Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLORThe poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent.
More Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes
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Science is not metaphorical. Science is scientific.
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I don’t have time for a job that doesn’t leave me time to be quiet or still or to pray.
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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.
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Day 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.
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Church can be extremely boring. It can be very meaningful, it can be character forming, but can be have very little fizz in it.
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Science is not metaphorical. Science is scientific.
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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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I decided I got to say whether I was Christian or not, and so I’ve relaxed enormously since then. I’m the one who gets to say that, and not someone else.
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When I forget the power of the word, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget the deep relief of telling the truth, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget to look for the holiness all around me, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget why the gospel matters, I read Frederick Buechner.
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That’s enough, and I have a ministry as a neighbor as well. A ministry as a friend and a ministry as an aunt and a godmother, and family is very much in the circle of my vocation.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Divine reality is not way up in the sky somewhere; it is readily available in the encounters of everyday life, which make hash of my illusions that I can control the ways God comes to me.
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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 became so attentive to the souls of other people that I was not as attentive as I might have been to my own.
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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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Humanity can be pretty stinky.
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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.
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Most 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.
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To get God on your side is a great way to feel powerful.
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We 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.
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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.
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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.
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Having been brought up with a definition of faith as adherence to a set of beliefs, I have more and more begun to turn instead toward a definition of faith as openness to truth, whatever truth may turn out to be.
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God does some of God’s best work with people who are seriously lost.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR