741
#48. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #908665
#49. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #916155
#50. Kindness is not a bad religion, no matter what name you use for God.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #922256
#51. God does some of God's best work with people who are seriously lost.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #938770
#52. The only real difference between Anxiety and Excitement was my willingness to let go of Fear.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #945800
#53. When I stopped trying to block my sadness and let it move me instead, it led me to a bridge with people on the other side. ... I learned that sadness does not sink a person; it is the energy a person spends trying to avoid sadness that does that.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #976165
#54. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #984079
#55. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #987181
#56. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #998878
#57. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1000962
#58. Our comfort or discomfort with the outer dark is a good barometer of how we feel about the inner kind.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1011544
#59. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1020839
#60. Human beings have a hard time regarding anything beautiful without wanting to devour it.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1064709
#61. Busy? The word loses all meaning under the canopy of this sky.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1084446
#62. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1087797
#63. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1089815
#64. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1095958
#65. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1136527
#66. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1139298
#67. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1170382
#68. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1214239
#69. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1221831
#70. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1257302
#71. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1258793
#72. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1260777
#73. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1261650
#74. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1302918
#75. 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.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1406516
#76. I think we d like life to be like a train..but it turns out to be a sailboat.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1458512
#77. I wish I could turn to the church for help, but so many congregations are preoccupied with keeping the lights on right now that the last thing they want to talk about is how to befriend the dark.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1486562
#78. Science is not metaphorical. Science is scientific.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1490841
#79. To get God on your side is a great way to feel powerful.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1493244
#80. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1572885
#81. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1576435
#82. I'm leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1589209
#83. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1592627
#84. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1613963
#85. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1648932
#86. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1661019
#87. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1716838
#88. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1717275
#89. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1777294
#90. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1788938
#91. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1791866
#92. According to the Talmud, every blade of grass has its own angel bending over it, whispering, Grow, grow.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1793196
#93. The poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1795201
#94. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1811046
#95. 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

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes #1832902

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