Finding God among others

     

In my home, Barbara Brown Taylor’s main claim to fame is that she has survived six cullings in six years of the books on my study shelves. All fourteen of her books have withstood donation to local libraries, friends’ entreaties, and nudges from would-be borrowers. I have hung on to them like a terrier with a bone.

      And nothing is likely to change, least of all in the face of Taylor’s latest offering, Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others (HarperOne, 2019).

      I hesitate to say that this is her best book, but I’m happy to confirm that I again reveled in her way of sharing her concerns and doubts about faith in the world today with such bluntness, honesty, and openness. I think of her in the way she describes one of her favorite students as having a racehorse mind, a generous heart, and a ready humor.

      Who else, for example, would describe in such detail a very first class at eight one morning at rural Piedmont College?

      The trash can needed emptying; she had lined up a row of religious symbols on her desk so that there would be something to point to when students asked if they were in the right room; and she had plugged a boom box loaded with Moroccan music into the wall to drown out the buzz from the fluorescent lights overhead.

      She also gave a dishonorable mention to two big guys in athletic jackets in the back row who scarcely noticed her as they sat eating “tater tots” (deep-fried potato segments) and scrambled eggs covered with cheese out of Styrofoam boxes!

      Two hundred and fifteen pages later she is able to tell a very different story as she speaks of retiring happily from teaching religion, though she is quick to add that she is not done with searching the scriptures and the history and tradition of her faith because she still wants to be a peacemaker.

      But back to the start of the classroom experiences she shared with a bunch of lively, curious students. No one could describe them better than the teacher herself—in her introduction to her book. She virtually writes her own blurb, describing a private liberal arts college in the foothills of the Appalachians.

      She says this is the story of Christian minister (an Episcopal priest) who lost her way in the church and found a new home in the classroom, where the course she taught most often was not Introduction to the New Testament, Church History, or Christian Theology, but Religions of the World. “As soon as she recovered from the shock of meeting God in so many new hats, she fell for every religion she taught.”

      The real blurb on the dust jacket does the rest, making it clear that this is not a primer on religions but an exploration of what is revealed when we accept the invitation to investigate the wonder around us.

      “Here,” the publicist writes, “we learn not only that God’s preferred language is driven by curiosity and specializes in questions, but we also discover the spiritual riches God can teach us from the faith of others.”

      And if that promotional exercise doesn’t persuade you that you should have joined Taylor’s class or should read her book, I don’t know what will. 

      I might add that Taylor also describes her book as the story of a generation of young Americans who are growing with more religious diversity than their parents or grandparents did and who are still trying to decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

      She reasons her way through this challenge with consummate skill, subtly embracing the wisdom of many other respected teachers, among them Thomas Merton (a keen scholar of comparative religion) who, for me, captures the essence of the book in one shining sentence: “God speaks to us in three places: in scripture, in our deepest selves, and in the voice of the stranger.”

      And how right he—and she—is!