Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [17]
“The peace of the Lord be always with you,” I said, freshly wise about what that meant.
“And also with you,” the people replied. After a very long engagement, it had finally happened. I was a priest in Christ’s Church.
Even now, I would prefer a more user-friendly word like pastor, but the truth is that an ancient word like priest captures the risk of this vocation as well as any word I know. In my lexicon, at least, a priest is someone willing to stand between a God and a people who are longing for one another’s love, turning back and forth between them with no hope of tending either as well as each deserves. To be a priest is to serve a God who never stops calling people to do more justice and love more mercy, and simultaneously to serve people who nine times out of ten are just looking for a safe place to rest. To be a priest is to know that things are not as they should be and yet to care for them the way they are. To be a priest is to suspect that there is always something more urgent that you should be doing, no matter what you are doing, and to make peace with the fact that the work will never get done. To be a priest is to wonder sometimes if you are missing the boat altogether, by deferring pleasure in what God has made until you have fixed it up so that it will please God more. “When I wake up in the morning,” E. B. White once wrote, “I can’t decide whether to enjoy the world or improve the world; that makes it difficult to plan the day.”
My early days at All Saints’ Church in Atlanta were rich in all that I believed I was called to do. I preached, celebrated the sacraments, visited the sick, and educated the young. I met with the steady stream of people who showed up at the church door looking for food, shelter, medical care, and sympathy. I also proofread the bulletin, recruited Sunday school teachers, kept the roster for nursing home visitations, and attended a great many committee meetings. I did not do any of this alone, of course. I worked as one member of a large team that shared the labor and covered for one another as needed.
Because I was an assistant to the rector and not the rector, I was also free from the extra symbolic weight he carried as paterfamilias of the clan. When I finally went home at night, my telephone seldom rang. His number was the one people called when they landed in the emergency room or found a loved one lying lifeless on the bathroom floor. He was also the one people called when they were furious about the way the finance committee was investing the church endowment or the way a Sunday school teacher had spoken to a child or the way the Episcopal Church was treating gay people.
Because he did his job so well, I was able to concentrate on mine, which grew with every day I gave to it for the next nine years. While some clergy justly complain that they are not being allowed to do the things that they were ordained to do, my problem developed more along the lines of choosing among all the things that I was ordained to do. With just seven days in a week, where is the time to be a good preacher, teacher, pastor, prophet, celebrant, prayer, writer, foot washer, administrator, community activist, clergy colleague, student of scripture, and wholesome exemplar of the gospel? When my friend Matilda lay dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease, she said that she had been prepared all of her life to choose between good and evil. What no one had prepared her for, she lamented, was to choose between the good, the better, and the best—and yet this capacity turned out to be the one she most needed as she watched the sands of her life run out.
I thought of her often as my time ran out each day. Out of the long list of things I had promised to be and do at my ordination, the “wholesome example” part was the one that gave me most pause. I spent a great deal of time trying to be good, but was good the same as whole? I never lay in the grass anymore, although I spent one whole week in bed with lower back spasms that would not quit. I was so busy serving the Divine Presence that we never got any