Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [34]
We lived in the trailer for nine months, watching the house on the hill grow with every sunset. I learned that the reason there is so much junk stacked outside some house trailers is because there is no room to stack it inside them. When tornado season arrived, I also borrowed the fear of those who live in trailers by necessity and not by choice. In the midst of a five-star thunderstorm, the whole place shook like a boat on the open sea. Scarier still were the late afternoons when the sky turned green and the lifeless air hung over the land like a damp cloth. Ed and I had our own tornado drill: at the first sound of a freight train, we would both grab a cat and head out the nearest window.
For my birthday that year Ed gave me my first outdoors clothesline, where towels and sheets soaked up the September smells of drying hay and turning leaves. We lived on vegetables from the garden, fell asleep to the sound of whip-poor-wills, and drank water from the well until we forgot the taste of chlorine. One day in the spring of 1995, the house was finished. We shook the builder’s hand, thanked him for a job well done, and watched his truck disappear down the gravel driveway. That evening I sat down to see the sun set from my new front porch for the first time and wondered what, exactly, I had done right to be right where I was.
Because I had been spending so much time on the house, I worried when certain people began acting strangely at church. When they saw me, they dropped their voices. Some would even end their conversations, giving me a perfunctory wave before they climbed into their cars and drove away. Since a couple of these people served on the church vestry, I began to wonder if I were in big trouble. Maybe they were planning to tell me they were expecting a little more from me now that the date for the housewarming party had been set. Maybe they were going to ask me to sit down with them and reorder my priorities. I hoped that was all it was, but I picked up my tempo at church all the same.
On the Sunday afternoon of the housewarming, people poured onto the front porch of our new home. Bob brought a Japanese maple to plant outside the kitchen window. John brought a basket full of dried hydrangeas to set on the dining room table. While we were admiring these gifts and more, swamped with gratitude for these people, this house, this land, this work, the senior warden called the crowd to order right there on the porch. The congregation had taken up a collection, he said, and they had something to give Ed and me that they hoped would make us feel right at home. Then he looked down the sidewalk, where people I could not see were carrying two beautiful rush-backed rocking chairs our way. When they arrived on the porch, Ed and I tried the rockers out while everybody clapped.
Thank God, I thought. The chairs explained the strange behavior at church. I was not being fired. I was being invited to sit down and stay a while, which I fully intended to do.
*Quoted in Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1945), 67.
CHAPTER
8
Over the next several years, Grace-Calvary Church and I enjoyed our extended honeymoon. The congregation that was plucky enough to call the first woman pastor in Habersham County also had the vision to start a new church in neighboring White County, even though that meant letting a third of our membership go. We hired a second priest to tend the mission while new members arrived to fill the empty seats at Grace-Calvary. We established the first church-related counseling center in the county and opened a hospice office in the parish house.
Grace-Calvary’s redheaded organist was fearlessly inventive. She could play Negro spirituals one Sunday and lead the choir in Fauré’s Requiem the next, getting more sound out of one nineteenth-century keyboard and fifteen volunteer voices than seemed acoustically possible. My first Pentecost Sunday, Miriam agreed to a jazz mass, which seemed like an inspired idea until I walked