Site uses cookies to provide basic functionality.

OK
Search Quotes tags
Query
Tags
Author
1 2 3 ▲ ▼
Link Quote Stars Tags Author
920a9f4 Christians are not particularly gifted at knowing how we sound to others, especially in parts of the world where our voices are the loudest and most numerous. Barbara Brown Taylor
8935fe1 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. Barbara Brown Taylor
96f7ccc 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 num.. Barbara Brown Taylor
866f239 Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish--separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world. But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two. Barbara Brown Taylor
ceb9f67 To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings. --Wendell Berry Barbara Brown Taylor
cd7e15b I would have to say that at least one of the things that almost killed me was becoming a professional holy person. I am not sure that the deadliness was in the job as much as it was in the way I did it, but I now have higher regard than ever for clergy who are able to wear their mantles without mistaking the fabric for their own skin. As many years as I wanted to wear a clerical collar and as hard as I worked to get one, taking it off turne.. Barbara Brown Taylor
d8e6c43 One of the main things that tip people toward garden-variety depression, she says, is a "low tolerance for sadness." It is the inability to bear dark emotions that causes many of our most significant problems, in other words, and 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 .. Barbara Brown Taylor
e87e63c Human beings have a hard time regarding anything beautiful without wanting to devour it. Barbara Brown Taylor
c2fe73d Spending extended amounts of time inside other religious worldviews has loosened the screws on my own, which is beginning to seem like a good thing. Disowning God has been a great help to me. Owning my distinct view of God has helped me understand it much better. Although I can see the places where religious truth claims collide, this does not bother me as much as it could. I am far more interested in how people live than what they believe... Barbara Brown Taylor
07193a2 Religions are treasure chests of stories, songs, rituals, and ways of life that have been handed down for millennia - not covered in dust but evolving all the way- so that each new generation has something to choose from when it is time to ask the big questions in life. Where did we come from? Why do bad things happen to good people? Who is my neighbor? Where do we go from here? No one should have to start from scratch with questions like t.. wisdom questions-in-life religion-spirituality barbara brown taylor
da71b6b 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 per.. Barbara Brown Taylor
22067be They sounded different from the mouth of a young mother than they did from the mouth of a widow. This was because the words did not come straight off the page. They percolated up through the silt and gravel of real people's lives so that the meaning in them was fluid, not fixed. Barbara Brown Taylor
df2a56b Seek not to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; rather, seek what they sought.1 --Gautama Buddha Barbara Brown Taylor
8dda44c being ordained is not about serving God perfectly but about serving God visibly, allowing other people to learn whatever they can from watching you rise and fall. Barbara Brown Taylor
c4a2dd1 If Bible lovers paid as much attention to Leviticus 25 as to Leviticus 18, then we might discover that God is at least as interested in economics as in sex. Barbara Brown Taylor
21ea654 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. Barbara Brown Taylor
8bdcbc8 Instead, I 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 Taylor
677978a We have just enough religion to make us hate one another," Jonathan Swift once observed, "but not enough to make us love one another." Barbara Brown Taylor
1a3b669 For those willing to keep heaving themselves toward the light, things can change. What has been lost gradually becomes less important than what is to be found. Curiosity pokes its green head up through the asphalt of grief, and fear of the unknown takes on an element of wonder as the disillusioned turn away from the God who was supposed to be in order to seek the God who is. Every letdown becomes a lesson and a lure. Did God fail to come wh.. Barbara Brown Taylor
1a0bc18 This is not a how-to book, but if it were, the only instruction would be to become more curious about your own darkness. What can you learn about your fear of it by staying with it for a moment before turning on the lights? Where can you feel the fear in your body? When have you felt that way before? What are you afraid is going to happen to you, and what is your mind telling you to do about it? What stories do you tell yourself to keep you.. Barbara Brown Taylor
c24cc7a After years of being taught that the way to deal with painful emotions is to get rid of them, it can take a lot of reschooling to learn to sit with them instead, finding out from those who feel them what they have learned by sleeping in the wilderness that those who sleep in comfortable houses may never know. emotional-intelligence emotional-pain emotions-quotes emotions Barbara Brown Taylor
f86fceb Whatever I decided to do for a living, it was not what I did but how I did it that mattered. Barbara Brown Taylor
0912796 I always wondered why it took "three days" for significant things to happen in the Bible--Jonah spent three days in the belly of the whale, Jesus spent three days in the tomb, Paul spent three days blind in Damascus--and now I know. From earliest times, people learned that was how long they had to wait in the dark before the sliver of the new moon appeared in the sky. For three days every month they practiced resurrection." moon resurrection Barbara Brown Taylor
6ded1ec 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. Barbara Brown Taylor
7350781 Our shadows are often behind us, where others can see them better than we can. Barbara Brown Taylor
b04642a Do you have a body? Don't sit on the porch! Go out and walk in the rain! If you are in love, then why are you asleep? Wake up, wake up! You have slept millions and millions of years. Why not wake up this morning? Barbara Brown Taylor
dc809e3 I thought that being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was, in other words, and it was not until this project failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness. Barbara Brown Taylor
3bff2bf Since some people consider being human a liability, and "fully" would only make things worse, I should perhaps explain what I mean. To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else's hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basi.. Barbara Brown Taylor
c228d29 Maybe that is the difference between pastoral counselors and spiritual directors. We go to counselors when we want help getting out of caves. We go to directors when we are ready to be led farther in. I Barbara Brown Taylor
4c7aacf Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish--separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world. But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two. Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars. Barbara Brown Taylor
59d2e6a I produced a fulsome sermon. When the appointed Sunday arrived, I used all of my best grooming skills. I picked the cat hairs off my most expensive suit, smoothed my hair, and put a Band-aid on the thumb I had chewed while working overtime on my sermon. Once I met the delegation at church I did my best to dazzle them, and after the service was over we sat for almost two hours in a Sunday School room as I answered question after question abo.. Barbara Brown Taylor
dfe3729 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 clas.. Barbara Brown Taylor
c295d66 Contrary to popular opinion, all religions are not alike. Their followers see the world in very distinct ways. Their understandings of the human condition proceed from different assumptions, leading them to propose different remedies. If I had been able to resist the wisdom they offered me - if I had been able to keep my Christian glasses on, so that I only saw what those prescription lenses allowed me to see - then I might have emerged unc.. Barbara Brown Taylor
c75f9bf Come to think of it, I do know one preacher who tried something like that - from the pulpit of a cathedral in a major city, no less. I do not remember what the subject of her sermon was, only the response to it. She must have suggested that the Christian way was one among many ways to God (a wave and not the ocean), because afterward a man came up to her and said, 'If God isn't partial to Christianity, then what am I doing here?' I wish or.. Barbara Brown Taylor
8931f68 I 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 Taylor
b089538 The wind smelled like the moon. I went up there so many times in the weeks that followed that I no longer remember which night it was that God finally answered my prayer. I do not think it was right at the beginning, when I was still saying my prayers in words. I think it came later, when I had graduated to inchoate sounds. Up on that fire escape, I learned to pray the way a wolf howls. I learned to pray the way that Ella Fitzgerald sang sc.. Barbara Brown Taylor
ffbc324 When religious arguments based on the perspective of a single century or culture reach a high pitch, or when people who seem to have read only excerpts of the Bible use it to propose legislation, I return to the Book - not to find a solution, but to remember how many possibilities there are. Barbara Brown Taylor
99530fa It was not until I began meeting people of other faiths in their most sacred spaces that I learned how bruised some of them were by Christian evangelism. Worshippers at the Hindu Temple returned to the parking lot after one of their major festivals to find Christians by their cars with pamphlets demeaning their holiday. Muslims were used to Christians saying malicious things about the Qur'an. Native Americans were tired of being asked what .. Barbara Brown Taylor
1f14b6b Ask anyone what she means when she says 'God' and chances are that you will learn a lot more about that person than you will learn about God. Barbara Brown Taylor
cbf88a3 As hard as I have tried to remember the exact moment when I fell in love with God, I cannot do it. My earliest memories are bathed in a kind of golden light that seemed to embrace me as surely as my mother's arms. Barbara Brown Taylor
40e01c8 The most deeply one sinks into one's own religious truth,' Knitter says, 'the more broadly one can appreciate and learn from other truths.' That has been true for me, both as a teacher and as a spiritual seeker. Unlike the young man bent on keeping his Christian faith uncontested and pure, I have gained insight every time I have put mine to the test. Sometimes the results are distressing, as when I find the silence of the meditation bench .. Barbara Brown Taylor
d5ffc06 Pema Chodron did not become one of my teachers until I had almost finished writing, but she diagnosed the problem so well that I can no longer say it without her help. We are all so busy constructing zones of safety that keep breaking down, she says, that we hardly notice where all the suffering is coming from. We keep thinking that the problem is out there, in the things that scare us: dark nights, dark thoughts, dark guests, dark emotions.. Barbara Brown Taylor
34d7e57 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.. religion respecting-others neighbor-quotes pluralism Barbara Brown Taylor
f135c23 Later, when I stood in front of an alter waving incense, I would remember standing in front of the bar at Dante's waving cigarette smoke out of my face, and the exact same feeling of tenderness would wash over me, because the people in both places were so much alike. We were all seeking company, meaning, solace, self-forgetfulness. Whether we found those things or not, it was the seeking that led us to find each other in the cloud even when.. darkness searaching sacred Barbara Brown Taylor
1 2 3 ▲ ▼