One October morning in 2011, Barbara Brown Taylor, a New York Times bestselling author and Episcopal priest, flew to West Virginia to walk into a cave. She was guided by a retired Presbyterian minister who had been doing just that for 50 years.
As she writes in her 2014 book, “Learning to Walk in the Dark,” the cavernous darkness of the interior was encompassing in a way that life above ground — even at night with its moonlight and starlight — can never be.
Deep in the darkness, she saw a fissure of crystals that glittered like jewels. Taylor took a crystalline pebble home as a souvenir, but when held under her bedroom lamp it was as dull as road gravel. Only when she turned off the lamp, letting darkness roll over her again, and shone a small penlight on it did the pebble burst “into a diamond factory before my eyes,” the stone “alive with light, but only in the dark.”
This precise, poetic passage, with its deftly delivered punchline of wisdom, is vintage Taylor. One who often takes the proverbial road less traveled, Taylor grew up in a mostly secular household but was ordained as a priest in 1984. She became rector of the small Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church in Clarkesville in 1992 and wrote 10 theology books. These books brought wide acclaim, but she left the church in 1997 to occupy an endowed chair of religion and philosophy at Piedmont College and to venture into inspirational nonfiction for a lay audience.
“I left congregational ministry, but not the priesthood,” she says. “Teaching became my way of exercising my priesthood, which continues to this day through writing now.”
Credit: ELaneGresham2017
Credit: ELaneGresham2017
Many themes run through her books, but it is her exhilaration in the here and now — the natural world, the present moment, the deeply felt connection between one human and another — that is her signature. As she writes in her 10th book, “An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith”: “Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.”
Next April, the 73-year-old will be formally inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, joining Alice Walker, Pat Conroy and Jericho Brown, among others. Her fans surely aren’t surprised. Her 2006 memoir, “Leaving Church,” won an Author of the Year award from the Georgia Writers Association. Her next two books, “An Altar in the World” (2010) and “Learning to Walk in the Dark” (2015), were New York Times bestsellers. In 2014 Time Magazine included her on its annual list of Most Influential People; in 2015 she was named Georgia Woman of the Year.
All her books, she says, arise from what she calls her pastoral ear. “I listen to what people are talking about. And they’ll ask me questions like, ‘Is God only in the church or also in the world? Is everything dark evil or do we need a full day and night view of life?’”
Darkness is her shorthand for “anything that scares me, for the fear that I don’t have the resources to deal with,” she says — things like melting polar ice caps, suffering children, dementia and chronic pain.
Credit: Harper One
Credit: Harper One
Sometimes she has been accused of lacking faith. “It’s not as mean as it sounds,” she says. “Some people have a sunny spirituality. But my spiritual gifts center around a more lunar spirituality. I’ve learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, and those things have saved me over and over.”
It’s a message that seems ever more apt for these times.
Hooked on religion
Taylor was born in Lafayette, Indiana, in 1951, the firstborn child of Earl and Grace Brown; two more girls followed. Her psychologist father worked for the Veteran’s Administration and the family of five moved nine times by the time she was in ninth grade. This, she says, made her a bit of a comedian, as humor helped her make new friends.
The family settled in Atlanta when her father got a position with Georgia State University. Her father had abandoned the Roman Catholic Church, and her mother was a “disinterested” Methodist.
“They had me baptized in the Pre-Vatican II Church to please my grandmother, but we never went back,” she says.
Her childhood was largely secular, but when Taylor developed a crush on a teen who was a faithful churchgoer, she became hooked on religion, too.
“I was baptized by immersion in the Baptist Church at age 16. I remember my mother saying to me, ‘We did not raise you to be religious, and you will get over this.’” Taylor laughs. “How does a secular child rebel? By going to church!”
She majored in religion at Emory, because “theology is the queen of humanities. When you study religion you study history, architecture, ethics, philosophy, psychology, culture. I loved it.” And she found her spiritual home, the Episcopal Church, in her final year of seminary.
Married to her second husband, Ed, in 1982, and ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1984, Taylor left Atlanta for the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains to become rector of Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church in Clarkesville. The church, built in 1839, had only 82 seats.
“I got to sit on people’s front porches with glasses of ice tea,” she recalls. “I knew everybody there on Sunday by name.” She also fell in love with the countryside. “In the city,” she recalls, “the sky of Atlanta had a metallic hue because of light pollution. In the country, we built a house with a front porch that had a 180-degree view of the sky.”
Credit: Harper One
Credit: Harper One
Given her rootless childhood, she has become serenely rooted in place.
“I have lived in exactly two houses over the past 42 years,” she says. “It took us two years to find the land we live on now, and another year to build the farmhouse, the two barns and the split-rail fence.”
But the perfect world of Grace-Calvary church could not last. In 1996, Taylor was named one of the 12 most effective preachers in the English-speaking world by Baylor University, and this, along with the popularity of her books of sermons, brought acclaim — and a flood of congregants. Church membership swelled to 400, and she was giving four services each Sunday.
“I found myself in a maze where I’d somehow taken a wrong turn. There was no time anymore to be quiet or still or pray. It was like my life got stuck in a projector so that a hole burned in the film.”
So, she left to teach at Piedmont College in Demorest and remained there for the next 20 years.
Finding faith in darkness
Taylor’s books can be seen as one long and irreverent sermon by a preacher who is a self-confessed “spiritual contrarian.” Her voice is vulnerable, curious, sometimes brokenhearted, occasionally angry and frequently hilarious. But above all, it is a voice of faith, and a brave one.
“I have the sort of character that wants to go to the hard place, the hospital bed, the ICU,” she says. In her 30s, as a newly married hospital chaplain, she came home after a night on call, exhausted. “I just wanted to get some sleep after all the terrible things I had seen that night, and my sweet husband met me at the door, steered me to a chair in front of a loudspeaker, lifted the needle on the record player and set it down on “Three Little Birds,” the Bob Marley hit song.”
The catchy, sweet refrain — “Don’t worry about a thing, because every little thing is gonna be all right” — was meant to soothe, but she says, laughing, “Why did I want to smack him? Every little thing is gonna be all right — really? After a hard day, whether it’s due to my own shortfalls or terrible things happening to people I love or the trauma of the headlines, I don’t feel so reassured.”
The song, she says, brought to mind Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.” And there, she says, she found her sustenance. “When I’m in a field flush with birds and lilies, sitting me down in front of things I have not created and that are glorious in that moment, my heart remembers to sing.”
Credit: Harper One
Credit: Harper One
But even birds and lilies can’t always lift us out of darkness. One of her toughest periods hit after her mother died in 2017, followed by the death of her younger sister in 2019.
“My sister died of tongue cancer. Now there’s a definition of darkness for you,” she muses. “It’s a terrible, terrible way to die. The person in the hospital bed, and the person right by the hospital bed, are seized in different ways by calamity.” After those deaths, “I just fell apart because it was so hard. I had shown up for every moment, and I don’t have any regrets, but mortality is terrifying.”
She thinks about mortality more these days: She’s 73 and her beloved, as she refers to her husband, is 87. She is still a frequent guest preacher and speaker and hard at work on her next book, but often, “All I want to do is go outside and touch something — plant a bulb, prune a limb, brush a horse,” she says. “With such a limited amount of time left in this body, I’ve become devoted to being embodied while there’s still time. This includes touching my beloved as often as I can, even if it’s just a smooch on his bald head as I walk by his reading chair.”
Taylor likes to tell the story of a night when she walked with Ed through a tunnel of Carolina laurel. On the path, enveloped by foliage, she could not see her feet or the way ahead. But she walked ahead easily anyway.
“I could hear when I got close to branches on either side. I could feel the presence of the laurels. I could even feel a palpable cord that connected Ed and me. Pretty soon we were walking by faith and not by sight.”
It seems she has always walked by faith — a faith that finds unexpected gifts waiting off the well-trodden trail.
