pondering my role in a bigger story

Sunday, July 16, 2006

tidbits from leaving church


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."

2 Comments:

Blogger Craig Dunham said...

Glad to see you back posting more regularly, Amy. I'll check more often now.

Loved Marge.

Monday, July 17, 2006 12:51:00 PM

 
Blogger spookyrach said...

Sounds like a great book. I'm interested...

Monday, July 24, 2006 5:40:00 PM

 

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