Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [12]
Now that I had found the Episcopal Church, I told him, I could see how I had moved from one congregation to another based on vagaries of location and personality, including my own. In the Episcopal Church, I had finally discovered something more lasting than that. I had discovered a history, a theology, and a liturgy that spoke to me, offering me words for all that I had not been able to say to God. Please, I said, I wanted to be confirmed in the Episcopal Church.
When I was through, this good priest unlaced his fingers and smiled at me. “Dearie,” he said, reaching over so that his chair squeaked as he patted the back of my hand, “you are an ecclesiastical harlot. Let’s be sure you’re really in love this time, hmm?” For the next year, he directed both my reading and my prayers. He cooked roast duck for me, found things for me to do around church, and suffered my adoration of him. At the end of this process, he agreed to present me to the bishop. I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church when I was twenty-five years old, just weeks before my graduation from seminary.
In this way, I found the church that is still my home, though I still had no intention of being ordained. In the first place, I could not imagine myself in brocade vestments, taking a leading role in the divine drama that I witnessed every Sunday. At what point did a person decide that he or she was holy enough to do something like that? Being a priest seemed only slightly less dicey to me than being chief engineer at a nuclear plant. In both cases, one needed to know how to approach great power without loosing great danger and getting fried in the process. All in all, I was happier in the pew.
Yet even there I had some reservations about the whole setup. If the purpose of the church were to equip all God’s people for ministry to the world—as I was learning in seminary—then what sense did it make to designate one of those people “the minister” in a congregation? The minute you set someone apart like that, didn’t you give everyone else license to say, “Don’t look at me—she’s the minister”?
In the same way, if the minister’s job were to support church members as they engaged their vocations in the world, then what sense did it make to locate that person inside the four safe walls of a church? A mobile unit would have made more sense, like one of those libraries on wheels that goes wherever people need books. As strongly as I was being drawn to worship at Christ Church, my heart remained in the world. I belonged among the laity, not the clergy.
After graduation, I discovered that a divinity degree was not a big door opener, at least not for someone who did not intend to be ordained. I applied for a job teaching religion at a private school in Atlanta; but when the principal asked me what sports I could coach, I knew that I had better keep looking. I worked as a cocktail waitress and a camp counselor before landing a full-time secretarial job at a United Methodist seminary. While this meant I worked with wonderful people, the pay was so low that I sometimes stole rolls of toilet paper from the women’s restroom to save expenses at home.
Around the same time, I began attending a large downtown church. Having searched in vain for Christ Church South, I settled for an incenseless, folksy liturgy in a congregation committed to urban ministry. At Saint Luke’s, the holy danger I had once experienced at the altar was transferred to the parish hall, where hundreds of homeless men and women showed up for soup and sandwiches each week. On Sundays most of them were gone, due largely to the policeman who directed traffic in the parking lot, but their smell lingered in the parish hall under a thin haze of Lysol. Although I never lost the sense of belonging to a church with two separate congregations, Saint Luke’s taught me to see the Divine Presence in human faces, and especially in those that least resembled mine.
The ordination of women to the priesthood had been legal for only about a year at that time, so the