BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR was supposed to be a poet or a short story writer. She accrued a respectable stack of rejection letters to show she tried. Instead, she became an Episcopal priest. One day, someone asked for a transcript of her sermon, and Taylor realized she had published her first story.

She went on to publish several collections of sermons or what she likes to call “spiritual meditations.” Ranked by Baylor University as “one of the 12 most effective preachers in the English-speaking world,” Taylor left parish ministry in 1997 and taught religion from 1998 until her retirement in 2017. She is the author of 15 books, including Leaving Church, An Altar in the World, Learning to Walk in the Dark, Holy Envy, and Always a Guest. She now devotes most of her attention to the farm she shares with her husband, Ed Taylor, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in north Georgia, where they have lived since 1992. But she still writes. She is working on Coming Down to Earth, a book about reverence, and she shares short reflections on the beauty of life on her email newsletter with the same title.

Sojourners associate editor Josina Guess lives on a small farm in Georgia, not far from Taylor, and the two spoke in January over Zoom about caring for animals, finding balance, loving neighbors, and the power of resurrection.

Barbara Brown Taylor: How many goats do you have? I have to establish that.

Josina Guess: I have two does, and Buckley joined our herd last fall. We’re hoping for kids in the spring. How many animals do you have at your place?

Taylor: I think I’m up to 24: two big horses, dogs, cats, chickens, and guinea hens. What I love about farm life is it doesn’t matter how I feel. They need food, water, and shelter. You put on boots, go out, and do it.

In an interview with Krista Tippett, you said, “To be holy is to keep one’s balance while the earth moves under our feet.” What is keeping you balanced in this ever-spinning world?

I thought being grounded meant both feet flat on the ground. Then I realized every time I ground myself, I’m putting weight on this foot and then a little more on the other one. It’s about being flexible, adjustable, and movable when the ground’s moving. So that was a big relief. I could quit trying to be nailed, stably, on some kind of floor. What used to keep me grounded was teaching. I had students I cared for enormously. When I stopped teaching, I had family members to care for, keeping up with hospice, meds, doctor’s appointments.

I was on this farm through all those times, and now this has taken precedence. I’ve got way too much land and way too many structures and animals here. I’m in my 70s and my husband is in his late 80s. Part of what we’re thinking is we’ll just go until we can’t go — I trust we’ll know when we can’t anymore. Instead of [exercising with] 50-pound weights, I’ve got bales of hay that need to be lifted. How much I can do goes down all the time. But it’s a really good way to stay alive.

I didn’t choose to have children. I had to learn other ways to live in attentiveness to other people’s lives, and that seems to me the key to grounding, to balance, to holiness when the word is stretched to mean wholeness.

What really keeps me sane is sticking as close to today as I can. I can think of a million things that will happen tomorrow, and it’s all speculation. I’ve joked to people that my dying prayer will be, “Thank God it was just that and not the 99 other things I have always been afraid would kill me!” When I get scared or despairing, I say, “How am I right this minute?” And it’s usually pretty good. Or “pretty good” is just out the door on the porch, or “pretty good” is just down the hill when I get a blanket off a horse.

A big part of reverence is the recognition of things greater than we are. I’m doing a funeral for a man who was my supervising minister for 10 years. He taught me to be grateful for the things that are out of your control. Those are the things that will teach you your true size in the family of things. It’s a great relief to be shrunk down to size because, at least in my culture, we get way too big in our own estimation and in the import of our own lifetimes. I’m looking at things a lot older than I am, from mountains to oak trees.

A weird thing that has happened to me in retirement is that now, if I’m sitting in a room full of books, I don’t know that I’ll ever pull one out again. So many books I bought to make me smart and educated — like biographies, so I’d always be able to answer a question about, say, Howard Thurman or Thomas Merton or somebody. And now I’ve just gotten very greedy for embodied life because time is so short.

We both live in very red counties. What keeps you loving your neighbors across political differences?

I’m anxious about the political landscape. I’m in conversation in daily life with people who keep the county running pretty well, though presidentially we’re not on the same page. They cancel my vote, and I cancel theirs.

When I moved here from Atlanta, I thought I would be bereft, or I would turn into a hermit, and it’s not true at all. It’s pretty easy to find people in the community who quilt, read, play music, or work on things I’m interested in. But the neighborliness just stuns me. I’m on a 2-mile-long, dead-end road. We lost a lot of trees during a recent snowstorm. By the time I needed to go out, the neighbors had gotten their tractors and saws and cleared the road.

I’m very opposed to the idea you know everything about somebody from the political sign in their yard or the sticker on their car. I think I’m as guilty of that as anybody, and it’s not true. I want to live into that more and more in the years to come. I’m happy I’m here.

How would you describe your new newsletter, “Coming Down to Earth.”

I look at it as a resting place. I remember being almost hired by a magazine. They said, “We’re doing great on social justice, on biblical interpretation, but we don’t have a lot of beauty. And maybe you could be the beauty editor — not hairdos and stuff, just to keep the picture whole.” The beautiful doesn’t obscure what is not beautiful. If anything, it brings the contrast up even higher. Wendell Berry said something like, “There are no unsacred places” — there are just places that have been desecrated [see Berry’s “How To Be a Poet”]. The Substack is meant to be that sacred place.

I worry about two things with my accustomed readers. One is I’m not using much religious language. I’m pretty incarnational. I really do think the divine shows up on Earth. I also worry about getting a scorecard that I’m not saying enough political, socially conscious, culturally relevant stuff. But I figure, I’m old. Why not take the risk?

We won’t save what we don’t love. Duty in our lives is hugely important but so is not missing the beauty that is put before us, because I think that’s an insult to the beauty maker. Everybody who wants to move to the country because it’s so beautiful needs to know about the storms and tree falls and killer bees and the hawk that grabs your favorite chicken. Nature is morally impartial. There’s wonderful wisdom in scripture about that: The rain falls on the just and the unjust. So how do I live while loving this stuff that doesn’t really care? I don’t know. I haven’t worked out my theology yet [on that].

Tell me more about your choice not to use much religious language.

People don’t attend churches as much as they used to, or their sense of belonging has shifted, or they’re in active disengagement after various forms of what they would call spiritual abuse. I feel less and less people get the [Bible] stories or the allusions, but they get real life on Earth. Fortunately, Jesus had a lot more to say about life on Earth than he did about theology. The way he taught the Sermon on the Mount as sort of the Zen encyclopedia of impossible ways to live that are absolutely, breathtakingly attractive — he’s not a bad master to follow. When he could have talked about high things, he talked about everyday things. There is hardly a divine truth that doesn’t take some shape on Earth. Christianity is still my first language, but I mean that to be incarnate language.

I want to stick with St. Julian and her cat. She saw the world in a hazelnut. Or the saint [Kevin of Glendalough] who put his hand out the window and a blackbird nested in it. He held his hand out till the babies hatched. To me, those stories just speak volumes.

How are you approaching another season of Lent and resurrection — anything hitting differently this year?

It’s not a one-year cycle that you get graded on. It’s not school. It’s a lifetime. It is what I have loved about the Episcopal tradition and any who keep church seasons. You have a season hallowed for every emotion. When you’re in your mid-70s, you’re going to funerals a lot. So, resurrection in a season where so many close ones and the Earth herself is in a kind of permanent crucifixion — it helps a lot to pull the hopefulness in close and attach it to something I can do today, small as it can be. Fill the bird feeders. Make somebody’s day better instead of worse.

There’s huge surrender in resurrection. Am I willing to go down to the dust with faith that consists entirely of saying, “I trust the one that takes me from there”? And if it takes me back into carbon molecules and puts me in a bird bone, that’s good enough for me. A lot of Lent and Easter is about not getting the cup you want, and it’s about drinking the cup. It’s about trusting your friends to finish what you started, and maybe you have less time than you thought to get done what you wanted to get done.

I always loved Good Friday services more than Easter. Easter Sunday just wore me out. Most people love Easter. They like the parades and the trumpets. And I’m not putting anybody down for that.

What did you love so much about Good Friday services?

I used to love it because I went to traditional observances, which were three hours long. We spent so much of the time [being] quiet, and people came and went, and there was shuffling, and there was silence. But the last time I checked in, it was like three hours of solid talking and music and journaling. We couldn’t be still for a second. It meant a lot to me to sit in silence with so many beloved people in a place that has soaked up so many prayers.

Can I ask you a question? What is your Lenten thing like? I don’t give anything up; I just try to be a nicer person than I am.

I go to a tiny Quaker meeting, and we don’t have collective observances of the liturgical year. I loved the Stations of the Cross walk in our church in Philadelphia and at Jubilee Partners, the Christian community where I used to live in Georgia. I loved walking with a group, stopping at a weeping willow, and imagining the women weeping — letting nature and the imagination connect. I live a mile away from Jubilee now and my family goes to the Easter sunrise service where everyone puts fresh flowers on a chicken wire-covered cross. It is a beautiful ritual. These days, I’m just trying to be open to my neighbors and what I may not be expecting.

The Spirit is loose in the world. It’s my favorite part of the Trinity because it’s the wild card. I wasn’t present, but Bishop Rob Wright [of the Atlanta Episcopal diocese] came to the small church I used to serve and 22 people showed up to be baptized or recommitted or confirmed. At the end of the service, I’m told, he looked out and said, “Anybody else here want to be baptized?” Two little kids raised their hands. He looked at their parents, like, How are you with this? The parents gave the thumbs-up. These two kids, like 6 and 7, came up and were baptized. Then he asked them to shadow him while he gave communion. The second time down this tiny rail, he gave the cup to them and alternated with them. The third time, he left it to them. And little children gave communion that day. Those kids will never forget that: From the day they were baptized, they were full members of that community.

I love that! I’m thankful for this conversation. If you ever want to visit, I’d be happy to show you our farm.

I might go when the goats give birth.