Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes - Page 4

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.

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.

I don't have time for a job that doesn't leave me time to be quiet or still or to pray.

You can create an intimate community of about 20 or 25 people, and beyond that you're into a different kind of relationship.

I didn't want to be a priest. I wanted to do the work that priests do, and that required becoming a priest.

I 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.

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.

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.

I'm in a mainline church, I'm very aware, especially as I move through community churches and new-start churches that are making real efforts not to associate themselves with traditional denominations - very often they have no history. They have no institutional memory.

You probably can't get much closer to God than serving a congregation 24/7. At the same time, there's a different kind of closeness in this present life I have in which I have much more freedom to come and go and to engage some of the silence and stillness and solitude that I was missing before.

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.

Because I'm a "strong person," the symptoms hit me by surprise. It was, as I write in the book, stinging in my eyes after Sunday that I thought was an allergy, until one day I sat in the car and decided to just let my eyes tear up so that whatever was in them would come out, and what came out were tears that wouldn't stop. It was literally a physical reaction that was my first indication there was anything wrong.

I'm leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.

For a long time I listened to other people to decide whether I was still Christian or not, and I would sort of vet myself by the traditional formulae.

I read more widely. I made friends more widely. I wore more red. I stayed home on Sundays. I did things that were never in the realm of possible things to do before. That was a real desert experience for me.

The boundaries became constrictive in what I was doing, and if my faith grew, it was because I pressed some of the boundaries in ways I hadn't felt comfortable or responsible doing that before.

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.

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.

If God is about putting God ahead of myself then I've just quit being religious, because that's what got me into such deep trouble.

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.

I don't miss the ministry, because I'm completely engaged in it. In terms of parish ministry, I miss the intimacy with a group of people.

Church can be extremely boring. It can be very meaningful, it can be character forming, but can be have very little fizz in it.

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.