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.

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.

Reason can only work with the experience available to it. Wisdom atrophies if it is not walked on a regular basis.

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.

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

No one had to tell me why Martha stayed in the kitchen while her sister Mary sat at Jesus's feet. Martha was an introvert. She found chopping potatoes far less exhausting than talking to people, and besides, she could hear everything they were saying right where she was without having to come up with something to say herself.

All these years later, I recognize this as the way that winners often speak of those they have harmed beyond repair. Trying to find some way to live with what we have done, we find solace in the idea that their doom was their own doing.

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

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.

If you are not able to set priorities any other way, then getting lost may be the kick in the pants you have been waiting for.

If I have any expertise, it is in the realm of spiritual darkness: fear of the unknown, familiarity with divine absence, mistrust of conventional wisdom, suspicion of religious comforters, keen awareness of the limits of all language about God and at the same time shame over my inability to speak of God without a thousand qualifiers, doubt about the health of my soul, and barely suppressed contempt for those who have no such qualms. These are the areas of my proficiency.

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.