Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [27]
On my first January in Clarkesville, the Northeast Georgia Peace Council invited me to join other local clergy at the head of the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Peace Walk. When I arrived at the starting point to accept this honor, the place was crawling with police cars, photographers, and newspaper reporters. They all but outnumbered the walkers, who were huddled together trying to keep warm while they waited for enough people to begin.
“What’s with the police?” I asked a woman with a red scarf wrapped around her neck. She did not look like the type to break store windows or set dumpsters on fire.
“Oh, they’re here in case the Klan shows up,” she said, as I felt the hairs on the back of my neck spring up. Eventually I found two other clergy and waited with them for the rest of the Habersham Ministerial Association to show up. When the walk finally began, there were still just three of us: the white Presbyterian pastor, the black Baptist minister, and me. As we faced the photographers and the police, I realized that what I had construed as an honor was more like a safety feature for the small crowd behind us. The three of us in front were human air bags in case of collision with the Klan.
We were singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” when we headed up the small hill toward the Clarkesville square, which was where we saw them. Three men in white robes and peaked hoods stood on the curb with police on both sides of them while some women and children with greasy hair sat heaped in a beat-up van behind them. One man held a sign that said, “James Earl Ray made my day.” Another held a picture of Dr. King’s face with a rifle target on his forehead.
To my surprise, I could see their faces too. The Klansmen were wearing their hoods but not the masks with the spooky eyeholes, so that I got a good look at all three of them. What I saw was so empty, so stone-cold vacant, that I was not afraid of them anymore. They were just people, as scared and lost looking as anyone. “He’s got you and me, brother, in his hands,” I sang as we turned the corner and left them behind. “He’s got you and me, sister, in his hands.” It was the nicest thing I could think of to say to them, and what is more, I believed it was true.
To be honest, that was one of the more dramatic things that ever happened in Clarkesville. Day by day, I did what most clergy do. I proofread the mailed bulletin, answered the telephone, chose the hymns for Sunday, and changed the lightbulb in the bathroom. I sat with families in the waiting room at the hospital and spooned applesauce into the mouths of patients at the nursing home. I visited shut-ins at home as well as a few at the county jail. I learned how to send money orders and post bond. I gave the invocation at the Special Olympics held in the high school football stadium and ate lunch at the Clarkesville Soup Kitchen with some of the regulars. I taught Sunday school, counseled couples, wrote annual reports, and led worship.
I also learned the difference between being an assistant to the rector and the rector, the main difference being that when I looked around for clergy support, I was the only person there. I had become the one church members called when they landed in the emergency room or found a loved one lying lifeless on the bathroom floor. I also had become the one they 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.
In seminary I had read about the phenomenon of transference, whereby human beings sometimes transfer the feelings they have for one pivotal person in their lives to another pivotal person in their lives, especially when they are feeling vulnerable in a relationship. I had read about it, but I had never gotten a full dose of what it meant until I was the sole pastor of a church. Sometimes, when people were busy adoring me or