Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [18]
When I dreamed about things that might make me more whole, most of those dreams had no other people in them, which made them seem a betrayal of parish ministry. I dreamed of renting a cottage on a deserted beach and spending one whole week beyond the sound of another human voice. I dreamed of taking a pile of books to a house in the woods and reading one whole volume every day without interruption. I dreamed of living for a while in a town where I knew no one and did not speak the language so I could go to the store for butter or sit all night in a café without anyone recognizing me. “Go into your cell,” one of the Desert Fathers said, “and your cell will teach you everything.” But I did not have a cell, and my increasing longing for one made me wonder whether I had taken a wrong turn somewhere.
By all accounts, loving God and my neighbor as myself was supposed to be enough to make me whole. I was in Christian ministry, after all. My own “wholesome example” was Christ, and when I looked at his life I did not see any beach cottages or all-night cafés. Instead, I saw someone who was always feeding people, healing people, teaching people, helping people. When he tried to withdraw from these people, they followed him. When they tried to eat him up, he did not resist. “Take, eat, this is my body, given for you,” he said, holding out a loaf of challah to them. Like a single mother, he fed his spiritual offspring from his own flesh and blood until all of his reserves were gone. Then he died, and, though he rose from the dead three days later, this was quite an act to follow.
I did truly love helping people. It was not only chief among the reasons I had decided to seek ordination; it was also, I believed, why I had been born. To help lift a burden, to help light a path, to help heal a hurt, to help seek a truth—these struck me as the sorts of things that human beings were created to do for one another, and since church was one of the places where people went both to give and receive such help, I still believed that I was well placed. I just did not want to die. I wanted to get better, and I wanted the people I helped to get better too. Good, better, and best remained the operative categories for me, however, while the hunger for wholeness kept drilling holes in my heart.
It was during my tenure at All Saints’ that I finally succeeded in raising a hurt bird to adulthood. I discovered the small, dark foundling under a bush in the church courtyard, cheeping for a mother who never came. When the baby finally gave up calling her and settled down to die, I scooped it up and took it home with me. For the next several weeks, I took it to work with me in a well-furnished shoebox, parking it on my desk as I answered telephone calls, planned schedules, and counseled couples preparing to be married. Every hour or so I got up to go microwave a couple of worms, having discovered that the main reason all my other baby birds had died was because I had not given them enough to eat.
Before long I was spending my lunch breaks driving far enough out of Atlanta to find bait shops that sold worms, but my dedication paid off. The brown baby grew into a sleek teenager with iridescent dark feathers and round black eyes, who greeted me with a screech in the morning and liked to sit on my head when I would let him. After a long session with the Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds (Eastern Region), I finally deduced that I had raised a Sturnus vulgaris, otherwise known as a starling. This was something of a blow, since most people I knew thought starlings should be poisoned instead of fed, but I was so grateful to this bird for surviving under my care that I would have been happy to discover he was a turkey vulture.
I had come to think of him as a “he” by then, if only because