Barbara Brown Taylor - An altar in the world (2009)

16 Sourced Quotes

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Whoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it.

Barbara Brown Taylor
The great wisdom traditions of the world all recognize that the main impediment to living a life of meaning is being self-absorbed.

Barbara Brown Taylor
In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life

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
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.

Barbara Brown Taylor
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
There comes a time when it is vitally important for your spiritual health to drop your clothes, look in the mirror, and say, 'Here I am. This is the body-like-no-other that my life has shaped. I live here. This is my soul's address

Barbara Brown Taylor
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
Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.

Barbara Brown Taylor
God does some of God's best work with people who are seriously lost.

Barbara Brown Taylor
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
Kindness is not a bad religion, no matter what name you use for God.

Barbara Brown Taylor
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
With all the conceptual truths in the universe at His disposal [Jesus] did not give them something to think about together when He was gone. Instead, He gave them concrete things to do - specific ways of being together in their bodies - that would go on teaching them what they needed to know when He was no longer around to teach them Himself... "Do this" He said - not believe this but do this - "in remembrance of me.

Barbara Brown Taylor
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