SPIRITUAL focus on books June 14, 2004 Issue

'Would you sit down for just a moment?'

By Kim Shippey

In 1997 , when teacher, preacher, and columnist Barbara Brown Taylor went from full-time pastoring to full-time teaching, I suspect that many of us who knew her only through her columns in The Christian Century welcomed the thought that she'd have more time for writing.

But as she reported last month in her May 4 column, she began to wonder how much she could cope with when she found herself agreeing to play a role in a Piedmont College, Georgia, stage production. It was every bit as time-consuming as she'd guessed it would be. Still, in typical Taylor fashion, she not only coped well with her six-minute monologue on stage but was able to use the experience to enrich her teaching and preaching.

For the first time, she says, she saw that Holy Scripture is a script, and that holy words are not meant to stay on pages. Yet the "performance" of Scripture calls for more than the mere presentation of passages "we all know" in a livelier way, because one is dealing here with the Scripture that "none of us knows until we have taken the words inside ourselves, entering into the live risks, mysteries, decisions, and relationships that they require of us."

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