Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others

by Barbara Brown Taylor

We do not see what we do not expect to see.

another group of Christians, who were more interested in talking about the right questions Jesus asked than in giving the right answers about him.

God was too great and the world too wide to allow for so little curiosity.

it was difficult to discern what made the confrontations between Christians any different from the confrontations between Christians and people of other faiths.

The lens is not the landscape. It is a way of translating the landscape so that people can walk upright on it, making some sense of what happens to them.

Religions are treasure chests of stories, songs, rituals, and ways of life that have been handed down for millennia—not covered in dust but evolving all the way—so that each new generation has something to choose from when it is time to ask the big questions about life. Where did we come from? Why do bad things happen to good people? Who is my neighbor? Where do we go from here? No one should have to start from scratch with questions like those.

Part of my ongoing priesthood is to find the bridges between my faith and the faiths of other people, so that those of us who draw water from wells on different sides of the river can still get together from time to time, making the whole area safer for our children.