Quotes from Barbara Brown Taylor

The soul does not grow by addition but by subtraction," wrote the fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart.

As much as I admire the brilliance of the Jewish Talmud—especially the way it hallows sacred debate across the centuries—I cannot have it. It belongs to those in whose lifeblood it was written. As much as my soul leans toward the whirling of the Sufis who bring heaven to earth with their ethereal spinning, I cannot have that either. It belongs to those who have devoted their lives to the love of Allah.

This kind of holy envy comes with its own safeguard. Although I am allowed to admire what is growing in the well-tended fields of my religious neighbors, I am not allowed to pull off the road and help myself. The things I envy have their own terroir, their own long histories of weather and fertilization. They do not exist to serve me, improve me, or profit me.

In my case, the attention deficit was all mine. I had moved to the country in order to lie down in more blessed fields, to live closer to the Divine Presence that had held me all my life, but I had once again become so busy caring for the household of God that I neglected the One who had called me there. If I still had plenty of energy for the work, that was because feeding others was still my food. As long as I fed them, I did not feel my hunger pains.

It is a great thing to see something familiar from an unfamiliar angle for the first time, even if it is because you have been worried and lost for longer than you would have liked.

We wanted More. We wanted a deeper sense of purpose. We wanted a stronger sense of God's presence.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

This is one of the reasons why I remain a devoted student of the Bible: because what it says is so often not what I have been taught it says, or what I think it says, or what I want it to say.

As important as it is to mark the places where we meet God, I worry about what happens when we build a house for God.

To be human is to live by sunlight and moonlight, with anxiety and delight, admitting limits and transcending them, falling down and rising up.

Although I am allowed to admire what is growing in the well-tended fields of my religious neighbors, I am not allowed to pull off the road and help myself. The things I envy have their own terroir , their own long histories of weather and fertilization. They do not exist to serve me, improve me, or profit me. They have their own dominion.

Is Christian faith primarily about being Christian or becoming truly human?