Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes

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.

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

Science is not metaphorical. Science is scientific.

Humanity can be pretty stinky.

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

To be fully human is perhaps why I'm Christian, because I see in the life of Jesus a way of being fully human.

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 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.

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

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.

This is good, and all good things cast shadows.

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

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

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

When I say I trust Jesus, that is what I mean: I trust that the way of life leads through perishability, not around it.

Beliefs have become unimportant to me. Faith as radical trust became even more important to me.

Human beings have a hard time regarding anything beautiful without wanting to devour it.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I love being alone. I learned that from my father, I think, who loved his own company.

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

Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.

The only real difference between Anxiety and Excitement was my willingness to let go of Fear.

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

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

Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.

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.

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

I'm a follower of the Christ path, and that opens a huge discussion about what we even mean by words like "Christian."

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.

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

I didn't want to be a priest. I wanted to do the work that priests do, and that required becoming a priest.

Busy? The word loses all meaning under the canopy of this sky.

To get God on your side is a great way to feel powerful.

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.

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

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

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.