Reading & Contemplation | “Holy Envy” with Barbara Brown Taylor

Show Notes:

We are excited to welcome Barbara Brown Taylor to The Weight for a conversation about hospitality and being in the center and being at the edge of a religion--how is it different when you’re the outsider versus when you’re on the inside? How do you let people who believe in something completely different strengthen your own faith? Barbara leaned into these lessons when she taught a Religion 101 class at Piedmont College, now Piedmont University, in Georgia. She got to watch the real love and hospitality of Buddhist monks and Muslim Imams who “welcomed a bunch of awkward strangers, and fed us, and showed us where to sit and gave us places of honor and thanked us for coming.” And in return, she was able to deepen her own faith and extend hospitality and love to the others in her own life. She used her experiences teaching that course to write Holy Envy, which was published in 2019.

Barbara Brown Taylor is an Episcopal priest, teacher, and the best-selling. She has served on the faculties of Piedmont College, Emory University, Mercer University, Columbia Seminary, Oblate School of Theology, and the Certificate in Theological Studies program at Arrendale State Prison for Women in Alto, Georgia. 

Resources:

Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others

Find Barbara Brown Taylor on the Web:

https://barbarabrowntaylor.com 

Follow her on Social Media:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authorBarbaraBrownTaylor/

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/71455.Barbara_Brown_Taylor 

Transcript:

Eddie Rester 00:00 Hi, I'm Edie Rester.

Chris McAlilly 00:01
I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight.

Eddie Rester 00:03

Today we welcome Barbara Brown Taylor. Barbara Brown Taylor is an author. She's an Episcopal priest. She is formerly a professor at Piedmont College. She's an amazing preacher. She's authored 14 books. And in 2014, Time Magazine included her in its list of the most influential people in the world.

Chris McAlilly 00:25
Have you ever made that list, Eddie?

Eddie Rester 00:27
You know, actually, no. But I hear that I ended up on the cutting room floor in '18 and '19, is what I heard. That was the rumor.

Chris McAlilly 00:38

That was a different thing that I heard. But anyway, we were talking with Barbara today about her book, "Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others." It's really about her experience as a teacher in the classroom of a Religion 101 course for undergraduate students there at Piedmont. And so we're exploring questions of different faith traditions, and kind of what Barbara learned and what the classroom experience really was through those years.

Eddie Rester 01:07

I think one of the things that amazes me is that she didn't want to write a book about what she taught. She wanted to really write the, I think she called it the autobiography of that class over time and their experience and how a lot of students came in with fixed ideas. And some students came in with no ideas about world religions, but how that, not just for the world, but how the locality of the interaction of religions in north Georgia in her area really began to help her think about her own faith.

Chris McAlilly 01:42

Truly a conversation about what it means to be a neighbor and what it means to interact with strangers and people in strange religious traditions, maybe ones that are very different than your own. It's also a conversation about what it means to be on the center of an institution or the center of a tradition and what it means to be outside. And then how you navigate that space between the center and the edge and the inside and the out. It's great. I mean, one of the things that we noted after we got off the call with her was just how beautiful and soothing her voice is. It's just a wonderful conversation.

Eddie Rester 02:19

I heard her years ago at Duke Divinity School in the 90s. And that's one of the things I remembered. She is an amazing wordsmith and preacher and has some of the most concise and impactful sermons I've ever heard or read. And so it's just an honor today to get to talk with her on the podcast.

Chris McAlilly 02:38
It's holy envy that Eddie has.

Eddie Rester 02:40
I have holy envy, absolutely. So grab the book, if you can, and we thank you for being with us. So like it, share it, and help other folks find the podcast.

Eddie Rester 02:51
[INTRO] Life can be heavy. We carry around with us the weight of our doubt, our pain, our suffering, our mental health, our family system, our politics. This is a podcast to create space for all of that.

Chris McAlilly 03:03

We want to talk about these things with humility, charity, and intellectual honesty. But more than that, we want to listen. It's time to open up our echo chamber. Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]

Chris McAlilly 03:19
We're here today with Barbara Brown, Taylor. Barbara, thanks so much for being with us on the podcast.

Barbara Brown Taylor 03:24
I'm happy to. Can't wait to talk to you.

Eddie Rester 03:27
I'm so glad to get to talk to you. One of the very first compilations of sermons of anyone I ever bought was when I was at Duke Divinity School long, long time ago...

Chris McAlilly 03:37
Very long, Barbara, very, very long. Eddie was there a long time ago.

Eddie Rester 03:41
Long time ago. But it was "Gospel Medicine."

Barbara Brown Taylor 03:44 Oh, yeah.

Eddie Rester 03:45

And there's a line in one of the sermons of... I can't remember exactly. But basically, "when was the first time that God let you down?" And it really was one of those moments for me that kind of reopened how I read different passages of Scripture. So it was a great gift to me, as a young preacher back a long time ago. So thank you.

Barbara Brown Taylor 04:06 I'm happy to hear that. Thank you.

Chris McAlilly 04:08

The recent book that you published, "Holy Envy," about kind of the move from the priesthood into the classroom where you taught religion 101, I wonder if maybe you could give folks kind of the background, who haven't had an opportunity yet to read the book.

Barbara Brown Taylor 04:27

Yes, I resigned from full time parish ministry in September of 1997, having hit a dead end in how to help a growing congregation grow. And I had an invitation to take a new position at Piedmont College then, now Piedmont University, to teach religion. I think they put philosophy on my title to make it sound fancy, but I couldn't have taught a philosophy course if my life depended on it. But in short, they put a Christian minister in charge of teaching the great religions of the world. And I didn't have a PhD, so all of a sudden pastor without a parish and professor without a PhD. So it was a wonderful wilderness time of needing to make things up as I went along and let students teach me as much as the other way around.

Barbara Brown Taylor 05:17

But I did have 15 weeks. I started out trying to teach seven great world religions and ended up with five, which meant I had about three class sessions to present Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity. And I suppose anyone in one of those traditions would realize how ridiculous that is that you can't do it in three one-hour-and-15-minute sessions. But that's what I tried to do. And I loved it. I did it for 19 and a half years and never did it the same way twice, because I was never satisfied with whether I'd done them justice and how I could do better.

Eddie Rester 05:56

And I would think that even kind of the, as the world began to change, 9/11 happened in there, politics began to change, and kind of even our conversations around religion and Christianity began to change over those 19 and a half years. What were some of the big shifts that you saw, kind of culturally, as you taught that class and in relation to how you taught that class?

Barbara Brown Taylor 06:22

Well, you just named most of them. I mean, by the time I retired in 2014, most of the students in front of me who were of traditional age had lived their whole lives with a US at war in some Muslim majority country. So everything they had seen in their whole lives was anti-Muslim, which meant I really needed five sessions on Islam because that was the hardest.

Barbara Brown Taylor 06:46

But the world changed. Even things that went under a lot of people's radars like the growth of Mormonism. I had LDS students in class who, one notably was a feminist LDSer. I learned a whole lot about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the threat it posed a Baptist students in the class who had been raised to see that as a pretender in Christianity. So there were rivalries within Christianity. One student showed up having read everything Marcus Borg had ever written. He was an outlier, for sure, that student.

Eddie Rester 07:23 Yeah.

Barbara Brown Taylor 07:24

But he was already revising atonement theory, you know, and rethinking inclusion of LGBTQ people. And that was way before that was in the news. So changes happened around the world. They changed in the US. And they changed in the southeast and in my rural county. So a Laotian Buddhist community who had finally been in this county for three generations finally had enough money to build a temple. And that caused some upset as you can imagine. So now that community is pretty blended in and everybody looks forward to the new year celebration, but the changes were global and local. And it meant that's another reason I couldn't teach the class the same way twice.

Eddie Rester 08:08

So when you sat down to write this book about the journey, really, were you trying to talk about your own kind of faith journey as you taught this class? Or was it about, did you want to convey the students' faith journey? What were you hoping to show as you wrote this book?

Barbara Brown Taylor 08:28
You know, it almost doesn't matter what an author hopes.

Eddie Rester 08:31 That's true.

Barbara Brown Taylor 08:32 What matters is what the reader gets.

Eddie Rester 08:33
Like a preacher doesn't, yeah.

Barbara Brown Taylor 08:35

But they're all there. I mean, it is the autobiography of a classroom, really, not the teacher. I wanted it to be a memoir about classroom experience that lasted almost 20 years. But it was impossible to do that without also talking about changes in me over that period of time, because it changed me hugely to be responsible for teaching the other great traditions in the way that I wished they would teach mine. So golden rules zoomed into my Christian consciousness and took me in a completely unexpected direction.

Barbara Brown Taylor 09:08

But the book went through a lot of iterations with an editor who kept sending it back and saying, "Not yet, not yet," because I couldn't figure out how to blend those. But if I answered it more simply, it would be how many people said, "I wish I could take a course like that, Religion 101." And I thought, 'Well, I can do that in a book." Not informationally, you know, not to give them the content of the course, but to give them the feel of the course. As students, a lot like me, began to encounter living communities instead of stereotypes and to make friends across traditions, instead of settling for memes, and it changed our lives.

Chris McAlilly 09:51
How would you define religion? How would you flesh that out for folks?

Barbara Brown Taylor 09:57

You know, I used in class a definition adapted from... Is he an anthropologist or a sociologist? Clifford Geertz, G-E-E-R-T-Z. So it's really his thought, but that religion is a way of thinking about and responding to divine reality. So thinking about, you know, what's the theology? What are the teachings? What does it look like creedily? Or, you know, what are the basic do's and don'ts? And maybe do's and don'ts moves into responding to, because that's where worship-- and I'm using Christian terms--and sacramental life and prayer and stewardship and footwashing come in. So a way of thinking about and responding to divine reality and he may not have used divine, but that was... Yeah, I think he did. That'll work for religion, right.

Barbara Brown Taylor 10:48

But the root word is religare, if my Latin's any good, and that could mean two things. But the one I liked was to re-ligament, you know, to repair the ligament between two things, to re- ligament. And then we had to think as a class about ligament what to what, and it was, you know, the human to the Divine, the soul to the body, the before and after, to this life, and me to my neighbor, so there were lots of ways religion teaches how to make connections, how to connect disparate things so they work together.

Chris McAlilly 11:27

So much of the book is about neighbors, and the ways in which we think about our neighbors within different religions or our neighbors around the world as global citizens. But then increasingly, as you work through this course, through the many years, it became about neighbors in Georgia and Atlanta and northeast Georgia. And, you know, I think one of the things that we all have in common is we tend to be envious of our neighbors. But why "Holy Envy?" How did you come to frame the journey as one of holy envy?

Barbara Brown Taylor 12:02
That's good. I had a Muslim, by the way, really object to that title.

Eddie Rester 12:05 Did he really?

Barbara Brown Taylor 12:05

He said in Islam, envy is never good. Never good, never holy. So he was wonderful to object to that. I picked that up, as I say in the book, from Krister Stendahl, who was the Bishop of Stockholm, Sweden, when the first Mormon temple was built there. And it was huge, and it was beautiful, and it was expensive. And the neighborhood was highly upset. And he was called in to broker some of the dis-ease in the neighborhood. And he gave three rules of religious understanding. And I wish that I had the book, here open to that page. But the last one was to practice holy envy.

Barbara Brown Taylor 12:46

And he never said much about that, but he exemplified it by ending up making both a video and an encyclopedic entry for the LDS church, on their view of vicarious baptism. It's got a lot of controversy around it now, but at the time, he found that something he envied because he, as a Lutheran, you know, was taught that death was the end, and you've done all you can do and the verdict was coming in. And so he ended up practicing holy envy towards the new LDS people in the neighborhood.

Barbara Brown Taylor 12:47

And the other two were, when trying to learn about another religion ask one of its adherents, and not its enemies or its critics. And the second one was, don't compare your best to their worst, which I find happens all the time.

Eddie Rester 13:39 All the time.

Barbara Brown Taylor 13:39 And third one was holy envy.

Chris McAlilly 13:43

That just makes me tired. Because it does happen all the time. I think that reminds me of one of the characters in the book, who has a particular student, who, like all students are coming in to check out the course and to see kind of what this is all about. And as you know, Eddie and I are both also pastors here in the American South. There's a particular version of Christianity that it's not about a particular denomination, but it very much is not just boundaries, but walls. And this particular student came in and wanted to know kind of the way in which you were going to teach World Religions and believe that Christ is the only way, and I wonder if you could kind of flesh out that particular student, and probably stood in for a range of different students who intersected with the course.

Barbara Brown Taylor 14:35

That's a good question. That happened early in my tenure. And what I knew then that was not true the whole time I was there was that homeschooling was very popular then among two populations: one who wanted more Christian teaching than they could get into public school and others who wanted to protect their children from sort of blindered view of religion and history. But it turned out that student, among many others, was being homeschooled out of Bob Jones University. And it was a brilliant education in history and art and science, and in religion, it was just flat. It was flattened and narrowed out. So he came out of that.

Barbara Brown Taylor 15:22

And he also came out of a high school experience where apologetics had been in his course curriculum. You know, he had learned in a high school class how to defend--not a public school, needless to say--but how to defend Christian faith. So he was, I think, quite innocently expecting that in a college class to be the next level of how to defend the faith against encroachments. So I was not mature enough at that time to receive him in the way that I just described to you. If I'd been wiser, I would have had a lot more questions to ask him. But mostly, I just freed him to make a decision and said, "This may not be the right course at all for you. So please," you know, "make a good decision and use your four hours, three hours of credit in a fruitful way." And he did. He dropped my course.

Eddie Rester 16:13
I was going to ask, what did he decide to do.

Barbara Brown Taylor 16:16 He took my advice!

Eddie Rester 16:18

And there is a sense, I think, sometimes, in some circles, that learning about other religions, it's disloyal, or maybe it can be threatening to your own understanding of what you believe in as a Christian. But what you discovered, and what you describe, is really just the opposite of that, that it really began to build and clarify your faith and the faith of others. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that.

Barbara Brown Taylor 16:53

You know, it's why I taught the students the phrase "holy envy," because they had been taught that would be sinful. If there was anything they appreciated in our site visits, they thought that meant they weren't being loyal to their faith. And there was a tender love of Jesus in all that, that I did honor at the time, that they didn't want to do anything that would disrespect him. And a lot of them had been taught that to find anything lovely in another tradition would be to disrespect him. So a lot of my work was pedagogical. And over and over again, smoothing down any idea they might have that I was out to evangelize them, or it was so funny to watch them gird themselves to be evangelized, when they went to different religious centers, and it never happened. It was like watching somebody who'd been pushing against a wall really hard, and the wall just fell over. They didn't know what to do with the momentum. Because nobody tried to change their mind about anything.

Barbara Brown Taylor 17:51

I remember one imam who said to a small group, he said, you know, "My wish is not that you become Muslim. It is that you become the best Christian, the best Jew, the best whatever you are." And the students were just blown away that he wanted them to be the best, the best in their own eyes at what they did. So I think I just lost the question in there somewhere. You got me all excited.

Eddie Rester 18:17
You know, just about how did this experience grow your faith or help you redefine and deepen

maybe your own faith, which I think is part of the story of the book?

Barbara Brown Taylor 18:28

Yeah. And they ended upset, too. I mean, I don't want to make any... I don't want to make this sound like a lovely...

Eddie Rester 18:35 Right.

Barbara Brown Taylor 18:36

un-bumpy path, because you know, to have a Muslim question you about trinity, and to say, "how does this make any sense?" Or, or even about, you know, the Christian view of crucifixion. "Why would God let God's beloved die that way? Why would God not defend?" Because Islam has a different story about Jesus' death. It's a difficult thing to have a Buddhist, in a very kind way, say "we don't really believe there's a big daddy in the sky who's going to make everything better." I guess that wasn't particularly kindly put, but it was still, you know, such hard, hard questions, you know, from other traditions, but they did make me think about things that other Christians, at least in my small mainline tribe, just didn't ask each other anymore.

Barbara Brown Taylor 19:23

We took it for granted that we knew roughly the answers to those things. But it ended up growing my faith in ways that other people would say, "No, that was losing your faith." But I came to the startling revelation that if I were called upon to defend my neighbor or defend my religion, that Jesus would point me to the neighbor, that when I looked at his example, if it came down to his loyalty to his tradition or his loyalty to a wounded person in front of him--or a threatened person in front of him--he chose the person. You know, not uncritically. I mean, there are plenty of times he didn't leave his tradition to do that. I'm one of those people who thinks he was a progressive in his time and was a lot like Rabbi Hillel. But anyhow, Jesus taught me that: choose the neighbor.

Chris McAlilly 20:21

Yeah, just this question of what is religion, it pervades the book. And there's this one paragraph that I found really provocative towards the end of the book, "There is no such thing as religion. There are only religious people who embody the scripts of their faiths as differently as dancers enbody the steps of their dances," and it kind of goes on from there. It's a really, really nice passage. And one of the things I was struck by just it is true, I mean, to encounter a single LDS person is not to encounter all that there is to know about the Church of Latter Day Saints. It just is to encounter one Muslim...

Eddie Rester 21:00 One Christian.

Chris McAlilly 21:01

One Christian, one Buddhist is to encounter the entirety of the tradition. I think we've all been guilty of that. But also think, like, there's both attending to the particularity of this one person's religious experience and then also recognizing that there's just a vast world beyond it.

Barbara Brown Taylor 21:20

Uh huh. Yeah, I remember one field trip coming home from a reform synagogue, and I heard a student talking to his mom on the phone saying, "Yeah, we learned all about Judaism tonight. You know, I think I understand it now." And I want to go, Oh, sweetie."

Eddie Rester 21:36 No.

Barbara Brown Taylor 21:37

But it's so true. Think about that. I mean, what if the only church somebody walked into was a Greek Orthodox Cathedral, and they came out and told people they now understood Christianity? It's just... Yeah. It's not going to happen through one.

Eddie Rester 21:53

One of the things that you bring up in the book is the story of Melchizedek, the priest from the Old Testament, as this holy outsider image. Can you say a little bit about that? Why that image was important? Maybe fill in for some of our listeners a little bit of the story of Melchizedek and how that informs some of your thinking in the book as well.

Barbara Brown Taylor 22:21

Yeah, I got on a tear that I had a lot of fun with. I'm rusty on it now. I did a continuing ed event I think at Duke on this. But it was looking for strangers in the Bible. I learned the the Jewish term for a righteous Gentile. You know, at Yad Vashem in Israel, there's a wall to the Gentiles that protected Jewish lives during World War Two. So they were not of the Jewish tradition, but they were honored by the Jewish tradition for the ways in which they defended Jewish people. And I thought, "Well, where are Christians?" If I look through the Christian texts, where are the righteous fill in the blanks? You know, where are the outsiders, the people not in the tradition, who change the tradition who come in and make a difference.

Barbara Brown Taylor 23:12

And so Melchizedek was the earliest, and I found enormous amounts of study on him, academic, you know, all the way down to some pretty crazy stuff online available for $25 if you wanted to be a member of an esoteric order. But he came out of nowhere, you know, to bless Abraham and serve him bread and wine, after a great battle. So he became the first I found, but the Magi would be more familiar to more Christians. And it's so funny that because we have a story from Matthew about them visiting the baby Jesus, probably a time after his birth, because the Holy Family is in a house by then and no longer in a stall.

Barbara Brown Taylor 23:12

But the Magi show up with their gifts. And most Christian translations say, "and they worshipped him," once they presented their gifts. If you do the word work, they honored him. And then they went back by another way. And chances are historically they were Zoroastrian priests, but I think Christians have so folded them into the Christian story, that if you asked a sixth grader, a sixth grader might say, yeah, they became, you know, the first members of the Christian Church of Bethlehem that they just were so excited to have found Jesus. But they didn't. They came from outside and they went back to outside, but in between they honored and became a part of the story. So they became the righteous Gentiles in that story of Matthew and I went off on a hunt that included others, but don't ask me now because, yeah. Don't ask me now.

Eddie Rester 24:49

But the idea is that these holy outsiders help us define our faith in ways or begin to understand more of what it is that we believe. And I'm assuming along the journey of those 20 years with your students, you ran into a lot of those holy outsiders, whatever you want to call them, along the way. Are there some of those that kind of, for you, stand out in how they spoke and taught and maybe helped you reflect?

Barbara Brown Taylor 25:23

I could. I could. You really shouldn't get me started on this. I want to back up to one thing you said, that the outsiders helped define our faith. And I would say true, but sometimes also simply do us a kindness, do us an unconditionally gracious kindness, and thereby change our vision of, you know, the possibilities of the stranger forever. So I'll just leave that in. It's not just they're useful. It's that they're kind.

Barbara Brown Taylor 25:55

So I mean, the first person that came to mind is Brother Shankara, at the Vedanta Center of Atlanta, which comes out of Vedic religion in India. But I remember when he kind of got in a habit of calling me on Sunday afternoons, because that's not a big day for him, but he knew it was for me, and he'd just check in, see how I was doing. And a wonderful Imam that I saw pretty recently, who, I don't know, was always so kind to me when I brought students to the masjid, not only in welcoming us to a Friday Jummah prayer service, which was huge, I mean, to have a bunch of--we were the strangers then. You know, coming in not to do a kindness, but to be curious and awkward and stand in the wrong place.

Barbara Brown Taylor 26:42

But his continued kindness to them and to me, and the ways in which when we sat around in a circle afterwards, and I would lead the questioning at first, because the students were too timid. And I realized now how many ways I blundered those questions, you know, quoting the Quran to him, for some reason, when he could quote it in Arabic, and he just, every single time, tried to make me sound smart instead of stupid. And I don't know. Those two come to mind right away. And there's so many others, I mean, if only because, again, they welcomed a bunch of awkward strangers, and fed us, and showed us where to sit and gave us places of honor and thanked us for coming. And it was so humbling.

Chris McAlilly 27:28

I feel like college is a time where it's okay to be awkward and strange, to kind of explore these kinds of things, but then often, you know, once you get to a certain place in your 20s, you kind of adopt a particular way of being in the world. And I often see folks kind of, you know, not really... There are not many incentives to leave your comfort zone, I guess that would be the way to think about it. And you have this really interesting way of talking about the center and the edge, towards the end of the book, and I've continued to reflect upon that. "After half a lifetime near the center, and no wish to be outside, being eccentric suits me," you write. "In the truest sense of the word, it suits to me to be off center, sometimes pressed against the edges of my tradition." I wonder if you could reflect upon that a little bit more.

Barbara Brown Taylor 28:27

I haven't stopped thinking about that one. But because I'm talking to two people who, and I guess your listeners too, are largely people who have given a great deal of time, thought, and care to institutional life, which is after all, how things continue from generation to generation, right?

Eddie Rester 28:47 Right.

Barbara Brown Taylor 28:47

Without churches and schools, universities, monasteries, Vaticans, how does stuff go from generation to generation? I can think of some Native American people right now who would say to me, "Through story, and personal relationship, and sweat lodge and sun dance." So they might say, those may be institutional, but they don't have any walls in them. But so I want to honor institutional life. And I want above all in this time when so many institutional lives are under threat, and the United Methodist Church is feeling that as much as any religious institution I know of at the moment. So we don't know, you know, how that one will roll out.

Barbara Brown Taylor 29:30

But I do find, I just have such gratitude for institutions who have allowed room at their edges, whether that means lending space or giving money, or sharing their worship space with somebody who's doing things way differently than they would do it. But just institutions who've got enough strength of identity and enough resources to spare, although it might be even more impressive if they shared resources they didn't have enough to share, but who are willing to share the center with the edge and to be hospitable at the edge, and not to marshal everything they've got at the center in the name of survival. Because that seems kind of unchristian to me.

Chris McAlilly 30:16

No, that's it. That's it. And you know, to be at the center is also to be a doorkeeper at times. And there's a great quotation from Richard Rohr, in that section of the book, where he talks about a doorkeeper must love those both on the inside and those on the outside of his or her group, and to know how to move between those two loves. That's such a rich image and one that, you know, that I've been contemplating a great deal. It's very difficult to do that. But I like the way that you put it: to have strength of identity such that you can, operate at the at the edge of your tradition, in such a way that you create paths of access in and out of it to those who are inside and those who are outside, and to create opportunities for those on the inside to get to know those on the outside and those on the outside to get to know those on the inside.

Barbara Brown Taylor 31:12

Yeah, see, the word "liminal" or "threshold" comes up a lot in what we're talking about also, because people at the doorway, you know, are greeting those going either way. And as you well know, sometimes it's hard to muster gracious goodbye to those who are leaving for good mad, you know, but also to welcome those who don't even know where to stand or sit. You just reminded me of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, which hosted a Sunday evening--can that be right?--yoga class, that put out their mats on the great labyrinth of the floor of that cathedral. I would love to have been in that yoga class. And that's a really trivial kind of thing. You know, in this age of being super tuned to social justice, there are many edgier ways to tend to doors so that you facilitate the in and the out, instead of trying to keep the out out in the in in.

Chris McAlilly 32:07

But isn't it the case that, and I think this runs through the book as well, that sometimes it's easier to offer kindness and hospitality to those who are so different than you, to folks in other parts of the religious world, whose traditions are so eccentric or strange that there's this kind of exotic, like, traveling-around-the-world air to it. And sometimes it's even harder to offer that kindness to people within your, you know, presumed tribe, but who practice their religiosity in a way that that you find, I don't know, maybe strange, hard, eccentric, but even maybe even challenging to what you would identify yourself as being this particular kind of Christian. And I just think about religion, like progressive or conservative Christians, that just bar who might be willing to actually offer a great deal of kindness and generosity for those who are outside the tribe.

Barbara Brown Taylor 33:07

Oh, sure. No, you're so right to talk about that. And you're being nice and tentative, I would say that's an absolute, that you just said. There were two subtexts in the book that I didn't do much with, and one is everybody loves to go to lunch with the Dalai Lama, right. And then he'll go back to Dharamsala. But you know, if your church is splitting, the last person in the world you want to sit next to is somebody who's going to make the other choice. And in a way, you talk about, you know, conservative Christians who fight but it's like, just keep making the circle smaller, and the fights get hotter and hotter, you know, when it gets down to a split denomination, and then it gets down to a church that's split. It just gets hotter and hotter.

Barbara Brown Taylor 33:47

And, you know, at least one reason for that is you don't have to live with the Dalai Lama, right? You're not in any kind of relationship with him that requires working out whether he takes out the trash on Thursdays or you do that, or, you know, whatever, or who's going to take care of what part of you know this life that is more than what any of us wants to do. And it's about sticking together in some way.

Barbara Brown Taylor 34:09

And the other subtext, of course, was political, which I couldn't go anywhere near. But I hoped it was apparent in the book that a lot of us have got stereotypes and memes and built-in meanness about our political strangers, as well. And sometimes I think we turn them into strangers. They're our neighbors. But anyway, that that was a subtext in there too, that I didn't want to go into.

Eddie Rester 34:32

Yeah, one of the things you write in the book is, it says , "It just seems helpful to admit that Christianity is as complicated and conflicted as any other religion with groups of followers who can believe in the unity of the faith even as they refuse communion to one another." And, you know, Chris and I right now we go to meetings of pastors who see differently. We were sitting in one this week on Zoom, who see things very differently in the United Methodist Church right now. And it's hard within our own tribe to muster the hospitality necessary, I think, to express the love of Christ and to show the world the love, the love of Christ.

Eddie Rester 35:14

I wonder, just in your own learnings, and this can be from the book or just from your own learnings, as a former priest and observer and preacher. Where do we begin? Where are the reservoirs of hospitality for us that I think our world needs? Where can we begin to relearn those habits and patterns?

Barbara Brown Taylor 35:50

One thing, as you speak, and again, this is so current in your lives especially, but all of us who are watching, you know, the way Christianity presents itself changed so dramatically, and the number of people who are interested in learning more about it changes so dramatically. But it's hard to do what you're talking about when you're afraid, when you're under threat. You know, I think in some ways, hospitality and kindness are at their best when people are not afraid and under threat. The real trick is, how do you continue to offer it when you are afraid and under threat?

Barbara Brown Taylor 36:26

I mean, the subtitle of my book is "Finding God in the Faith of Others." So do I want to bracket and say which others? You know, under what conditions, you know, to what end? But I think, because I've talked to a lot of people who are now outsiders to Christianity, or who were never insiders, it is that Christianity, Christian hospitality has so often come with a carrot or a stick. It's come with an agenda. And so that it becomes very interesting for particular Christians in particular places to figure out what hospitality looks like, without the goal of making new members or increasing the budget, or agreeing on the zoning of some new thing. I mean, maybe it's just human to have agendas. But I think a lot of people I talked to don't want to go anywhere near a Christian, hospitable person, because there's going to be a hook in there somewhere. And so that's a history to be overcome.

Barbara Brown Taylor 37:28
What do you think? This conversation goes two ways. I'm turning that question around on you.

What do you think? Because you do think about it.

Chris McAlilly 37:35 Yeah, we do.

Barbara Brown Taylor 37:37 Tell me.

Chris McAlilly 37:39

I mean, I think about a lot of my friends, you know, who perhaps grew up in the church or people around town at the University in our town, too. You know, they're beyond the institutional life of the church or any kind of religious tribe. And I don't know, I mean, I think there is a curiosity and a neighborliness, that I find in the community that's just there, that is outside any kind of a contested kind of political agenda. In some ways, like, it's easier to kind of just be to be myself, and to engage in human relationships with people outside of the church, just because people have no expectations of me as a pastor, you know, and so there's a way of just extending hospitality as a human being that I actually find it's a really healthy thing for me as a pastor to kind of get beyond the institutional life of the church. I don't know, I'm just kind of rambling. I don't... That's not an answer.

Barbara Brown Taylor 38:47
No, no, I've got a response, no. I want to hear from Eddie, too. Eddie?

Eddie Rester 38:50

I think for me, one of the things that for a while I've just wrestled with is that Scripture calls us the ecclesia, the gathering. It's not church. It's not building. It's not institution. It's the sense of the gathered people and how crazy it was in the New Testament that those people actually showed up in a room together to talk about a resurrected Savior. And there was something beautiful and natural about that, that I think in all of our wrangling and striving for power and place for the church that we have set aside the idea of the gathering and love for each other bound by Christ. And we kind of put that over here as a program off to the side and these other things are what's important.

Eddie Rester 39:45

But whenever you talk to someone who, at one time was an active, vibrant part of a church and then they're not that anymore, one of the things that they will reminisce about to me is, "I remember being with this group. I remember caring for that person. I remember being cared for." And I think reigniting that, for me is part of it. Can we create the beautiful community again? And I don't know if we can, but I think that's part of the hard work, that people can look at Christians and say, "I'd like to be part of that life." And I don't think right now that people in our world look at the Christian institution and say, "I want to be a part of that life." Most of them say, "I'm glad I got out" who have gotten out.

Barbara Brown Taylor 40:39

Gosh, I love those two answers, because I'm listening, you know, to hear Chris talk about hospitality of being I mean, this is outside the doors, right? He's talking about being out in the community as a human being whose hospitality is in you're receiving other people's hospitality. You know, that's such a flip I think, sometimes when you want to focus on being the host, but he's talking about that. And then you, Eddie, really talk about "in," you know, within. How could church recover, you said, beautiful community, you know, we're used to hearing beloved community as well. But I know what you mean.

Barbara Brown Taylor 41:22

I hear the same people who've left but who remember what they miss a lot. There's a guy named Scott Black Johnston, who's pastor of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York, and he's got a new book coming out. He talks about the de-centered church that's coming right up and about what it would look like to embrace the opportunities that offers. And I thought, "Wow." He's also the guy at staff meeting, who said, what do we want to keep from the pandemic about the way we did things? You know, what, do we not want to let go? So I love thinking about the de-centered church. We were talking earlier about edges and centers. But what a church that's decentered from the public square in the way it used to be because, Eddie, you talked about power and place, and if that is going and gone? What are the advantages?

Eddie Rester 42:12

Right? Yeah, I think that's one of the things that church has to begin to wrestle with. Whatever veneer of Christendom was left in the South, around our churches, COVID stripped that away finally, and I think that rethinking who we can be if we don't have to be that, I think can be healthy and holy.

Chris McAlilly 42:38

I like the image that you use from John Philip Newell, of a way of thinking about kind of moving, navigating between the center and the edges of faith. He tells a story of kind of early Christian circles, the Celtic monks living in Britain, engage the practice of peregrination, moving deliberately from home into kind of pilgrimage, journeying from place to place. I just, I've heard people talk about kind of caravans lately, or kind of just moving, moving out of a place that feels like home, maybe disillusioned or, you know, maybe you don't fit. The experience of feeling homeless is one that I hear a lot, both from people within religious circles and beyond them. And so you end up kind of having to go move around and look around for new friends or new places where you might seek new life. So I don't know, I find myself really interested just in that category of peregrination, or pilgrimage as a way of engaging kind of the journey of faith lately.

Barbara Brown Taylor 43:53 Sure is appropriate now, isn't it?

Eddie Rester 43:58

We've reached the end of our time, and I just hate it because I feel like we could talk for another two or three hours. So maybe we'll need to get you back in at some point. But it's been just a delight to get to share a little time with you today and just really appreciate your work over time and really the work of "Holy Envy." I think that it's a book that can help us all think about how do we not defend ourselves against but with in the search for our faith. I think it's an important work.

Barbara Brown Taylor 44:34
I love where we ended, too. That felt real holy. So I've enjoyed it so much. Thank you both for inviting me.

Eddie Rester 44:44
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Chris McAlilly 44:50

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