Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes

...I had spent hours talking with people who had trouble believing. For some, the issue was that they believed less than they thought they should about Jesus. They were not trouble by the idea that he may have had two human parents instead of one or that his real presence with his disciples after his death might have been more metaphysical than physical. The glory they beheld in him had more to do with the nature of his being than with the number of his miracles, but they had suffered enough at the hands of true believers to learn to keep their mouths shut.

For others, the issue was that they believed more than Jesus. Having beheld his glory, they found themselves running into God's glory all over the place, including places where Christian doctrine said that it should not be. I knew Christians who had beheld God's glory in a Lakota sweat lodge, in a sacred Celtic grove, and at the edge of a Hawaiian volcano, as well as in dreams and visions that they were afraid to tell anyone else about at all. These people not only feared being shunned for their unorthodox narratives, they also feared sharing some of the most powerful things that had ever happened to them with people who might dismiss them.

Given the history of Christians as a people who started out beholding what was beyond belief, this struck me as a lamentable state of affairs, both for those who have learned to see no more than they are supposed to see as well as for those who have excused themselves from traditional churches because they see too little or too much. If it is true that God exceeds all our efforts to contain God, then is it too big a stretch to declare that dumbfoundedness is what all Christians have most in common? Or that coming together to confess all that we do not know is at least as sacred an activity as declaring what we think we do know?

It is the inability to bear dark emotions that causes many of our most significant problems, in other words, not the emotions themselves. When we cannot tolerate the dark, we try all kinds of artificial lights, including but not limited to drugs, alcohol, shopping, shallow sex, and hours in front of the television set or computer. There are no dark emotions, Greenspan says – just unskillful ways of coping with emotions we cannot bear. The emotions themselves are conduits of pure energy that want something from us: to wake us up, to tell us something we need to know, to break the ice around our hearts, to move us to act.

Some are questioning whether the churches they grew up in have anything to offer them as they make their ways in a culture of many cultures with many views of truth, some of which make a great deal of sense to them. For those who counted on God to protect them from so many choices, it is as if the heavenly Father let go of their hand in a crowd one day and vanished into a sea of divine possibilities. I cannot protect the students in my classes from this any better than I can protect myself. Existential dizziness is one of the side effects of higher education, and it affects teachers too.

What I know and most of them do not yet is that even people who belong to the same religion do not agree about what they mean when they say 'God.

I noted that it is sometimes hard to tell whether you are being killed or saved by the hands that turn your life upside down.

1. When trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of the religion and not its enemies.
2. Don't compare your best to their worst.
3. Leave room for holy envy.

(Krister Stendahl's rules of religious understanding)

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.

You are a Jew?' the Dalai Lama asked him. When Kevin said yes, His Holiness said, 'Judaism and Buddhism are very much alike. You should learn more about both and become a better Jew.'

I envy that. My tradition has a hard time blessing strong bonds to other traditions, especially those whose truths run counter to our own. We like people to make a conscious choice for Christ and then stay on the road they have chosen, inviting other people to join them as persuasively as they can. It is difficult to imagine a Christian minister talking to a Buddhist who has spent years studying a Christian concept and then telling him to go become a better Buddhist. In some circles, that would constitute a failure on the minister's part, a missed opportunity to save a soul. This is another way in which Buddhism and Christianity differ. Both are evangelistic - what else is a Buddhist mission doing in a suburb of Atlanta? - but the Buddhists seem to understand what Gandhi meant by the 'evangelism of the rose.' Distressed by the missionary tactics of Christians in his country, he reminded them that a rose does not have to preach. It simply spreads its fragrance, allowing people to respond as they will.

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.

For reasons that will never be entirely clear, God has a soft spot for religious strangers, both as agents of divine blessing and recipients of divine grace - to the point that God sometimes chooses one of them over people who believe they should by all rights come first. This is a great mystery, but it does nothing to obscure the great commandment. In every circumstance, regardless of the outcome, the main thing Jesus has asked me to do is love God and my neighbor as religiously as I love myself. The minute I have that handled, I will ask for my next assignment. For now, my hands are full.

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.

Our shadows are often behind us, where others can see them better than we can.

According to a recent article in the New York Times, few parents expose their children to those works in the original these days, and some of their reasons make sense. Who wants children growing up with the idea that stepmothers are wicked, ugly people are evil, women can get by on their beauty, and princesses are all white? At the same time, I worry about children who grow up thinking that every story has a happy ending and no one gets permanently hurt along the way.