Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith

by Barbara Brown Taylor

“I

distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do,” she once said, “because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”

“Strange travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in one of his novels, which is how my vocation has unfolded all of my life.

being ordained is not about serving God perfectly but about serving God visibly, allowing other people to learn whatever they can from watching you rise and fall.

As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave

more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God. In the words of Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas, “People of the Book risk putting the book above people.”

If I am not careful, I can decide that I am really much happier reading my Bible than I am entering into what God is doing in my own time and place, since shutting the book to go outside will involve the very great risk of taking part in stories that are still taking shape.

The whole purpose of the Bible, it seems to me, is to convince people to set the written word down in order to become living words

in the world for God’s sake. For me, this willing conversion of ink back to blood is the full substance of faith.

I wanted to recover the kind of faith that has nothing to do with being sure what I believe and everything to do with trusting God to catch me though I am not sure of anything.