Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [11]
I sent my application to Yale Divinity School, Yale Divinity School accepted it, and in the early fall of 1973 I pulled out of my parents’ driveway with my green Saab 99 packed to the roof. I had never lived more than a mile from home. I had never driven farther than South Carolina by myself. When I looked in the rearview mirror at the bottom of the driveway, I saw my dog sitting there with one ear up and one down, wagging his tail against the asphalt as I drove away. I cried most of the way to Virginia, dried up in Maryland, and became euphoric in New York. By the time I arrived in New Haven I was so elated by the stone gargoyles on all the buildings that I parked my car in front of a phone booth on College Street, stopping traffic while I called my mother to tell her that I had arrived in Oz.
I went to seminary the same way some people sail around the world. On no particular timetable, I let the wind carry me. Under the care of no bishop, I took any course that interested me. I became friends with Lebanese Presbyterians, Minnesota Lutherans, and Franciscan monks. I read brain-busting books, learned ancient languages, prayed tortuous prayers. When I discovered Christ Episcopal Church my second year, a whole new sea opened up to me. I read the poetry of George Herbert and John Donne, along with everything Charles Williams ever wrote. I learned my way around the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, attending High Mass until I could sing the Nicene Creed in my sleep.
For the first time in my life, I had found a church where the Divine Presence felt as strong to me inside as it did outside. When I entered that sacred cave, I not only lost track of time, I also lost track of my self. From the moment the thurifer passed down the central aisle, swinging the censer in a cloud of sweet smoke, to the moment the organist lifted his fingers from the last chord, I became part of a body far larger than my self. As this body stood to sing, kneeled to pray, and stood again to declare its faith, I did my part without feeling apart. The feeling of communion was already so intense that I did not go forward for the bread and wine. I let the body go forward for me, while I sat there sensing God’s pleasure. Before Christ Church, I thought that worship was something people cooked up by themselves. At Christ Church, I discovered worship that took place inside God’s own heart. The divine pleasure was the pleasure of a mother with her baby at her breast.
After a couple of months of this, I made an appointment with the rector to announce that I wanted to become an Episcopalian. Pursing his lips, he laced his fingers together and sat back in his desk chair. “Dearie, why don’t you tell me your story?” he said, so I did. I told him about my baptism in the Catholic Church when I was six weeks old and my trip to the Methodist Church when I was seven. I told him about Jack, my redheaded Baptist boyfriend, who persuaded me to be baptized again by immersion when I was sixteen, but how that did not last very long after Jack and I broke up.
I told him about how during my sophomore year at college I accepted Jesus into my heart under some pressure from the Navigators and became something of a Jesus freak before discovering the Sunday night suppers at the Newman House, where I learned about Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day from Father Joe Genessee. I told him how I had joined Central Presbyterian Church in Atlanta after my first semester at seminary because I felt self-conscious about having no church affiliation and because Central