Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [10]
The number of graves in the backyard never deterred me from picking up the next orphan or cripple. Caring for creatures who could not care for themselves offered me a larger sense of purpose than playing Monopoly or collecting stamps. I was much happier with a hurt bird than I was with most people, not least because the bird seemed happier to see me. Sitting quietly together, we both got better. We understood each other, and, in the inexplicable alchemy of compassion, my care for the bird gave real comfort to me.
If you talk to most clergy long enough, you can usually pinpoint the moment when they first received a call to ministry. Nine times out of ten, it did not come straight from God. Instead, it came from a grandmother, a father, a sick sibling, a wounded bird. Sometimes the call came with spoken words, such as, “You’re good at this,” or “I need your help badly.” Other times the words arose inside, such as, “This needs fixing and I think I know how.”
The effort to untangle the human words from the divine seems not only futile to me but also unnecessary, since God works with what is. God uses whatever is usable in a life, both to speak and to act, and those who insist on fireworks in the sky may miss the electricity that sparks the human heart. In my case, priesthood was as natural to me as breathing, as simple as picking up a hurt thing and taking it home either to heal or to bury.
My compassion did not extend quite as naturally to human beings, since I had ample evidence that they were as likely to cause hurt as to suffer it themselves. As a preternaturally tall and bookish child, I was used to being sat on during recess by my classmates, who would groan out loud when the teacher forced me to play on their teams. They groaned for good reason, since I could not throw a ball or swing a bat without suffering the torments of hell. When I made up for this physical disability by excelling in class, my popularity rating went into single digits and stayed there for most of my public school career. Even the people I thought of as my friends looked embarrassed when I asked them to sign my yearbook.
My religious experiments continued through high school and into college, gaining urgency with the escalation of the war in Vietnam. By the time I was eighteen, I had witnessed the assassinations of two Kennedys and one King. Boys my age were being sent to Southeast Asia to fight a dreadful war that few of us understood. When some of us stopped attending our college classes to protest this war, the professors who joined us in the quadrangle were the ones from the religion department. Under their tutelage, I added nonviolent resistance and social justice to my vocabulary. I discovered the God of the Hebrew prophets. I read Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Paul Tillich, who spoke of the Divine Presence in language that far surpassed any of the language I had heard in churches.
So of course when it came time to decide what to do with my life, I decided to go to seminary. What else do you do when you are in love with God? Even if ordination is the farthest thing from your mind, even if you cannot find a church big enough to hold all that you know to be true about God, what do you do with this strange attraction but go where other people go when they feel it too? If I had been born in another time and place, I might have headed to a convent or to a small beehive-shaped hut made of stone on a holy island. I might