Barbara Brown Taylor

When God Is Silent

Excerpt
Silence has become God’s final defense against our idolatry. By limiting our speech, God gets some relief from our descriptive assaults. By hiding inside a veil of glory, God deflects our attempts at control by withdrawing into silence, knowing that nothing gets to us like the failure of our speech. When we run out of words, then and perhaps only then can God be God. When we have eaten our own words until we are sick of them, when nothing we can tell ourselves makes a dent in our hunger, when we are prepared to surrender the very Word that brought us into being in hopes of hearing it spoken again--then, at last, we are ready to worship God.

This is my reading of our situation at the end of the twentieth century. Our language is broken. There is famine in the land. Gods’ true name can never be spoken. What is a preacher to do?


Selected Works

Memoir
Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith
(HarperSanFrancisco, 2006) "I love this book. Her beautiful, absorbing memoir will bless countless readers, helping us to see God in the church, and out in the world, and in the small interstices in between."
--Lauren Winner
Nonfiction
The Seeds of Heaven (2nd edition)
(Westminster John Knox) Sermons on the Gospel of Matthew
The Preaching Life
(Cowley) “One is reminded of Somerset Maugham’s The Summing Up and Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life.”
--Fred B. Craddock
Home By Another Way
(Cowley) “Sermons wonderfully intelligent, moving and direct.”
--Annie Dillard
When God Is Silent
(Cowley) The 1997 Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale



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