Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [0]
A Memoir of Faith
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR
For Edward,
always and again
Contents
Introduction
PART ONE
Finding
PART TWO
Losing
PART THREE
Keeping
Acknowledgments
Recommended Reading
Reader’s Guide
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
Because I am looking at the Special Events page of my calendar, I know that I was ordained in the Episcopal Church twenty years ago last May. If the event had been a marriage instead of an ordination, then that would have been my china anniversary, with silver just five years away. I might have looked forward to receiving a new serving platter or soup tureen in my wedding pattern from my old sweet-heart—or, if he forgot, to buying some replacement pieces myself so that I could finally let the cracked ones go. Anniversaries that end in zeros merit some sort of ceremony, no matter what they mark, and I had meant to do justice by this one. Twenty years of priesthood was a lot to reflect upon, especially for someone who no longer spent every Sunday in church. I had fully intended to hallow the day by going to a monastery for the weekend or at least spending a couple of hours in contemplative prayer. Instead, the date slipped right past me. All these months later, I am trying hard to remember how I spent it.
Since May is graduation month, perhaps I spent the day sitting on a folding chair on the basketball court at the college where I now teach, watching another class of giddy graduates receive their diplomas. Or since May is the month when the lush spring fescue becomes safe for horses to eat, perhaps I spent the day checking the fence line of the summer pasture before turning my two quarter horses out in it. Since I feed the chickens every day, I believe I can safely say that I marked the anniversary of my ordination by throwing a can of scratch grains to two Rhode Island Red hens and two Dominiques before taking four brown eggs from their communal nest.
The truth is that while I have never felt more engaged in what I was ordained to do, few of my initial expectations have been met. By now I expected to be a seasoned parish minister, wearing black clergy shirts grown gray from frequent washing. I expected to love the children who hung on my legs after Sunday morning services until they grew up and had children of their own. I expected to spend the rest of my life writing sermons, leading worship, delivering pastoral care to the living, and burying the dead—not for twenty years but for all my years. I even expected to be buried wearing the same red vestments in which I was ordained.
Today those vestments are hanging in the sacristy of an Anglican church in Kenya, my church pension is frozen, and I am as likely to spend Sunday mornings with friendly Quakers, Presbyterians, or Congregationalists as I am with the Episcopalians who remain my closest kin. Sometimes I even keep the Sabbath with a cup of steaming Assam tea on my front porch, watching towhees vie for the highest perch in the poplar tree while God watches me. These days I earn my living teaching school, not leading worship, and while I still dream of opening a small restaurant in Clarkesville or volunteering at an eye clinic in Nepal, there is no guarantee that I will not run off with the circus before I am through. This is not the life I planned or the life I recommend to others. But it is the life that has turned out to be mine, and the central revelation in it for me—that the call to serve God is first and last the call to be fully human—seems important enough to witness to on paper. This book is my attempt to do that.
Like every believer I know, my search for real life has led me through at least three distinct seasons of faith, not once or twice but over and over again. Jesus called them finding life, losing life, and finding life again, with the paradoxical promise that finders will be losers while those who lose their lives for his sake will wind up finding them again. In Greek the word is psyche, meaning not only “life” but also the conscious