Barbara Brown Taylor
Last Updated April 6, 2023
Original Air Date April 6, 2023
“I like it much better than ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ — to be a seeker after the sacred or the holy, which ends up for me being the really real.”
– Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor
From Krista, about this week’s show:
It’s fascinating to trace the arc of spiritual searching and religious belonging in my lifetime. The Episcopal priest and public theologian Barbara Brown Taylor was one of the people I started learning about when I left diplomacy to study theology in the early 1990s. At that time, she was leading a small church in Georgia. And she preached the most extraordinary sermons, and turned them into books read far and wide. Then in 2006, she wrote Leaving Church — about her decision to leave her life of congregational ministry, finding other ways to stay, as she’s written, “alive and alert to the holy communion of the human condition, which takes place on more altars than anyone can count.”
She’s written other books since, with titles like An Altar in the World, Learning to Walk in the Dark, and Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others. Being in the presence of Barbara Brown Taylor’s wonderfully wise and meandering mind and spirit, after all these years of knowing her voice in the world, is a true joy. I might even use a religious word — it feels like a “blessing.” And this is not a conversation about the decline of church or about more and more people being “spiritual but not religious.” We both agree that this often-repeated phrase is not an adequate way of seeing the human hunger for holiness. This is as alive as it has ever been in our time — even if it is shape-shifting in ways my Southern Baptist and Barbara’s Catholic and Methodist forebears could never have imagined.
Image by Lilian Vo, © All Rights Reserved.
Guest
Barbara Brown Taylor is the author of many books, including An Altar in the World, Leaving Church, Holy Envy, and Learning to Walk in the Dark. Her 2020 book is Always a Guest, a compilation of recent sermons. She is the former rector of Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church of Clarkesville, Georgia, and she taught for two decades in the religion department at Piedmont College. Image by Jean Santopatre.
Transcript
Transcription by Alletta Cooper
Krista Tippett:It’s fascinating to trace the arc of spiritual searching and religious belonging in my lifetime — and in the work I’ve done very intently since the turn of this momentous century. The Episcopal priest and public theologian Barbara Brown Taylor was one of the people I started learning about when I left diplomacy to study theology in the early 1990s. At that time, she was leading a small church in Georgia. And she preached the most extraordinary sermons and turned them into books read far and wide. Then in 2006, she wrote Leaving Church — about her decision to leave her life of congregational ministry, finding other ways to stay, as she’s written, “alive and alert to the holy communion of the human condition, which takes place on more altars than anyone can count.” She’s written other books since — with titles like An Altar in the World, Learning to Walk in the Dark, and Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others. Being in the presence of Barbara Brown Taylor’s wonderfully wise and meandering mind and spirit, after all these years of knowing her voice in the world, is a true joy — I might even use a religious word — it feels like a “blessing.” And it’s not a conversation about the decline of church or about more and more people being “spiritual but not religious.” We both agree that this often-repeated phrase is not an adequate way of seeing the human hunger for holiness. This is as alive as it has ever been in our time — even if it is shape-shifting in ways my Southern Baptist and Barbara’s Catholic and Methodist forebears could never have imagined.
I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.
[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating]
Barbara Brown Taylor came of age in an earlier era of shifting religiosity. Her parents encouraged her to go to the library instead of to church. And Time Magazine was asking on its cover whether God was dead — and she studied at Emory University as one of its theologians helped make that case. I was in the On Being studios and she traveled to Georgia Public Broadcasting to speak with me.
Tippett:Hello?
Barbara Brown Taylor:Hello.
Tippett:Hi, it’s Krista.
Taylor:Krista Tippett, it’s Barbara Taylor.
Tippett:I’m so glad to meet you. You know, I thought all these years that our paths would actually cross with bodies on and they never have. [laughter] And you know, as I started delving in, I kept seeing this word “peregrination” show up from across the years. I looked it up and it comes from the Latin “to live or travel abroad,” but it’s really a meandering journey, which felt like good framing for your life and faith and callings, and also the evolution of religion and religiosity and God in the course of your lifetime and mine, and especially in this century, which is also something I want to draw you out on.
So, literally, you had a peregrinating — there was a lot of peregrination in your childhood. It looks like you moved nine times before you were in ninth grade.
Taylor:That’s true.
Tippett:A lot of moving around. And then, in terms of the religious background of the world you grew up in, God was officially dying.
Taylor:Um-hm.
Tippett:But interestingly, it seems that you were not deterred or frightened by God’s death. You kept investigating church. How do you think about what you were looking for, what you were searching for?
Taylor:Oh, there’s so many answers because in high school, I was looking for friends and all my friends went to churches and wanted me to go with them to churches. So that was the belonging stage. And after that, it was mostly realizing I hadn’t found it yet. So it was mostly a sense that I was being drawn to a place with people I cared about, but what I was looking for wasn’t there. So what was I looking for? Some sense that I was being told the truth about the way things really were. And instead, I think I often found caricatures or warnings about the way things were. Especially as a young person, a lot of people lobbying for my soul, both denominationally and theologically.
So it took me until my middle year of seminary to walk into a church in downtown New Haven and feel like I was home. Though now when I look back on it, it was like Hogwarts. I mean, I can’t believe that’s what I fell in love with, but I did.
Tippett:You mean that church, that high Episcopal Church?
Taylor:Yeah. Very high. I think no women even in the choir.
Tippett:Yeah. Lots of — what do they say? “Bells and smells” and all of that, all the high ritual. I love this story about — it sounds like, again, you were on this wandering exploration and you went to many kinds of churches and then the story about when you landed in this Episcopal Church in your mid-20s and the priest who said to you when you went to talk to him about this, he said, “Deary, you are an ecclesiastical harlot. Let’s be sure you’re really in love this time.” [laughter]
Taylor:Yes, no, he has passed onto his blessed rest. I hope that he knows I did — I stayed faithful in my way.
Tippett:Yeah. You were in love and you were eventually ordained a priest. And your book Leaving Church is one that a lot of people read. And I like the structure of that book, which is in three parts: “Finding,” “Losing,” and “Keeping,” which also feels like a good framing for this journey, not just that you’ve been on, but that we’re on as a culture. One of the things that intrigued me that you wrote about leaving parish ministry in 1997 — then you became a college religion teacher. I want you to unfurl this for me. You said that moving from church to classroom was “the beginning of my theological humiliation.” [laughs] What does that mean?
Taylor:Well, it was a surprising move. You got it right, though. I’m really happy you understood “leaving church” meant leaving parish ministry because I got many consolation notes shortly after that offering to help me find my way back to God. And I said, “Nope, don’t need help with that. Just needed a vocational change.” But what it meant was leaving a church where I was solo pastor — I had special vestments I put on. I had a time when I got to talk and nobody else talked. I had a parking spot. But to move into a college situation where there was not even a religion department, but that came under the Department of Humanities meant that literally, I walked to the door of my new office and it said “Barbara Taylor, Department of Humanities.” And I thought that is such a long ways from being a “Master of Divinity”…
Tippett:“Master of Divinity,” right. [laughter]
Taylor:…with some miles on the odometer. And I had a lectern instead of an altar. And the most distressing thing was to find my language didn’t work anymore. The plural “we”: we believe, we’re called, we are here because we’ve come to baptize this child. All my language was gone. So it was a great time in my life to reinvent, though I’m very happy students didn’t know that I didn’t know what I was doing.
Tippett:One of the things you wrote about teaching, something that came to you, you said, “the great gift” — and you pointed at this a minute ago — “the great gift of the unbelievers in class.” Well, a couple of things. You said, “the students in my [classes] who distanced themselves from religion often knew more about the faith they had left behind than the students who stayed put without question.” And then you said, “the great gift of the unbelievers in class was to send me back to my historic vocabulary list to explore its meaning in the present.” That you now had to translate, as you say, things that were said ritually.
What this makes me think of is something that’s been on my mind in the last couple of years — which is not what you were talking about then, but bringing that into the present — I am having this experience that theological and liturgical language and practices, at the same time that we can tell a story of churches emptying out, that theological and liturgical language and practices feel more resonant for the world we inhabit than ever before. And I’m thinking of confession and repentance and lamentation and redemption.
And also, I feel like what I see from where I sit in terms of all the energies and curiosity around this part of life — this religious and spiritual part of life, this life of faith — is so much more complicated and richer than the phrase “spiritual but not religious.”
Taylor:Yeah, I’ve been offended by the category of the nones, N-O-N-E-S, because it sounds like a null set. I don’t know if this is what you’re talking about, but the whole way for many years that people who were embedded in church communities dismissed the spiritual but not religious was being frivolous, non-committed individualists who just wanted to design their own religion. And now, lo-and-behold, it turns out they’re really part of an evolution we’re in the middle of. And I hope we find a word better than “Nones” to describe them, not only because they’re now 30% of the US population.
Tippett:Yeah, N-O-N-E-S.
Taylor:Yeah.
Tippett:Well, part of the reason that word is destined not to be profound is because it emerged from a poll. The context in which it was formulated is lacking.
Taylor:And “unaffiliated” is not very lovely, is it? We’ll have to find something else. “The peregrinaters”? “The peregrines.”
Tippett:Yeah. Is that the category you’d like to recommend?
Taylor:I don’t know. I think they’ll think of their own names and I hope there’ll be a lot of them, a lot of different ones. Because again, the N-O-N-E-S is a category that includes a bunch of people who are very different from one another as well.
Tippett:Yeah, yeah. In the beginning of the section of Leaving Church, you have a quote from Teilhard de Chardin, which I really loved: “What we are all more or less lacking at this moment is a new definition of holiness.” And it almost felt to me like that’s a better descriptor of the search that is on. I don’t know, where does that language of “a new definition of holiness” take your theological imagination right now?
Taylor:It takes me in so many directions. I realize as we speak, I’m thinking of things like my age and the region in which I live, and the ways in which holiness is used. Where I live, it’s most often in terms of Pentecostal Holiness churches. So that would be the free association for that. And yet, the hunger for holiness in terms of a sense of being rooted — grounded in shifting ground — which oddly means that to be, what, to be holy is to keep one’s balance while the earth moves under our feet.
There’s a lot. I would love to play with that word for the whole rest of our time, but I like it much better than “religious” or “spiritual,” but to be a seeker after the sacred or the holy, which ends up for me being the really real. But not just the materialist really real, but the really real that’s got layers all the way down.
[music: “The Gerimo” by Blue Dot Sessions]
Tippett:I’d love to walk through — as I was reading through your work and your writing and interviews you’ve done across the years, also just finding what you had written about going from the church to the classroom, or sending you back to the “historic vocabulary” for its “meaning in the present.” And, of course, that present you were talking about in the 1990s was different from ours. And one of the pieces of theology that you invoke again and again is this notion of incarnation, a spirituality and a theology that — a spirituality that is embodied. In your book, An Altar in the World, you titled the chapter about incarnation, “The Practice of Wearing Skin.”
You’ve talked about “the daily practice of incarnation — of being in the body with full confidence that God speaks the language of flesh.”
Taylor:That’s what came up quickly and clearly for me, was no longer standing up to speak in a community that shared a language and spoke it with some coherence back and forth, also some lively variation and what they meant by all those multisyllabic theological words. But then, all of a sudden, to be in a college classroom with students of many faiths and no faiths to whom it meant little, next to nothing. When I compare the teaching of World Religions, which was full of practices, dance and music, and body decoration and mandalas, and going from that to Intro to Christian Theology, it was like going from a festival to a cemetery, in terms of where the body just vanished. It all went up into the head to figure out whether our ontology fit with our eschatology and whether our doxologies were adequate. It was a big challenge for me to either stop using the language or find a way to put skin and flesh on the language. And I’ve kept that through the years. I’m a champion of body language when speaking of the holy, which for some people is counterintuitive, because they’ve been taught the body has nothing to do with what is holy. But I beg to differ.
Tippett:Yes, you wrote about the Christian reverence for the body: “the neighbor’s body, the leper’s body, the orphan’s body, the Christ’s body — the clear charge to care for the incarnate soul.”
Taylor:And these days, more and more for the body of the tree and the body of the mountain and the body of the river. And I think — and that train pulled through the station a long time ago with people like Sallie McFague at Vanderbilt, lots of people who did ecological work that now has a new fire under it: that if we don’t take the body of this earth seriously, it will no longer be our host.
Tippett:Yeah. It’s also that what we have referred to as “body” and what we’ve referred to as emotion and spirit, that those things in fact are completely entangled. We know this now in a way we didn’t even know this 20 years ago.
Taylor:It’s true. I just listened — this will be highly inappropriate. You can take it out, too — but I just listened to Lady Gaga sing at the Academy Awards, and that woman sings from the top of her head to the soles of her feet. And as soon as she started belting out that song, I had this rush, this physical rush that went head to foot. And I think it was awe. I don’t know what that was. It was certainly amazement at the full embodiment of her purpose in community at that moment. So there. The Academy Awards just made it into our talk.
Tippett:[laughs] Excellent. I also just love this language: you said, “Here we sit, with our souls tucked away in this marvelous luggage, mostly insensible to the ways in which every spiritual practice begins with the body. Our bodies have shaped our views of the world, just as the world has shaped our views of our bodies.” You’ve been thinking about that for a long time. And again, science is meeting it now.
Taylor:Oh, thank you. That made me sound ahead of the time. [laughter] I don’t think I was. I’ve always felt way behind. You live long enough, the circle comes around again.
Tippett:Yeah, there you go.
Taylor:When we talk about theological language, I was mid-20s when I discovered it, largely in seminary. And then it was the most wonderful thing I had ever discovered. It was like a field guide and somebody had given me a book with the names of things that I had experienced, but I didn’t know there were these names for them. And so it was a gift of language along with a community that spoke the language. And so it was a kind of taxonomy of holiness. Late in life, that same language often feels to me like a seatbelt, like it’s trying to keep me in a car. I want to get out of the car; I want to get my feet on the ground. But the language keeps saying, “No, no, no, here are the boundaries of the taxonomy.”
I just want to start all of a sudden now saying, “Look: bird with white spots on it and some red,” instead of going to my field guide to see what the bird’s name is, how long its wings are, what it weighs, where its migration patterns are. So I guess in other contexts, I’ve talked about the rewilding that happens after a while.
Tippett:Yeah. I want to talk about wilderness. I definitely want to get there. What comes to mind if you think about that taxonomy that you learned that was a gift? And I also had that experience studying theology. It was like this — there were these riches that had been hidden away, even though I went to church three times a week.
Taylor:Yeah, and as you spoke about it earlier about the appropriateness of the language for a lot that is going on now in the headlines, if not in churches. But where I live, the language is either — the language is required or it’s rejected. The language, even if it fits right now with a lot of people I’m in community with, will not be used because of the abuse associated with it in the past. Even some of the good language, you know? If we want to talk about good language and bad language, or frightening language and “redemptive” language, to put one of the words in there. But I really — I spent a lot of time with people who don’t want anything that sounds like the church they were hurt in.
Tippett:One of the things, when you talk about incarnation and the body, you said, “Deep suffering makes theologians of us all.” And you said, “The questions people ask about God in Sunday school rarely compare with the questions we ask while we are in the hospital. This goes for those stuck in the waiting room as well as those in [the hospital] beds.”
Taylor:Yes. [laughs] Yeah. I was never good at hospital calls. Because I was pretty sure I knew why I was there, but it meant offering to pray preferably from The Book of Common Prayer. And that never seemed to me like what was called for once I was in the room. And quite often, if I would sit there quiet long enough — I don’t mean to be a bummer here, but what people would get around to saying is how odd it was that they did not feel the presence of God. That in their hardest hours they felt abandoned. And that called for a different kind of prayer.
But again, that was probably the point at which my theological training required me to learn how to be an improvisational holy person. And that called for as much creativity as I could come up with, but mostly not many words. Whatever that says about the theological language. Nope. It was better to rub someone’s feet or just sit and breathe together. But then, I always wondered if I was doing my job.
Tippett:You’ve written so interestingly about prayer. You had a chapter on prayer in Altar in the World, and I noted that in the first few pages you said, you wrote these different things: “I know that a chapter on prayer belongs in this book, but I dread writing it,” and “I am a failure at prayer,” and “I would rather show someone my checkbook stubs than talk about my prayer life.” [laughter]
Taylor:I’m not a good role model, Krista, but I’m representative. [laughter]
Tippett:Somewhere though — and this was more positive — I think you said, “Sometimes, when people ask me about my prayer life, I describe hanging laundry on the line.”
Taylor:Or all kinds of things. Hanging laundry on the line, like they’re prayer flags and thinking of the people whose laundry it is, and being grateful to the wind for blowing it around. And then, going from that to filling a horse trough with water so that these great big vegetarians can get something to drink during their days. But thank goodness for people like Brother Lawrence in Christian religious tradition, or others who found their vocations in kitchens and sweeping.
Tippett:Brother Lawrence. The Practice of the Presence of God, which, I think — washing dishes. [laughter]
Taylor:Yeah. Oh, he said it was enough to flip a pancake for the love of God because he cooked for his monks. I think he always was a Brother and never went above being a lay Brother. But thank goodness for him and others like him who at least carved out a wedge in the Christian pie for those who did the most ordinary things in the world with reverence, or at least with some awareness that reverence was possible in the most ordinary things on earth. That’s where I live.
Tippett:And I think that language, also that word “reverence,” which is sometimes connected to the notion of sacrament, that does feel like language to me. Especially the word “reverence” that is inviting, even to a modern secular mind that feels like a word and a thing we might be missing.
Continue reading “This Hunger for Holiness”