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 TAYLORThe 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.
More Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes
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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.
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Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead.
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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.
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Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.
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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.
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I wanted to be as close as I could to the Really Real, and I’ll capitalize both of those R’s, because God is a word that means different things to different people, but we might all agree it’s what is most real.
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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 -
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.
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I can’t help but note that God is being useful to a lot of people trying to do harm to one another.
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I love being alone. I learned that from my father, I think, who loved his own company.
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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.
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I think we d like life to be like a train..but it turns out to be a sailboat.
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Beliefs have become unimportant to me. Faith as radical trust became even more important to me.
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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.
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The only real difference between Anxiety and Excitement was my willingness to let go of Fear.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR