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.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLORAs a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLORTo 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.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLORHumanity can be pretty stinky.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLORI have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLORI live by the simplest, perhaps facile command that Jesus ever gave, which is to love God with the whole self and the neighbor as the self, and I find that’s entirely consuming. To do those two things leaves me very little time to do much else.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLORMost 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.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLORThe great thing about civility is that it does not require you to agree with or approve of anything. You don’t even have to love your neighbor to be civil. You just have to treat your neighbor the same way you would like your neighbor to treat your grandmother, or your child.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOROur 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.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLORThe value for me being in a mainline tradition is history and memory, which is not just Christian tradition but denominational tradition, and characters, you know, with real distinct flavors of ways to be Christian.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLORDay by day we are given not what we want but what we need. Sometimes it is a feast and sometimes…swept crumbs, but by faith we believe it is enough.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLORI 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.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLORI love being alone. I learned that from my father, I think, who loved his own company.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLORI 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.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLORI 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.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLORI 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.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLORWe 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.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR