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Taylor gave an answer that day but, today, she has another one: the story that she does not understand is her own.
But something happened to him as his reputation spread. She found herself attracted to "someone else's rose". She began to see beauty and truth in the religions of others. And she became so disappointed by hers that she "could not look her in the eye".
Taylor once called "Detective of the Deity" for his ability to gather evidence of God's genius. But his spiritual wandering sometimes gave him the feeling of being guilty of a crime.
"Fear arose from a more primitive part of my brain that had been taught to fear the anger of a jealous God if I did not love him, and him alone," Taylor says.
This is the complication of the plot she faced in her story: what do you do when you are the superstar preacher, but do you fall in love with other beliefs than yours?
Easter morning would help to give him an answer.
A voice for worried times
A story about doubt may seem like a strange topic for an Easter weekend. The traditional message of Easter is one of triumph: Jesus conquers death and sin by his resurrection. But it's a difficult Easter holiday for many Christians. Many do not feel so triumphant.
Few, if any, contemporary Christian leaders speak of the spiritual anxiety of this era, such as Taylor. In her books "Leaving Church" and "Learning to Walk in the Dark", she always seems to be moving – leaving a spiritual rest to stop for another outing on the road.
"She has so powerful gifts of language and narration that her readers and listeners find their own questions and concerns expressed in ways that encourage them to say," Yes, yes, that's what I feel, " declared Long.
Why Taylor is afraid of true believers
What Taylor feels in this recent afternoon is hungry. It's lunch time when she receives a visitor to her secluded farmhouse located in the mountains of northeastern Georgia.
Now 67 years old with a dazzling mass of white hair, Taylor turns to a page of her kitchen that she has prepared for her guest.
"Ransacked eggs, good turkey sandwiches," she says, pointing to the food. "You eat the rest because I'm not going."
Taylor's farm looks as quaint as a postcard: rolling meadows, mountains at the horizon, a vast porch decorated with swings and cushions. She even has a small writing booth near her home where she goes to work without being disturbed.
One of his dogs greets the visitor at the entrance of his farm with some disjointed barking. Then he trots to play in a meadow. He has a lot of company. Taylor has two horses, two dogs, four cats, 11 guinea fowl and more chickens than she can count.
She shares the farm with her husband, Ed. They married in 1982, a year before his ordination as an Episcopal priest. Fourteen years older, he was never intimidated, she said, by a woman with a religious collar.
"We were both hurt when people shake my hand and completely ignore her," she says. "He does not travel much with me for this reason, and I am relieved not to do it because, when I come home after a trip, he is there, like a pool of fresh water at the end of the day. a dusty path. "
Taylor has traveled extensively recently to promote her latest book, "Holy Envy". He describes what she calls the "shock of meeting God under so many new hats" when she gave a lecture on world religions at Piedmont College, a liberal arts school north of New York. Georgia.
The book has received much praise. Book reviews and journalists tend to like Taylor's work. Time magazine once said that his writings "rivaled the poetic power of C.S. Lewis and Frederick Buechner".
Yet his critics often react with such force to his work.
But others say his message is more necessary than ever. After Taylor spoke at Concordia College-Moorhead in Minnesota, Jacqueline Bussie, director of the Forum on Faith and Life at School, said more Americans needed to receive a dose of jealousy.
The United States is the most religiously diverse nation in the world, but "in this country you can get a university degree without having a clue about religious practices, worldview, and history. Billion people, "said Bussie, author of" Outlaw Christian. "" It's neglect. "
In person, Taylor is playful, expressive with her hands and devalues herself. But her voice exasperated when she tells how some Christians describe her as an excluded pastor.
She calls them the true believers.
"True believers are some of the most ugly people I have ever met," she says, stretching her legs in a comfortable living room with poetry books, religious icons and a photo of her. she posing with Oprah.
"I can not think of anyone from another religion who hurt me as a Christian," she says. "Judged, sentenced to hell, driven out of the body of the faithful, look at me online."
Taylor, however, became one of her most severe critics when she experienced a spiritual fear that she never saw coming.
A pastor who does some spiritual sleep
When she started teaching a university course on world religions, something strange happened. She was fascinated when she taught students of other religions and accompanied them on field visits to mosques, temples and Buddhist centers. But when the class program turned to Christianity, its fire spat.
She began to feel like she was sleeping spiritually. She started collecting Tibetan singing bowls, Hindu deities and Muslim prayer rugs. She felt like she was a thief at the spiritual display.
But she was not a mere theological tourist.
She began to see beauty and truth in other religious traditions.
The Buddhists impressed him because they did not want to oppose any other religion or to convert anyone.
She was amazed by the kindness of an imam who confided to his class after visiting a mosque: "Our deepest desire is not to become a Muslim, but to become the best Christian, the best Jew, the best man possible. "
And she was ashamed to learn how much her own faith had "burned" other religious traditions, in the way that the faithful treated non-Christians.
"Depressed, favored, infantilized – treated as if she had never thought of the divine and the sacred," she says.
Taylor knew what she had learned: Jesus was the way, salvation is not under any other name and in the name of Jesus, every knee will bow. But she also knew what she felt – something sacred spoke to her even when the name Jesus was not attached to it.
In a passage from "Holy Envy", she writes, "Over the years, I spent dozens of hours in the presence of Tibetan lamas who spoke directly about my condition." Their talks were also significant for me that all that teachers of my own traditions … What does this mean? "
It did not mean anything when she thought back to her days following a fear-based Christianity that she thought she had abandoned. The scriptures declared that God was a "jealous God" and passages in which the prophets described those who turned to other gods as whores shone in his memory.
"The fear surprised me because it was not rational," she says. "I was a researcher long before I became a Christian, so everything was second nature to me."
Taylor says that she felt like a little child, fearing to lose forever the love of her heavenly father.
How could she find her way?
She opened her Bible and began to read about Jesus.
Where Jesus found beauty
She was surprised. It turns out that the New Testament is filled with interconfessional encounters with Jesus. Some of the best-known stories about Jesus illustrate her admiration for those who do not belong to her religion, she says.
She cites some of them in her book: Jesus is astonished at the faith of a Roman centurion who wanted his servant to be healed; the leprous Samaritan who impressed Jesus with his gratitude; Syrophenician woman whose spirit and love for his daughter surprised Jesus.
They were all people who worshiped other gods or worshiped the same Jesus did in an unorthodox way, she said.
"On the contrary, foreigners seem to be changing Jesus' ideas about where faith can be found, far beyond the limits for which he was raised," she wrote in "Holy Envy."
Taylor amplifies the point of her living room. His voice is rising in volume. She does not laugh anymore and does not laugh anymore. She goes into preaching mode.
"Everything is on the page," she says. "It's on the Bible page that Jesus deals with women, Syrophenicians, Canaanites and Greeks, and he does not make any distinction, nor does he try to convert everyone." He only cares for people who are hungry. "
Taylor stopped seeing herself as the lost child risking the wrath of God because she was dazzled by the faith of others.
"Now, I do not believe that Jesus is mad at me for finding the beauty in faith of my religious neighbors because he's done the same thing," she says.
Taylor's New Easter Sermon
There are, however, nagging questions about Taylor's position with his own faith.
Have you stopped being a Christian?
"No, I did not do it," she said. "So it means that I am very aware that Jesus has never commanded me to love my religion." He said he loved God and his neighbor, and that's about all I can handle. day after day."
Do you still go to church?
Taylor has gone to everything from a sprawling evangelical mega church to a tiny African-American Catholic parish and a window shopfront church in a linear mall in recent years.
"I venerate every day," she says. "Sometimes it happens in churches, but sometimes around tables, in airports, in urban parks and in the woods with wild turkeys."
These answers, however, are the kind of poetic reflections that still make some Christians mistrustful. Is it more than "happy faces and pumpkins in the sky?"
She does not sound like a person who abandons Christianity.
In "Holy Envy", she writes: "However, many other religious languages that I learn, I dream in christian.However, many other spiritual teachers teach me a lot, c & rsquo; Is to Jesus that I come home at night. "
Easter morning also helps him find his way.
She still believes in the story of Easter. She simply does not believe it represents the triumph of Christianity – proof that Christians have a monopoly of religious truth.
How can you believe in Easter without believing that Christ is the only way?
The way she is now talking about God in the Easter story helps to explain why.
"These days, I would say that Easter is the eruption of the life of a tomb, a huge surprise for God, which goes in a different direction and, if so, a proof that it is impossible to predict how God will act next, "she says.
Taylor's spiritual anxiety can continue to push her in different directions. But she no longer seems to be afraid to look at her faith in the eyes.
"Now, I consider Easter as a reminder that we never know where the life will come from, and there is no sense of being tied to yesterday the day before yesterday because The day before yesterday is dead, and today something is alive, "she says.
She leans forward on her couch and her expression becomes serious. She has a distant look in her eyes and raises her hands as if she were worshiping.
"So why not follow life and see where it leads, with some kind of confidence in the ability of minds to blow where no one expected to blow, and in a direction where no one was expecting to what she's going to – and be ready to be blown a way. "
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