99+ Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes on An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith and Church - Quotes.pub

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I no longer call such tasks “housework”. I call them the “domestic arts,” paying attention to all the ways they return me to my senses.

The faith that had sustained them through their middle years had gotten as tight as their old clothes. Their views of God, scripture, the church, and the world were all under renovation.

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?

I and everything I love have come forth from the furnace of the stars by a process so full of unfathomable, life-giving grace that my earlier worrying strikes me as cheap.

The miracle is not to walk on water but on the earth. – Thich Nhat Hanh.

What if I could learn to trust my feelings instead of asking to be delivered from them? What if I could follow one of my great fears all the way to the edge of the abyss, take a breath, and keep going? Isn’t there a chance of being surprised by what happens next? Better than that, what if I could learn how to stay in the present instead of letting my anxieties run on fast-forward?

No one’s spiritual practice is exactly like anyone else’s. Life meets each of us where we need to be met, leading us to the doors with our names on them. Yet because we are human, we almost never go where no one has gone before.

Part of my ongoing priesthood is to find the bridges between my faith and the faiths of other people, so that those of us who draw water from wells on different sides of the river can still get together from time to time, making the whole area safer for our children.

I learned that sadness does not sink a person; it is the energy a person spends trying to avoid sadness that does that.

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.

This is worrisome, not only because he is reading a translation from the original Hebrew or Greek that has already involved a great deal of interpretation, but also because it is such a short distance between believing you possess an error-free message from God and believing that you are an error-free messenger of God.

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.

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.

Anything can become a spiritual practice once you are willing to approach it that way – once you let it bring you to your knees and show you what is real, including who you really are, who other people are, and how near God can be when you have lost your way.

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

To be a priest is to know that things are not as they should be and yet to care for them the way they are.

The poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent.

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.

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.

I read science for the same reason I read theology: because I am a seeker after truth.

One of the quietest revolutions in Religion 101 follows a student’s recognition that he or she has a worldview, a particular way of viewing reality that it is not the only way. A worldview is a wave, but not the entire ocean.

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.

How many times since then have I rejected Love because it did not present itself the way I expected, in a form acceptable to me?

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.

When this young priest received my news with grace instead of anger, he reminded me that 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.

I think my idea of God was much more directive than my idea of God now, that is, a God who had one plan in mind for me, perhaps, and my job was to find out what it was and obey.

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.

I don’t have time for a job that doesn’t leave me time to be quiet or still or to pray.

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.

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?

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.

Church can be extremely boring. It can be very meaningful, it can be character forming, but can be have very little fizz in it.

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.

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

You can create an intimate community of about 20 or 25 people, and beyond that you’re into a different kind of relationship.

A bed, in short, is where you face your nearness to or farness from God. Whether you are in pain or not, whether you are an anxious person or not – even, I think, whether you are a religious person or not – a bed is where you come face-to-face with what really matters because it is too dark for most of your usual, shallowing distractions to work. You can turn on the lights if you want, but they are all artificial. The most they can do is postpone your encounter with what really matters.

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.

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.

There was no time anymore to be quiet or still or pray. So, in many ways, that’s what led to my downward spin.

The cost of the pretense was the loss of the real human texture underneath, but since we all thought that was what was expected of us, that was what we delivered.

I’m leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.

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.

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.

I miss the hot spots. I miss the hospital calls. I miss the nursing homes. I miss the really intimate human contact with other people, which I did nothing to earn.

I wanted to recover the kind of faith that has nothing to do with being sure what I believe and everything to do with trusting God to catch me though I am not sure of anything.

It’s difficult for me to ignore how many conflicts locally and worldwide have religion tagged to them.

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.

Maybe that is the difference between pastoral counselors and spiritual directors. We go to counselors when we want help getting out of caves. We go to directors when we are ready to be led farther in. I.

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.

God does some of God’s best work with people who are seriously lost.

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