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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.

Barbara Brown Taylor

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Barbara Brown Taylor
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: September 21
Anglican Priest
Priest
Boring
Church
Character
Littles
Fizz
Little
Forming
Extremely
Meaningful

More quotes by Barbara Brown Taylor

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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.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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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. The divine presence was strongest outdoors, and most palpable when I was alone.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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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.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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Most of us spend so much time thinking about where we have been or where we are supposed to be going that we have a hard time recognizing where we actually are.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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I'll do my best to always put God and neighbor ahead of ego, but I want to find myself, and if finding myself means losing my ego self, I'll go there.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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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.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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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.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self - to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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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.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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I've got a hold of something that won't move. It's a willingness to keep walking into the next day, open to whatever may turn out to be true that day.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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The only real difference between Anxiety and Excitement was my willingness to let go of Fear.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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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.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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The value for me being in a mainline tradition is history and memory, which is not just Christian tradition but denominational tradition, and characters, you know, with real distinct flavors of ways to be Christian.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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I think a toxic message in a lot of Christianity has been that the self has to be annihilated in order for God to be found. I think that has been a toxic message.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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When someone asks us where we want to be in our lives, the last thing that occurs to us is to look down at our feet and say, 'Here, I guess, since this is where I am.'
Barbara Brown Taylor
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I wanted to be as close as I could to the Really Real, and I'll capitalize both of those R's, because God is a word that means different things to different people, but we might all agree it's what is most real.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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It can be difficult to be an introvert in church, especially if you happen to be the pastor. Liking to be alone can be interpreted as a judgment on other people's company. Liking to be quiet can be construed as aloofness. There is so much emphasis on community in most congregations that anyone who does not participate risks being labeled a loner.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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The poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent.
Barbara Brown Taylor