Quotes from Barbara Brown Taylor
Our shadows are often behind us, where others can see them better than we can. If we want to hear and see more, even the parts that expose our scornfulness, we need partners from outside our ingroups to keep telling us how we sound.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Week after week, I was permitted to stand up in special clothes and talk while everyone else sat quietly and listened. Week after week, they heard the gospel filtered through my sensibilities. On Sunday mornings they sang the hymns I had chosen, and on Wednesday evenings they engaged the topics I had picked.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
The meaning we give to what happens in our lives is our final, inviolable freedom.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Greenspan calls this "spiritual bypassing"—using religion to dodge the dark emotions instead of letting it lead us to embrace those dark angels as the best, most demanding spiritual teachers we may ever know.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
To be human is to live by sunlight and moonlight, with anxiety and delight, admitting limits and transcending them, falling down and rising up. To want a life with only half of these things in it is to want half a life, shutting the other half away where it will not interfere with one's bright fantasies of the way things ought to be.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
if God is all-powerful and God is all-good, then why do terrible things happen to good people?
- Barbara Brown Taylor
I don't have time for a job that doesn't leave me time to be quiet or still or to pray.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
There was no time anymore to be quiet or still or pray. So, in many ways, that's what led to my downward spin.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.
- Barbara Brown Taylor
No one longs for what he or she already has, and yet the accumulated insight of those wise about the spiritual life suggests that the reason so many of us cannot see the red X that marks the spot is because we are standing on it. The treasure we seek requires no lengthy expedition, no expensive equipment, no superior aptitude or special company. All we lack is the willingness to imagine that we already have everything we need. The only thing missing is our consent to be where we are.
- Barbara Brown Taylor