tidbits from leaving church
Posted: July 16, 2006 Filed under: Uncategorized 2 Comments
I’m working on a book review of Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith by Barbara Brown Taylor. As one who tends to live closer to the edge of the map than the center, it really resonated with me. Here are a couple of my favorite passages from the book:
“By the time I resigned from Grace-Calvary, I had arrived at an understanding of faith that had far more to do with trust than with certainty. I trusted God to be God even if I could not say who God was for sure. I trusted God to sustain the world although I could not say for sure how that happened. I trusted God to hold me and those I loved, in life and in death, without giving me one shred of conclusive evidence that it was so. While this understanding had the welcome effect of changing faith from a noun to a verb for me, it was an understanding that told me how far I had strayed from the center of my old spiritual map.”
“If my time in the wilderness taught me anything, it is that faith in God has both a center and an edge and that each is necessary for the soul’s health. If I developed a complaint during my time in the wilderness, it was that Mother Church lavished so much more attention on those at the center than those at the edge.”
Glad to see you back posting more regularly, Amy. I’ll check more often now.Loved Marge.
Sounds like a great book. I’m interested…