Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [25]
“Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” I said to them.
“And blessed be his kingdom,” they replied, “now and for ever. Amen.”
If I had hoped for a little less of the leaking breast syndrome at Grace-Calvary, that hope was already dashed. My sense of ownership was staggering, in spite of the fact that I had just arrived. The smallness of the congregation would have triggered my protectiveness even without my awareness of their grief, but that awareness kicked me into even higher gear. Like the second wife of a widower, I wanted to make up for what they had lost when Julian died, without trying to take his place. By the end of the first month I felt responsible for everything from the happiness of the babies in the nursery to the cleanliness of the windows in the church. If this proved exhilarating instead of exhausting to me, that was not only because I was finally in charge of my own congregation but also because I found that congregation so worth my while.
While the church directory listed almost five hundred names, the two hundred and fifty people who actually showed up to have their pictures taken provided a more accurate count. They included college professors, real estate agents, shop owners, and artists plus a whole flock of retirees from Florida. In a big city they might have found homes in five markedly different parishes, but in a county with only one Episcopal church they learned to live together—the Yellow Dog Democrats, the National Rifle Association boosters, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the League of Women Voters. Once, when I asked a newcomer what had brought him to Grace-Calvary, he shook his head. “I know people who come to this church,” he said, “and I finally had to come see for myself how they got through a Sunday morning without assaulting each other.”
Far from assaulting each other, they seemed as intrigued as I was by their differences. People who canceled out one another’s votes in every county election cooked soup together at the Clarkesville Soup Kitchen. Champions of the decommissioned 1928 Book of Common Prayer attended Sunday school with charismatics who prayed with both hands in the air. When the British-born lector stood to announce a reading from the prophet I-zigh-ah, Southerners who used verb constructions such as “I might could have done that” sighed with pleasure, and when the auto mechanic in charge of the church softball team needed more players, he recruited the economist with the PhD.
When my friends in Atlanta asked me how things were going in north Georgia, I told them that I was living in a Flannery O’Connor story. I would spend one afternoon visiting a septuagenarian who lived in an octagonal house that her late husband had built for her, eating kiwis that she grew on her clothesline and listening to her reminiscences of Isadora Duncan. The next day I would take communion to a man who was back in the hospital for the third operation on his knee, which was crushed when his pickup truck rolled backward and pinned him against his trailer. After church on Trinity Sunday, I came out to my car to find a miniature Three Musketeers candy bar on the hood. Underneath it was a note from the deeply eccentric woman who lived across the street from the church. “One for all and all for one,” the note read. “Happy Trinity Sunday.”
Since clergy are bound to protect the confidences we keep, I cannot tell most of the stories that made Grace-Calvary such a colorful place to be. I cannot go into detail about the Italian chef whom I bailed out of jail or the two vestrymen who got into such a fight one Monday night that one of them had to lie down on the couch with chest pains while