Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [1]
As hard as preachers may work to clarify this koan, I do not believe that it can be done. The promise contains truth that can only be experienced, and even when it is I do not know anyone who readily volunteers for loss again. Yet loss is how we come to surrender our lives—if not to God, then at least to the Great Beyond—and even those who profess no faith in anything but the sap that makes the green blade rise may still confess that losing really has helped them find their ways again. My losses have been modest compared to most. I am an educated, middle-class white woman who has never so much as broken a bone. I have been married twice, once not so well and now well for more than twenty years. The suffering of children has broken my heart, but none of those children has been my own. I have buried one parent but still enjoy the company of the other, and my two younger sisters and their families are all alive and well.
I guess you could say that my losses have been chiefly in the area of faith, and specifically in the area of being certain who God is, what God wants of me, and what it means to be Christian in a world where religion often seems to do more harm than good. When I was ordained twenty years ago, I was far surer of those things than I am now—so sure that I decided to spend my life helping other people become more sure of them too. Some of those people clearly humored me, since they knew far more about the life of faith than I did, but others seemed genuinely grateful for my ministrations.
Together we explored the mysteries of holy baptism and communion along with the vast and varied books of the Bible. Together we navigated both the predictable passages of human life on earth and some of its more unusual cruelties, taking comfort in the cycle of the church year, which never led us into the pit without lighting a way out again. Together we even managed to overcome our preoccupation with our own needs long enough to tend the needs of our neighbors, although never without the strong temptation to congratulate ourselves for our good works.
Like most ordained women in those days, I served as an associate on a large church staff, working under the supervision of an ordained man who helped shape my desire to be the priest in charge one day. I am not sure I can defend that ambition now, except to say that it seemed the natural course of things. Does anyone ride in a car without wanting one day to steer it? I wanted one day to lead a congregation of my own—to guide a course, shape a vision, serve a people, make a difference. I wanted to see what I could do with a church of my own. Although the hubris in that admission now causes me to wince, I suppose it was no worse than that of any bride laying up her trousseau. I wanted to spend the rest of my life as close to God as I could get, and full-time parish ministry seemed to offer me the best chance of doing that.
In the tenth year of my priesthood, I found what I was looking for. A small, historical parish in north Georgia with a reputation for taking risks began looking for a new rector. When my husband Ed and I visited, it was love at first sight. After a lengthy courtship, I discovered that the church I wanted also wanted me. I was about to go and do what I believed God was calling me to go and do, without the least suspicion that finding my life might involve losing it—or that loss, in the end, might be cause for praise.
PART ONE
Finding
The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
CHAPTER
1
The night that Ed and I decided to leave Atlanta, we were nearing the end of our evening walk when a fire engine tore by with lights flashing and siren howling. If we had been inside