Barbara Brown Taylor — “This Hunger for Holiness” | The On Being Project

Encounters with the sacred that radiate from the core of the ordinary embolden you to cultivate stillness and simple awareness. In the midst of a world that is begging you to distract yourself, this is no easy practice. Yet you keep showing up. You are indomitable. You are thirsty for wonder.

It is, before all else, the practice of allowing that existential wonder that usually comes to us only in evanescent instants to become instead a constant inclination of the mind and will, a stable condition of the soul rather than a passing mood.

what we need is to learn a way of being-in-the-world that transforms us, day by day, by the rhythms of repentance and faith. We need to learn the slow habits of loving God and those around us.

The afflicted unmask the lie that what makes life worth living and God worth knowing are the pleasures I can wrench from my days.

We ask God to shield the joyous, to protect that part of us that’s courageous enough to believe that good things happen.