Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [22]
It was not as if I had never seen stars before. Even in the city, I could sometimes see the big stars on a clear night: Jupiter, Venus, the Big Dipper. But it had been a long time since I had seen the stars between the stars, a virtual curtain of stardust upon which the larger constellations were hung. When Ed stopped the truck so we could admire them without a windshield in the way, we saw something else that we had previously accepted chiefly on hearsay. The stars actually twinkled. With no yellow sulfur haze between them and us, they looked less like steady ten-watt bulbs and more like diamonds being turned on black flannel under a bright lamp. They changed colors as the light flashed out from them, first blue, then gold, then rose. They danced in place with such energy that I swear I heard them rustling—or was that the breeze in the ten thousand breathing leaves?
The roar of the truck engine drowned them out, but when I looked out the shattered back window of the cab, I no longer saw what I was leaving behind. Instead, I saw what Abraham and Sarah must have seen: a night sky that went on forever, under which my small sorrow was already turning to awe.
CHAPTER
6
Later that same week, the moving van pulled away from the parish house in a burst of diesel exhaust. As the sound died away, I plumped the cushion on my desk chair and sat down. Like the rest of my office furniture, the chair was still outside on the sidewalk, under an oak so old and enchanted looking that I half expected it to lean down and speak. From where I sat beneath its sheltering arms, I had a postcard view of Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church, aka My New Church.
Suspended for one liquid morning between the dreaming and the coming true, I tried not to think about how much anxiety my selection had caused. The Episcopal Church had been ordaining women to priesthood for almost sixteen years by that time, but women in charge of congregations remained rare. In Clarkesville, where many local churches still taught that scripture forbade women to speak in church, my arrival confirmed what many already suspected about Episcopalians. When one teenager’s mother broke the news to her, the girl wailed out loud, “God, Mom, people already think we’re so weird—do we have to have a woman too?” Several families left the church before I arrived, and others were poised to leave. I knew that I would drive myself crazy if I thought about it too much, so I followed the protocol that I had established during my previous years in ordained ministry. I got up out of the chair and went to work.
I do not know how male clergy begin their new jobs, but I begin mine by cleaning. That first week I cleaned windows, cleaned files, cleaned closets and cupboards. When I finished with my study and the parish house kitchen, I proceeded to the church library, where new shelves had been built to hold all of Julian’s old books. Among them I found a cache of nineteenth-century prayer books that I assumed he had collected, at least until I saw “Grace Church 1854” written inside one of the front covers in faded brown ink. There were ghosts all over the place, but most of them were friendly.
One morning I arrived to find a vase full of yellow daffodils and a quilted jar of muscadine jelly in front of my door. Another morning there were two pastel flowered napkins inside carved wooden napkin rings with a note that said, “Welcome home, Barbara and Ed.” As the week wore on, parishioners showed up both to help me get settled and to do their own jobs, which included