Special Episode: “Patchworks of Meaning: Stitching Together Our Stories with Scripture” with Barbara Brown Taylor
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Show Notes
Host
Sarah Bessey
Find Sarah online: @SarahBessey on Instagram or Sarah Bessey on Facebook. You can also subscribe to Sarah’s newsletter, Field Notes on Substack. Explore Sarah’s recent books on her website.
Featured guest
Barbara Brown Taylor
Barbara Brown Taylor delights and captivates in her work “saying the things you’re not supposed to say” as a best-selling author, teacher, and Episcopal priest. From her award-winning first memoir, Leaving Church, to her latest book, Always a Guest, she explores the wilderness places of faith, drawing on curiosity and an open heart to guide her path. Barbara has served on the faculties of colleges, universities, and seminaries, but her home is a small farm in the foothills of the Appalachians that she shares with her husband, Ed, and their dogs.
Explore her work on BarbaraBrownTaylor.com, and follow Barbara Brown Taylor on Facebook.
“Faith evolves both with the times and with the Spirit or it passes away with those who want to remember it the way it was.”
Thanks to our producer, SueAnn Shiah, who also provided the music for this episode, you can listen to her album A Liturgy for the Perseverance of the Saints on Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube, or Bandcamp and find her at @sueannshiah on Instagram and @sueannshiah on Twitter.
Transcript
Part 1: Introduction
SARAH: Welcome back to The Evolving Faith Podcast. For someone who was pretty ambivalent about having a season three of the podcast, hello, how are you? I'm Sarah Bessey and I am so glad to be here with you today. If you have been looking for a respite in the wilderness of deconstruction and faith shift or an evolving faith, well, you have definitely come to the right place. You just pull up a quilt to our little campfire here and we are going to spend some time together.
We are also on Twitter and Instagram as @EvolvFaith and over on Facebook as Evolving Faith. And of course, we are also a thriving online community. More than 10,000, which is just mind-blowing to me, more than 10,000 fellow wanderers are currently journeying together over at community.evolvingfaith.com. We are having everything from book clubs, and conversations, and special gatherings for Pride, as well as just conversations about everything from CCM to books we're reading to how we're feeling on Sunday mornings if we are not going to church anymore. I mean, you name it, we're talking about it.
So today on the podcast, we are going to be hearing from our beloved friend Barbara Brown Taylor. This message that she is sharing, this talk, happened at our last Evolving Faith conference, which was in 2022. Barbara is such a good friend to all of us here at Evolving Faith. I think I made the joke on the podcast, I want to say it was last season, that she lives in my heart close by where Jesus lives. That's not wrong, even though it's probably theologically suspect. So Barbara, if you don't know her, Barbara Brown Taylor just delights and captivates in her work at saying the things that you're not supposed to say. She is a spiritual contrarian. She's a best-selling author, and teacher, and Episcopal priest.
From her award-winning first memoir, Leaving Church, all the way to her latest book called Always a Guest, she has explored the wilderness places of faith, drawing on curiosity and an open heart to guide her path. Barbara has served on the faculties of colleges and universities and seminaries, but her home is a small farm in the foothills of the Appalachians that she shares with her husband, Ed, and their dogs. You can always check out her work over on her website, barbarabrowntaylor.com. And I wanted to mention that Barbara will be with us again this year in Minneapolis and online for the Evolving Faith conference in October. I was joking with her the other day that I need to create like this five-timers jacket like they have on Saturday Night Live for frequent hosts because both her and Amena Brown, who's always our MC, they are both due for it very soon. And maybe I could knit it. I could maybe knit them a five-timer's cardigan. That's not a bad idea.
So many of us of course have found our way here because we are looking for healing spaces like this. We are longing for fellow sojourners. We're needing room to exhale all of those questions and doubts that we've been carrying. We yearn to be more connected and less alone, and we're reaching out for others who feel the same, to know that it's not just us out here, to know that it is possible to resurrect and reimagine and rebuild a faith that works not only for ourselves but for this whole world. And so, we know that we're not alone, neither are you, and so we are so ready to welcome you to our little outpost where you can have this weekend to rest, and laugh, and grieve, and create, and hope, and just even be reminded about how loved you are through and through.
So you are invited to join me, Barbara, and a bunch of folks from all over the world who are making our own kind of beautiful, and messy, and diverse table in the wilderness. This year, of course, as I said, we'll have Barbara with us, but there will also be Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber, Rev. Dr. Randy Woodley, Krista Tippett, Dante Stewart, Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney, Amy Kenny. There's so many more including a musical collective called The Many, which is just going to be incredible. You can find all the info, read all the speaker bios, you can buy your tickets for both online and in person, and of course, check out our ever-expanding FAQs and more over at evolvingfaith.com. I would absolutely love to see you there.
In Minneapolis or online, I hope you find belonging here. I want you to bring a friend, I think we call them debrief buddies, bring a few with you. And then you can come by yourself even, though, and make a new friend there. I promise that it's easier than you think to make new friends in that room. And I'm really looking forward to it. This is going to be our first in-person gathering since 2019, and I already know that it's going to be a holy and sacred and life-giving time together. So just to give you a bit of a glimpse as well as bring some goodness to you, let's turn towards Barbara Brown Taylor from that 2022 gathering. Barbara was part of a conversation around evolving faith in Scripture, and this is one of the big connection points that she has with people who were raised evangelical or adjacent to those influences that wrestling with and love of Scripture. And so I will meet you back here at the conclusion of her talk to say goodbye.
Part 2: Barbara’s Talk
*This is a verbatim transcript of the spoken presentation and is not for publication without the speaker's permission.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR: How good to be with you all again, both here in Atlanta and wherever you are at your screens. I come to you straight from my hairdresser at the Grateful Head Salon in Habersham County, Georgia, a dynamo with five kids under 18 who are her real job. We talk about a lot of things while she's cutting my hair. We talk about high school wrestling and difficult in-laws and raising a blended family. This week it was faith. She said, "I feel like my husband and I try to teach our kids to be more spiritual because religion hasn't evolved with the times." She said while she was snipping really close to my right ear, she said, "It's not relatable to them. And as much as we'd like them to grow up the way we did, that's not going to happen. They're part of what comes next and they're going to have to live into that."
I could not have asked for a better signpost to this week's conference. Faith evolves both with the times and with the Spirit or it passes away with those who want to remember it the way it was. We're living into it too because we're part of what comes next. The bad news is, no one can do it for us. And the good news is, no one has to do it alone. No one has to be exclusively right either. It's enough to be together, talking and listening and talking back while we make the way by walking. Sarah and Jeff—thank you—asked me to talk about sacred stories this afternoon, which is perfect since there is no evolving faith without an evolving relationship with Scripture, especially for people who've been taught to listen to Scripture without ever talking back, or who have been punished for talking back, or who get a nervous tic right here when Scripture enters a conversation because they're so used to it being used like a stick.
This kind of relationship would be hard enough if it were a personal one alone. But in this country, it has become a national problem as well. Just about every issue dividing churches and communities have to do something with how people read the Bible, as the literal Word of God universally true in all times and places or as the written record of inspired people who heard God in their own times and places, as a book with one message or a book that is a whole library full of messages that jostle against each other, as a text that is kept under glass or one that is meant to be handled, even if that means getting fingerprints all over it. I have a bias, of course, we do all of us, I accept Scripture as a gift to be opened and rummaged around in, one that wants me close and can stand my scrutiny the way that it has stood the scrutiny of ancestors before me. That's what makes it sacred for me. It's a community project—it always has been—without ever losing its gravity or its allure.
When I was in the business of convincing college students that they could handle Scripture too, which wasn't easy always in rural northeast Georgia, I started by giving them the short list of those who had handled the text before them. So if you've already taken that course, hang in and you can tell me what I missed. But first, the writers of the books, the authors of the Biblia, people who were literate and therefore almost overwhelmingly male, the earliest of them working from oral stories that had circulated for decades or hundreds of years, that made them editors as well as authors, who included priests, and prophets, poets, historians, monarchs, apostles, mystics, and a few people who might be on meds if they were alive today. But since they didn't make meaning the same way, you might think, they got winnowed down. They didn't. Their books didn't always mesh.
But that didn't seem to bother the second group of Bible handlers who were, two, the early authorities who decided what should be in the Bible and what shouldn't. The First Testament was solidified earlier than the second one, which wasn't fixed until the end of the fourth century, a shocking date for some students in an intro to the Bible class. The Book of Revelation almost didn't make the cut. I think Luther said, "If you weren't crazy before you read it, it would make you crazy." A book called The Shepherd of Hermas almost made it. There were a lot more gospels than four at the time, but the authorities decided on four. Though there were significant differences between them. It was an interesting move on their part since choosing one would've kept a whole lot of questions from coming up later. But that's not what they did. "Better to have too many viewpoints than too few," they thought. Surely, later Christians could handle that.
Three, these early authorities also decided what order the books should be arranged in since the arrangement tells its own story. Any of you who picked up the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, you know it's arranged differently than the Christian Old Testament. If the New Testament were arranged in chronological order, it would begin with Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians. And it wouldn't get around to Mark's gospel until Paul had written his last letter, almost a third of the way through. That would've told a different story. But it wasn't the one the early editors wanted to tell so they started with Matthew's gospel instead.
Four, next came the scholars who had to choose among the many surviving versions of the biblical texts—some of them whole, some of them in tatters—to decide which were the oldest ones, which were the most reliable ones, which ones should be in the sacred library. There are more than 5,000 manuscripts to choose from in the New Testament alone. With hundreds of thousands of differences between them. Most of the differences are minor, but a few are major such as the three different endings of Mark's gospel. If you have a good study Bible, it will tell you about that, but somebody had to decide to tell you.
Five, linguists also handled the Bible, deciding how to translate ancient Hebrew and Greek and Aramaic into readable German or English or Mandarin. This was harder, as some of you might imagine, since they had no word spacing, no paragraph breaks, no punctuation, no upper- or lowercase letters in the old text to guide them. So a phrase like "I am now here" might also be read "I am nowhere." Though in the case of ancient Hebrew, there weren't any vowels either, just consonants, until Jewish scholars added vowels in the Middle Ages.
Six, next, came the editors who divided the books of the Bible into chapters and verses so people could reference them easily. This happened around the time of the printing press. Whether they wanted to or not, those editors also shaped the way that we separate and combined teachings in our minds. The first English Bible to appear with chapters and verses was the Geneva Bible published in 1560. Before that, no one held up signs with John 3:16 on them at football games.
Seven, finally, they're the editors of your preferred English translation of the Bible. And there are hundreds of those translations, more if you include paraphrases. Where there's a board of editors, they usually include their titles and their institutional affiliations in the front, along with an introduction telling you how they made their decisions about everything from gendered language to footnotes. I don't need to tell you these decisions often reflect theological differences as well as semantic ones. As in Romans 16:1, where Paul introduces Phoebe as a deacon in her first-century church in some translations or as a servant of that church, depending on the translation. If there are headings above text in your Bible such as The First Sin and Its Punishment or The Married Life of Spirit-Filled Believers—that was in my first Scofield Reference Bible—it helps to remember that those are from the editors of the translation and are not part of the text; the word of human beings, not the Word of God. But like all other headlines, they don't just preview what's coming. They also influence how you read it.
Eight, I should probably include preachers, and teachers, and bloggers, and athletes, and songwriters, and YouTubers, and other influencers on this list since they too play a large role in how people read and hear Scripture. But you get the point, the Bible didn't drop out of a ceiling tile. There are thousands of fingerprints on it already, which can affect your reading of it in a number of ways. Some people decide so much human involvement makes Scripture highly and always suspect if not irrelevant. Others decide that God guided the whole process the same way God guides your reading of it. Some people, me included, decide God accepted the risk of working with human beings a long time ago and entrusts us with handling Scripture in the evolution of our faith.
Whatever you decide, I think it's important as you heard so beautifully a moment ago to own your own reading of Scripture. Otherwise, you miss the ways that your DNA and the DNA of the Bible are all mixed up together. And that might tempt you to keep thinking everyone ought to evolve to be on your page. If you get stuck there, you might as well be back in the same-page community you left a long time ago. Instead of a page, why not a quilt? I know some Bible lovers with literal verse-based quilts that are beautiful. I know others with swirly literary quilts. Some favor the clear patterns of Exodus or the Acts of the Apostles while others take comfort in the darker designs of Job or Revelation. Some don't know where all the pieces in their quilts came from. With so many inherited bits among them, faded images from a bedtime story, half a verse of a meal-time prayer, there's a spot of blood gone brown on one piece, there's an illustration from a children's Bible on another. The thing is, they're all homemade. They're all stitched together from everything that's stuck for the person who made that quilt, commandments and consolations, smackdowns and riddles. The quilts are works of art and they double as comforters through some long cold nights. There are patchworks of meaning and of identity, and there are no two of them exactly alike. The only people I've ever had any trouble with in this metaphor are those who insist they had nothing to do with the way they read Scripture. That is God's Scripture quilt they're wearing, perfect and whole. They didn't pick or choose or interpret a thing.
If I press them, they often point out that mine looks a little misshapen, little thin in some places. They know where I can get one just like theirs if I want. I don't want. There's evolutionary power in owning your quilt, taking responsibility for it and accepting the freedom that goes with it. There's humility in it as your attachment to yours helps you understand why other people are attached to theirs. There's great reward in it. Since the size of the quilt? Entirely up to you. You can replace some of the patches if you want to, using more flexible, more stretchable thread this time if you want. You can sit down with the pieces that trouble you and interrogate them if you want. You can add new ones anytime you want. Maybe a whole bunch of you get together for a quilt-making party. The spirit loves that, especially if they're snacks, hunting down stories together maybe that aren't on any easy-to-find playlist and making them part of your repertoire.
Once, when I got tired of being called too often and too casually to follow Jesus, I counted up exactly how many people he asked to follow him in the four gospels, if not by name, then while looking right at them and saying, "You, follow me." You want to guess? Ten, and only four of them disciples. You should check my math, especially if you read a different translation. But it was such a relief to me to discover how deadly serious he was about the invitation to follow him, knowing exactly how much it cost. By my count, he warned more people about that than he invited. As in Luke's gospel, 14th chapter, when he turned around to face a whole lot of people who were following him, and he said, "Whoever comes to me and does not hate mother and father, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. For which of you intending to build a tower does not first sit down and estimate the cost to see whether he has enough to complete it?"
Once, when I read that passage in class, a volleyball player named Kayla said, "Jesus didn't say that. Who said he said that?" I had to say, "The Bible." Another time, I was so blinded by sunny Christianity that I went hunting for all the sacred stories I could find that happened in the dark. There were so many of them that I wondered how I could have missed them before, not just the obvious ones like Abraham being led outside his tent one night and told to look up at the stars while God said, "That's how big your family's going to be one day." Or the night Jacob wrestled the angel who turned out to be God. But also stories I never, never tagged as happening in the dark before. God parted the Red Sea at night, manna fell in the wilderness at night, angels came to Joseph in dreams at night, the Magi could only see the star they followed at night. My quilt got a lot more lunar patches on it at that point.
The Magi led me to wonder how many other religious strangers play important roles in Scripture, not as potential converts, again, we've just heard that in this session too, but as agents of the God who transcends religion and never met a stranger. Whether they come in Scripture from Egypt or Persia, Samaria, Greece, Rome, Canaan, they enter stage left. They deliver their blessings and they exit stage right, leaving their mark on a tradition that is not their own. They're as easy to miss as the nighttime stories, but what treasure they leave behind, proof that we can bless each other across the boundaries of our tribes.
Working on your quilt isn't the same as designing your own Bible, though we do that too. It's a matter of taking responsibility for how you read it and why along with the honor of putting your fingerprints on it as generations before you have done. It's a matter of remembering you are part of that community, a community that is always evolving. So that even if the stories don't change, your relationships with them do change. And if you believe God has a plan, that's part of the plan.
The hidden bonus is how taking hold of the book can remind you, you were not made to worship a book. It's the divine energy behind the book that woos some of us. It's the divine questions it asks and the divine diversity of its answers in stories and sermons, prophecies and songs, all of them pointing beyond themselves to the source that gives them life, to the one that gives us breath and takes our breath away. The book's the pointer, it's not the point, and our quilts, as lovely as they are, are tents we sleep beneath while we wait for the stars to come out.
Part 3: Wrap-Up
SARAH: Oh my goodness, this is exactly what I mean when I keep telling you all to join us at the conference. There is nothing like hearing something like this live and in real time with kindred spirits. But honestly, the podcast, I'm just so glad that we have a chance to bring this to all of you right now today.
So I forgot actually until we relistened that Barbara had also found her way to the quilt metaphor as well. And of course, you know that we use that metaphor in our conversations, in our artwork, and in our logo even, here over at Evolving Faith. And not only because of the oasis image of just having a place to sit down and rest for a minute while you're in the middle of the wilderness but also, the metaphor lends itself to kind of what we're pursuing in terms of warmth, the patchwork that honors and creates and weaves together our stories and experiences, the humble nature of it even that is really rooted in the artistic and creative and lived experiences of people. And so I have loved revisiting that metaphor for Scripture, and when she says that faith evolves with the times and with the Spirit, and it passes away with those who want to remember it the way it was. And we're living into it too because we are part of what comes next. And we are part of what comes next, and that's both beautiful and terrible, isn't it?
I do hope that you can join us in the autumn for our next gathering. You're going to find some fellow misfits, good conversations there. I would love to see you there. And again, you can find all that info at evolvingfaith.com. You can find more info about Barbara and her work in the world as well as the full transcript of this episode in our show notes. Those are over at evolvingfaith.com/podcast. And you can find me mostly at my newsletter, Field Notes, these days, which you can find at SarahBessey.com. But I'm also over on social media as Sarah Bessey in most places. The Evolving Faith Podcast is produced by myself, Ashleigh Nelson, and SueAnn Shiah, who also wrote and recorded our music. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Evolving Faith Podcast, and until next time—whenever that might be, probably sooner than I think—just remember, still and always, that you are loved.
