Washington National Cathedral

Dean Lloyd: Good morning and welcome back to the Sunday Forum; to our weekly engagement at the intersection of faith and public life. Today we have with us a very special guest to start off our new season, Barbara Brown Taylor, who has been celebrated in official circles such as the Baylor University Newsweek Survey declared her one of the top twelve preachers in our country as also someone who is a much loved Episcopal priest and pastor and preacher across our denomination and the author of twelve books.

Barbara is an Episcopal priest—she has been most recently a college and seminary professor, a public radio commentator, a magazine writer and, also, on most days, the person who feeds the chickens on her farm in northeast Georgia—probably the most important thing you do, isn’t it? <laughs>

Barbara is with us today on the verge of launching a new book we’re going to talk about in just a bit, but I’d first like to simply open up a conversation about what her ministry has all been about, but Barbara first of all welcome to you.

Barbara Brown Taylor: Thank you for inviting me.

Lloyd: Well, let’s begin. You’ve been an active Episcopal priest in congregations for small congregations, large congregations and then what was it? About twelve, fifteen, ten years ago, you left being an active priest in a congregation to focus on a teaching and writing ministry. Do you see a connection? Are they part of one trajectory? Or do you see that as a rapid departure?

Brown Taylor: I saw it as a rapid departure—long enough to have to write a book about why it was perhaps not as much a departure as I had first thought. I received lots of notes from friends following that change, who said they were sorry to hear I had left church. And that took me aback because I didn’t know church was a building; I thought it was sort of a people. But it did take awhile to realize that, in the classroom, I am with people who are as hungry for purpose and love and direction as anybody I ever met. The only catch is I have less to do than ever about who’s there, and less common language, no sacraments we agree on or how to do them, so it’s been a great challenge to walk into a wider swath of humanity and try to be useful.

Lloyd: Do you think you would put yourself in the category of being more spiritual than religious? That seems to be the dichotomy we hear about all the time: “I’m spiritual but not religious.”

Brown Taylor: And everybody who says that, ask them what they mean by those words. Because those words are containers with things in them we know not of. I claim both. Religion is my trampoline—that’s the foundation, the stories, the place that I take off from and when I’m being supremely spiritual I’m in the air doing back flips, but I’ve got to come back down to go back up.

Lloyd: So, religion is what keeps you grounded and solid and engaged, but the back flips are the other side of it, huh?

Brown Taylor: Sure.

Lloyd: We want to hear about those back flips in just a minute.

Brown Taylor: Yeah, they’re fancy.

Lloyd: You’ve written a new book called An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith. Tell us what you mean by an altar in the world. I thought altars were right here in church on Sunday.

Brown Taylor: Helpful. I think part of what you asked earlier—my altar now, it looks like a desk in a classroom, it looks like a bag of grain for chickens, it looks like my dining room table, it looks like my front porch where I meet God on a regular basis. This book was an effort to take the things I had learned at altars like this, about how to recognize places that human beings meet the sacred, and push it out the door, and talk about the way of life and all the ways that life comes to us.

Jacob was my main inspiration. That guy could go to sleep on a rock…

Lloyd: Tell that story. That’s in your first chapter and sort of a defining image for what you’re all about now.

Brown Taylor: The Hawaii part or the Beersheba part?

Lloyd: Start with Beersheba. If you get to Hawaii, that’s great too. Go ahead.

Brown Taylor: Well it’s just that the story of Jacob—fleeing, on the run, life a mess, middle of nowhere, finding a place to sleep for the night and being taken over by a dream of a ladder with its top in the heavens and its feet on earth and waking up to realize that—what does he say? God was in this place and I did not know.

Lloyd: Saw angels ascending and descending.

Brown Taylor: Going up and coming down—as if they were happy either place.

Lloyd: Yeah.

Brown Taylor: And busy both places. And he set up a rock. So that I like to think that, as I walk through the world and bump into stones, who knows what happened there? That may be someone else’s altar, someone else’s place of marking a moment of encounter with the sacred.

Lloyd: We think of altars as places where people worship, places where they engage and meet God, and we do that inside churches because that’s been the place where we’ve been told most confidently through our stories that we can count on engaging God.

But in a way you’re trying to knock the four walls off the church, and in fact you say very movingly somewhere, It made sense to build a temple with four walls—because God is inside—but it began to suggest that God was only inside. And a trap we keep falling into is that we might or might not find God in church but that’s the place to find God and not outside. So, in a way, you’re trying to expand everyone’s sense of horizons about where God can be found.

Brown Taylor: Again, with the Bible as my teacher on that, that God doesn’t have a ZIP Code, but it’s tempting to think that when I have a beloved zip code, a place of reliable meeting. What I love to think of, is that… I think it’s way too much pressure to make a church the chief place of God’s meeting with humankind—it’s too much pressure.

I think the world is the place of God’s meeting with humankind and churches are places to celebrate that, to find other people interested in that, to find people who historically know things about that, ways to live into that, ways to encounter God more.

So I would like to reverse the airflow, I suppose, and let the world—the whole world—be the altar of God, and church be the place where we know that.

Lloyd: Yeah. You talk about your sense of people in church on Sunday may have some engagement or encounter with God, but by the time they get to the parking lot, they’re back in the “real world”. They left God back there now they’re going to the “real world,” well, we have a lot of people coming out of a parking garage here and I know they’re experiencing the real world by then, and they may think the experience of God was a long way behind them. But you’re saying, in a way, it’s just beginning when they walk out the doors of the church and into the parking lot.

Brown Taylor: And you even make a good point: that those of us in churches know that some really unpleasant things happen in parking lots. Everybody’s nice in here, and then they go outside and… are real. So another thing I think about insisting that God is active in the world is, more of human experience gets included in that way. I know people who will come to churches and will freely say they love this because people behave well, it’s a place they can bring their children, the songs have been vetted, you know, the sermons won’t be too over the top—that it’s a safe place.

And it needs to be a safe place. I want it to be a safe place. But I also think that to acknowledge altars in the world allows more of the human to be dealt with. You know, more of the human to be exposed, limited, and engaged.

Lloyd: You write in your book about a wise priest who posed a question to you that gave you pause and that opened a lot of possibilities for thinking when, I think it was a ‘he’ who asked, “What is saving your life now?” An interesting question we might ask to each other. Tell us what your response to that was. What is saving your life now?

Brown Taylor: My new book is called The Altar in the World, in which I answer that. That priest, by the way, was John Claypoole, since people here know and love him. He was at St. Luke’s Birmingham when he invited me to come speak and phrased his invitation that way. I’ll say more about that in a minute, but I do think this book is an intentional walking through the answer to your question.

Part of it was to be as honest as I knew how to be about life-giving sources for me, even if they weren’t the ones I thought they should be.

I do find chickens’ lives depend on me—this is not a small thing. There’s something about the move from city to country to caring for large numbers of creatures along with human beings, that has rooted me in temperature and cold and heat and drought in ways that I was never rooted before that’s life-giving. I’ve begun to embrace things like getting sick, or getting lost, or being deep in grief, as altars—as places of meeting God, as places of breakthrough that aren’t available when all is well. So if anything, in this book, I make an effort to answer that question in way in which I hope will encourage other people to ask the same question of themselves and come up with different answers.

Lloyd: Why don’t you go on a read a passage you were bringing in. We asked you to read a small passage from this book. It’s so beautifully written, you’ll catch some sense of what she’s after.

Brown Taylor: Now Sam has covered almost everything I was going to read.

Lloyd: [laughs]

Brown Taylor: What I thought of, since you don’t know anything about this, I’d begin at the beginning. Now I’ll only read for a moment:

If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say, “I would not call myself a religious person, but I’m definitely spiritual,” then I might not be any wiser about what that means, but I’d definitely be richer. I hear the phrase on the radio, I read it in interviews, people often say it to my face when they learn that I am a religion professor who spent years as a parish priest.

In that context, people are usually trying to tell me that they have a sense of the divine depth of things but they’re not churchgoers. They want to grow closer to God but not at the cost of creeds, confessions, and religious wars— small or large. Some of them have resigned from religions they once belonged to, taking what was helpful with them, while leaving the rest behind. Others have collected wisdom from the four corners of the world, which they use like cooks with a pantry full of spices. Plenty of them are satisfied too, even as they confess that they are sometimes lonely.

I think I know what they mean by religion. It’s the spiritual part that’s harder to grasp. My guess is that they don’t use that word in reference to a formal set of beliefs since that belongs on the religion side of the page. I think it may be, instead, the name for a longing for more meaning, more feeling more connection, more life.

When I hear people talking about spirituality, that seems to be what they’re describing. They know that there’s more to life than what meets the eye. They’ve drawn close to this More—in nature, in love, in art, in grief. They would be happy for someone to teach them how to spend more time in the presence of this deeper reality, but when they visit the places where such knowledge is supposed to be found, they often find the rituals hollow and the language antique.

Even religious people are vulnerable to this longing. Those who belong to communities of faith have acquired a certain patience with what is sometimes called organized religion. They have learned to forgive its shortcomings as they have learned to forgive their own. They don’t expect their institutions to stand in for God, and they are happy to use inherited maps for some of life's journeys... they too can harbor a sense that there is more to life than they are being shown. Where is the secret hidden? Who has the key to the treasure box of More?

Lloyd: And then, when you began talking about the ways to have access to that More, you say it has a lot more to do with the body than with the head.

Brown Taylor: Oh, yeah.

Lloyd: Now that’s very interesting. We… all faiths are filled with doctrines and teachings and texts, but you’re saying that actually encountering—if, if the religious journey is not simply about knowing about God, but knowing God, then we need to think a whole lot more about how we’re actually living physically our lives, and less about a whole set of things up in our heads, something like that?

Brown Taylor: Sure. I think the key, and I didn’t think of this myself, but the key to the life of any living religion is to keep at least three balls in the air. The institutional ball—places like this, schools, seminaries that keep the story going from age to age. The intellectual ball, where people think through the ways faith encounters new realities. And then what Episcopalians are happy to call, the mystical way. I call it the direct way for Presbyterians: the direct way to God, which is the experiential, the mystical, which some institutional, some intellectual types can feel uncomfortable about, like some mystical types will disenfranchise the other two. But it takes all three to keep a religion alive.

So I’m really interested in the direction experience. I think that, for a lot of reasons, Christianity is in a very heady period of its life right now, and I think I fear more—I fear more for the intellectualization of Christian faith than I fear anything else. I’m not afraid of shrinking congregations, I’m not deathly afraid of vanishing budgets…people like you—

Lloyd: Easy for you to say. [laughs]

Brown Taylor: Easy for me to say. But I do. I fear the intellectualization of faith because then I think the other two are almost guaranteed so I am really interested and I think the Christian way is particularly gifted at bodily practices that are more or less guaranteed to lead people into a deeper life.

Lloyd: Well, so let’s talk about those. A set of practices that can make the reality of God accessible to people. You have some pretty exotic titles for them. Things like the practice of wearing skin. So what does skin have to do with God?

Brown Taylor: God thought it was a good idea. God thought somehow that this stuff would turn out to be the very best way of getting to us. And I’m not talking about beautiful bodies, or well bodies.

I’m talking about to be in the flesh. To be made flesh. To be human seems to be God’s best strategy for getting to people, for bringing people together, for astonishing people, for breaking people, for asking people to… not asking people to, taking people to the deep places. So, it seems to me again, that to intellectualize faith, to make it something that we think about, agree with, disagree with, is to miss one of God’s best strategies for getting our attention and bringing us to each other, whether it’s Biblical practices like washing feet and eating meals together, or going on pilgrimages. Or, I’ve tried to add some others in there that people do all the time: carrying water, chopping wood, feeding animals, getting lost.

Lloyd: When you talk about wearing skin, you also talk about learning to love your body—your body, which can be a struggle for most of us.

Brown Taylor: Yeah. After fifty, especially.

Lloyd: [laughs] Yeah.

Brown Taylor: It is, it is, but we treat them like suitcases. You know, here’s my suitcase, you’re there in your suitcase, let’s ignore each others’ suitcases and let’s just talk about our souls. I think that there’s, again, a loss, a deep loss in that.

Lloyd: What is so spiritual about getting lost? These are practices, a set of practices, which she calls embodied practices—ways that we experience God through our bodies in the world. One of them is getting lost. Why is that a way to God?

Brown Taylor: Well, I figured I might as well take things that are going to happen anyway, like getting lost, and then see if there wasn’t a practice in there for the deepening of the soul.

So I start out with all the ways people get lost. I mean, I get lost still just trying to get from here to there. I get lost in my relationships. I get lost in my work. I get lost in my mind. I get lost. It helps me deeply to know that in the Bible, God does some of God’s best work with people who are really, really lost. So I figured that that was clue.

I figure if I can get good at consenting to be lost, I may then advance even to getting lost on purpose sometimes—going a different way to work, exploring a part of my own town I’ve never been in before. I just found out there’s a Theravada Buddhist temple on the grounds of an old country music park and—my county there’s more chickens than people, and I have a Theravada Buddhist temple so there are ways to get lost without going more than twelve miles from my home as I seek out ways to be a stranger in my own land, and I trust God to use that to deepen me and maybe, the others, as well.

Lloyd: And so God has met you when you were lost?

Brown Taylor: Oh yes, and that can be a flat tire on the expressway at ten at night.

Lloyd: Really?

Brown Taylor: Yeah, you want an encounter with reality—one minute everything’s fine…

Lloyd: And how does God come to you in a flat tire by the highway?

Brown Taylor: I—well, you have to read my book. [laughter] But I—I do find, now I’m an anxious person alright, there’s no one here who’s anxious, right? But I’m an anxious person and when I have a flat tire in my part of Georgia, at night, and I have a little tiny Prius, and the semis are wheeling by, I go from a state of warm security to a state of deep dread about what will happen to me, and how I’ll get home, and who might help me and who might harm me.

And if I can take a breath in that moment in puts me in a neighborhood of people all around the world who might be feeling that way. I get a softened heart in my high anxiety, if I’ll take a breath, so that seems like a helpful thing. At the very least, I can thank God nobody’s shooting at me, that there aren’t bombs going off. It’s just a flat tire.

Lloyd: You talk about living life with a purpose as one of your practices. What does that mean: to live life with a purpose?

Brown Taylor: I think that again, purposelessness may be a far greater concern for many people I know than being sinful or going to hell. To live without purpose is hell, is—is to be lost. I find this particularly with young people which I’m privileged to work with. I do find, however, that people I work with set a very high bar on what purpose has to be. And what I try to do in that book is talk about how anything can be done with purpose.

And it’s the purpose itself that supplies the meaning not the salary, not even the prestige that the job confers, but the purpose with which I decide to do it.

Lloyd: But you talk so much in all your chapters about these particular, finite, tactile encounters with ordinary things. You have a beautiful piece about the spirituality of hanging clothes on the clothesline. You have an ordered way about hanging each different kind of clothes on the clothesline, but somehow the practice of being outdoors with the wooden clothes chips and putting that there gives you a way of connecting with the world and, in a strange way, with God. Why is that?

Brown Taylor: I didn’t think about it until now, but it’s because I view it with a purpose. It’s an act of imagination. I’m also obsessive-compulsive as well as neurotic. [laughs] But… what he’s talking about is it’s a prayer flag exercise… of hanging the laundry of my particular beloved on the line, and letting that giving of his wet things to the beautiful drying wind and sun is an act of love.

So, simply to imbue it with purpose can move it from chore to sacrament. And I’ve started making him do his own laundry. [laughter]

A wonderful woman named Bunny at the Clarksvile Laundry has come into our life.

Lloyd: One of the chapters I liked a lot was the chapter called, “The Practice of Saying No.” That’s one of the essential pieces of the spiritual life. Say something about saying no.

Brown Taylor: That comes under the heading of Sabbath, which is a dead word for too many people. I was speaking to a college group in March, and I had to come up with a new title, because I was told Sabbath wouldn’t work for them so it’s now called, “Downtime: the Sacred Art of Stopping”.

But it seems to me in a culture of more, more, more, faster, faster, faster, that—that Sabbath has somehow got dropped off the list of the Big Ten. I mean I live in a part of the country where people post the Ten Commandments in the front yard, but they don’t stop anything on Sunday, or on Saturday—however they define Sabbath.

So I see the sacred art of saying no not only to what other people want of me but to what I expect of me, and to what God demands of me as an essential part of my spiritual practice. Usually when I say no, sometimes to the things that give me life, I get some real practice in what it is to trust in God alone and not in all the things that I provide myself.

Lloyd: One of the challenges, you wrote about in your last book, Leaving Church, was the sense of the never-ending list of things to do: that you could never feel that you could put a period at the end of the day and felt all right about it—that it never stopped. And my sense is that’s a general experience of life not uncommon around this room now.

And I would like to see the fairly full to-do list for Sunday afternoon among people sitting here now, because there are so many things to do they can’t all get done.

How have you learned to deal with those impossible lists? Now one thing you did was you moved to the country. Of course, we know that most people take their issues with them wherever they go but have you found—did you have to make that kind of radical shift from full-time parish ministry to being a teacher and writer to begin to be able to say no? Have you found some ways to do that? That very painful way of saying no, this set of important things is not going to get done, or at least not today?

Brown Taylor: Sure. The practice of Sabbath. The practice of Sabbath which—I am Christian, not Jewish—but the practice of Sabbath which I finally decided would be Saturday for me which somebody somewhere was doing it with me, because nobody at my house was doing it with me. But Saturday is a day off. Saturday is a day in which verbs that sound like should, would, or ought are not allowed, there’s no computer, there’s no changing of money, there is no shopping, there are no mail-order catalogues, the chickens get fed on Friday or Sunday.

It’s a day of eating the manna I stored up on Friday and trying not to be scared that there won’t be any on Sunday. And I will tell you what, I’ve been at it ten years, and I fall off the wagon every other week.

So it’s a real, reliable practice. It is absolutely tried, true—people have always been wrestling with Sabbath for as long as there have been commandments, as long as there’s been Torah.

And it works. Even when you’re not doing it, it works.

Lloyd: For those of us that live back in the city that you left behind, isn’t that totally impractical?

Brown Taylor: Absolutely.

Lloyd: Yes?

Brown Taylor: Absolutely impractical.

Lloyd: So?

Brown Taylor: Well I have this idealistic idea that people of faith are supposed to be misfits. We’re not supposed to fit.

We’re not supposed to be entirely practical. I mean, I do have an idea that, at some point, we do something so nuts that people look at us and say, “Why are you doing that? Why are you living that way? That is not practical.” And then we get a chance to say, or to think, because there’s something more important to me than… ta-da. Fill in the blank. Because there’s something more important to me than that.

Lloyd: As if we were—if we were clear enough about what mattered most to us, it might be the more practical choice to make.

Brown Taylor: Could be. Absolutely. Great point. It could be. I just find that many of us are delaying what gives us life. We know what gives us life. We know what gives our communities life, and we’re waiting until we get the list of things done and then we will do those things.

Lloyd: We’ll get to it, right.

Brown Taylor: And my gravestone’s going to say, ‘I thought I would have more time’.

And I should also point out that this is a, uh, a cultural problem, but not for everyone. There are retired people, there are people who live with various kinds of handicaps, there are children, there are people who don’t identify by work or salary. There are large numbers of people who don’t have enough to do and I think when we stay in our busy, busy, busy mode, we’re out of community with those with those who would love to have too much to do.

Lloyd: One last question, then I want to go to the audience for their questions. You have a chapter on being present to God. We usually worry about God being present to us, but you seem to have flipped it the other way. What does it mean to be present to God? And give us two or three ways that you especially have found to be able to be present to God.

Brown Taylor: Sure, that—that chapter, and in every chapter I tried to title it—it’s got a subtitle with a traditional discipline—and prayer goes underneath that one. But again, I think many people think of prayer as on your knees, hands folded look at the sky with your eyes closed. Or stand up with your hands—but set, set ways to pray and with, some wonderful brothers—Brother Lawrence and Brother David Steindl-Rast—in that chapter I—I explored different ways of being present to God. I’ve been accused of being closet Buddhist, which is a real compliment to me, but the practice of attentiveness I think is not Buddhist alone.

I think when Jesus said consider the lilies of the field, the birds of the air look at those laborers, look at that woman rolling out her daily bread, that he was calling those who followed him to a practice of attentiveness , which to me is the best way to be in prayer every minute of the day.

Yeah. Great. Questions from the audience. Any? Deryl?

Deryl Davis: We have some questions to start with, and I’ll ask you in the audience if you would pass your questions, if you have them, to the center aisle where my colleagues will be collecting them over the next few minutes. But one to start with here is, do you have a daily—a specific daily spiritual practice?

Brown Taylor: Attentiveness is my daily spiritual practice. See? I’m going to say things you’re going to think aren’t spiritual, and then we’ve got to talk about what’s spiritual. I cook five days out of seven at my house, leftovers the other two.

But that is a spiritual practice: to take the things of the earth, to handle them, occasionally lose some of my flesh to them, to use them to nourish at least one other person, hopefully a table full of people, is a daily spiritual practice.

I have weekly spiritual practices that include caring for other people and creatures.

I have a weekly spiritual practice of Sabbath, which is the most important spiritual practice in my life. Rabbis—I believe them—said if you have that one covered, everything is covered. And I have found, if I can get my arms around Sabbath, that that has in it the seed of every other practice that matters.

Davis: You’ve just noted, that’s probably the one that most of us don’t practice. Another question is, how has your contact with American culture in the area of Georgia in which you live influenced you or your thinking about your faith?

Brown Taylor: Huge, huge. In ways—to the day I realized I built my house on land that was taken from Cherokee Nation under President Jackson was a big day.

And the second big thing was to realize that I wasn’t going to give it back. That I was going to live there, but I was going to find a way to be generous with that land as best I could.

Then when a community took my husband and me up on that offer and began to use that place as their home, because there are many outdoor singing, dancing rituals that are hard to do within city limits with prohibitions against things like that. I became an admirer of a community that spiritually I am not part of, but whom I serve with great regard. Largely men, lots of men with pasts, with more tattoos that I have, and fewer teeth, who’ve done time, who are in recovery , whose lives have been broken to smithereens and who, through this very difficult practice of being attentive to God, have both found themselves being put back together by God and have assisted in putting one another back together. So I feel like the acolyte at that. I cook, I answer the telephone, I smooth down the mad neighbors, and I welcome them.

Davis: This is definitely from an urban-dweller here. Can you encounter God in civic places such as city halls, baseball stadiums, etc., or on the National Mall and, if so, how do you do so in a pluralistic community like our nation?

Brown Taylor: I hate to sound like a broken record but, yes, absolutely. And the broken record is attentiveness.

If you are interested in the people that you are there with, if you are interested in what is going on. Maybe you have to be a short story writer or a poet to start seeing the snapshots—the little parables that are happening all over the place. And believe me, they happen better in cities than they do on my farm, by myself. The more people the better.

Thomas Merton worked on this. How do you practice the presence of God on a subway train or at the corner of two busy streets in a big city?

I think that it is no mistake that the Bible begins in a garden and ends in a city. Or that Paul spend so much of his time in cities. Yes, it is absolutely possible. If there’s any place on earth one cannot experience the terror and the wonder of God, then I’m not sure it’s not virtual reality.

Lloyd: Can I stay with this for a second? The wonderful, rich counsel you’re giving is to be attentive—to be attentive when you’re cooking, attentive on the streets of the city. Supposing somebody doesn’t quite know what that is, but is interested in it, how do you begin learning to be attentive?

In other words, we’re all programmed to move past things pretty quickly, we’re analytical, we’re setting our priorities we’re moving fast, we’re impatient. So suppose I’m inspired by Barbara Brown Taylor today to want to be more attentive. How do I begin doing that?

Brown Taylor: Oh, a hundred ways, but you raise a great, great question. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to find someone whom you regard as fairly attentive and ask them how they do it? I mean I’d love to see—we have prayer partnerships, let’s have attention partnership.

And beyond that, there are so many answers to that. One is, again, these embodied practices commended, at least in my tradition, to bring you—I—I cannot wash your foot and not be attentive. I’m going to notice.

I cannot tear off a piece of bread and hand it to you without noticing your hands and the size of the bread, and whether I gave you too much or too little and how your face looks when I hand it to you.

I cannot do these things without that. I could volunteer to go into a place that scares me half to death, to let my fright move me into a space of absolutely new, raw attentiveness to other people and their suffering because, believe me, so much of this book is written by a white, middle-aged woman who’s never broken a bone. And there are places in the world where people know far better than I how to become attentive.

I just bought something in the bookstore downstairs, [Sharon] Salzberg. It’s called Unplug, an interactive guide to becoming more attentive. I’ll tell you when I’ve opened it.

But I think there are people who know how to do this, and I think we’ve got to be interested enough to seek them out. I find many people buy books. Books have become sort of para-communities for lots of people. That’s a way to start, but I think living, breathing creatures, including human beings, are a better bet.

Davis: Great. This next question relates directly to the subtitle of your new book A Geography of Faith. And this question is, do you believe that our separation of sacred geography and secular geography—making that distinction—leads to ecological challenges such as we’re seeing in our world today?

Brown Taylor: Yes. That’s a yes-no question. Yes, it does lead to that. It does absolutely, and I’ll talk about this a little bit later about going after the dualities that allow us to attend fifty percent of the world, or our experience or our being and ignore or mistreat the other fifty percent. So, dualisms, good old Western dualisms, good and evil, heaven and earth, body and soul, sacred and secular, church and world—I worry about those.

And I certainly worry about any view of creation. I’ve just heard Philip Newell really take on the doctrine of ex nihilo. I’ve never thought about that as a problem, but he said the world didn’t come from nothing, the world comes from God. Makes a big difference.

Davis: Do you have any plans to write fiction in the future?

Brown Taylor: Oh I wish. I would love to write fiction. It still feels like lying to me. [laughter] So I have to get over that. It still feels like lying. But I also have an idea… The people I talk to, whom I love who write fiction, enter another world and meet characters who do things that they never meant for them to do. I would love for that gift to come to me but so far that dove hasn’t landed on me.

Lloyd: I have a new question. One of the courses you teach at Piedmont College is on world religions, where you’re taking your students to an array of ways of encountering God. And you’ve been an advocate in your writing and preaching before claiming a certain holy ignorance when it comes to claiming how much we can know about God.

We’re in a time when religions are clashing quite a bit everywhere around the globe now. Does your vision, your understanding of God and the kind of God you’re describing here have something to say to this clash of religions and the ways we bump up against each other? Or even in the Christian tradition—the left wing and the right wing, the liberals and the conservatives? Religion has been so much a part of the problem and yet it contains such essential truth and experience with God. It just gets in the way sometimes. How do you see a way of these religions beginning to come alongside each other in a healthier way?

Brown Taylor: One thing occurs to me. The first part of it is, a lot of the worldwide clashes are about what we are doing to one another in our bodies, with our food, with our land, with our water. You know, if you think about it, in a lot of the clashes at that level are about our physical selves.

In Christian circles, our experience is more intellectual arguments. We include each other in or out based on the words we say that then identify us as friend or enemy. I know only what you know about the world’s religions. I’m so aware of—did you know there’s a new publishing category of atheism? I’m mean that’s a new publishing category in religious houses now, given the Dawkinses and the Hitchenses and the others and I am so aware of how religious tradition works for ill.

I’m also aware of how it works for good and that at the heart of every religion I’ve studied seriously is a call to honor, serve the neighbor as the self. That if the sacred is ever to be apprehended, it will be apprehended in the neighbor.

So it’s at our ethical, our practical, practice teachings that we have any hope and frankly the only step I know to take is a baby step. It is a religious literacy. Know enough about the other traditions of the world not to serve beanie weenies to your Muslim guest. Know enough about the world not to send black and white napkins—death colors—to your Shinto friend who’s getting married. I mean, just buy one book, Steven Prothero’s Religious Literacy will do. Know enough to not be a dolt and then if you want to go a step further find some people you can talk to, not about their theology but about their music, and what they do with babies, and how they bury people, what matters to them and what they love about their own tradition, and see what happens from there.

Lloyd: Stay away from sets of cognitive claims and much more in the range and much more of how do you encounter God in the context of your lives?

Brown Taylor: That can come later, but some trust—there needs to be a relationship. The only way I’ve seen that work is a Muslim and Christian student who were both very, I will say traditional, in their faiths, but they both loved scripture so much, they would spend three hours a week comparing the Bible and the Koran to see what was in them. And these are students… I would never put a dollar on either of them engaging at that level. But because they cared so much about their very different traditions, they spent three hours a week together comparing those. That was a wonder to behold.

Lloyd: Yeah, sounds like it.

Davis: About the church now, what do you see as the future of the institutional church and do you agree with those who believe we’re moving into a post-denominational era?

Brown Taylor: Oh, how would I know? [laughs] Has Phyllis Tickle been here? Because Phyllis Tickle would know.

Lloyd: She’s coming.

Brown Taylor: I truly, there are people so skilled at that: Diana Butler Bass, Phyllis Tickle, Tony Jones, there are people so attending to the life of the church. Although I’ve now learned the emergent church is distancing itself from the word “emergent” because that’s sounding too stereotypical.

All I am attentive to is when people are telling me what is giving them life it is either small communities of faith or small circles within larger communities of faith. It is smaller groups.

Twelve’s a nice number, whether it’s the tribes of Israel or the Biblical disciples, but it is in small enough groups to know who’s hurting, who needs food, who needs a place to sleep, who’s scared, who’s fine—that seems to be giving life to lots of people so, wherever church is going, I hope that those small communities are breathed on with love.

Davis: This question is something you’ve touched on—has been touched on many times in this conversation, but maybe this takes us a little further on the road, and that is, if God can be experienced anywhere at any time, how does one know if one is experiencing—truly experiencing God?

Brown Taylor: Now that’s a great question. That’s where I need a community of faith. That’s where the individual—rugged individualist, spiritual believer can get into trouble, I think, because I do need help.

There are things that I would take to be the presence of God that are my delusion, or my fear or my projection, and that’s where I had better be in some kind of community of wisdom. Historical wisdom, present wisdom. I’d better have some teachers, some fellow travelers, some guides who can say, “I want you to think about that one for about a week. Why don’t you not act on that yet, because that sounds crazy to me.” I think that’s important, vitally important.

Lloyd: You need some community of accountability.

Brown Taylor: Yeah.

Lloyd: The danger of religion is getting stuck inside it. The danger of doing without institutional religion of some—is having some kind of foundational sort of history and story and accountability structure. So living in the tension seems to be important.

Brown Taylor: That’s true and, even as you say that, I do know people in communities of faith that have told them they are crazy for wanting things they have every reason to want. And they’ve left, I think, for good reason. They’re decided they can no longer stay in places that tell them they’re crazy.

Lloyd: Even communities can be destructive?

Brown Taylor: Yes. Oh yeah.

Davis: Who are your specific literary and (in the sense of spiritual) guides?

Brown Taylor: I have got to make a list and write that down so I have an answer, because all my answers are my first answers. My first answers are Annie Dillard. My first answers Fred Craddock, Frederick Buechner, Mary Oliver. I read poets, I love Billy Collins.

I read the New York Times book review now just to get leads. I just follow, you know, the good reviews which lead me to something else. I prepare for my classes the same way. I’m a voracious reader. A voracious voyeur. A voracious overhearer of conversations in restaurants. But in terms of authors, it’s inexhaustible.

Alice Munro—nobody talks about her, what a fabulous writer. Some of these brand new international writers who are leaping off the page and telling us more about what it is to be a Pakistani in London or to be a Jew in Iran under the fall of the shah. I mean, the ways in which our lives get so expanded by people who are willing to write fiction and poetry and essays from these different places in the world that I can only visit through them. So I’ll make a list, and the next time I come back, I’ll read it off. Right now the stack of books is like…

Davis: I remember at the end of one of, Leaving Church, maybe you have a postscript with some lists of authors.

Brown Taylor: I did I have some books that meant a great deal to me then and probably I should post that on a website because lots of people are voracious readers, and find lots of encouragement and community that way. Good idea.

Lloyd: One more question.

Davis: Is Sabbath something that can be—that can be observed alone, or does it have to be in some sort of relationship?

Brown Taylor: I think it’s always in relationship to the holy, to God. I think it was God’s idea. So I think that when you’re doing it, it is not always possible to choose to be in community. Sometimes you’re in prison. Sometimes you’re in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes you’re in a hospital bed and it’s not visiting hours yet.

So I think to make a requirement of a present body, lovely as it may be is, is a difficult requirement for some people to fulfill.

But I think if there’s not a great meal, somewhere in the Sabbath, with just more to eat and more to share and songs to sing and—I even made my husband sing me Proverbs 31 one night, because that’s what Orthodox Jews do, and I wanted to hear how it sounded.

But if there’s not a party in there somewhere with some other people present, then you’ll hope that happens next time.

Lloyd: This has been a great conversation and you have some work to do in just a few minutes, so we’d better stop and give you a breather. We hope you’ll join us next week for the next Sunday Forum which is part of the Martin Luther King weekend and of course the inauguration weekend.

The Forum that day will be reflecting on what this inauguration means for our country. We’re going to have William Raspberry, former columnist from the Washington Post, with us and, very interestingly, a man named Earl Stafford—a Virginia businessman, who’s putting on the poor people’s inaugural celebration, creating three days of events for the poor of the city and beyond to come and celebrate the inauguration of our new president.

For now, though, there’s coffee available in the west end—the entrance end of the Cathedral. We’d love for you all to stay for our service at 11:15. We’ll have a chance to hear Barbara Brown Taylor speak. Please join me in thanking Barbara now for this wonderful conversation.

Brown Taylor: Thanks, thank you. [applause]