Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [35]
“Good morning, Helen,” I said, but she would not look at me.
“Music like that in church,” she said, rubbing hard at the silver.
I should have known not to try something like this so soon, I thought, shifting into Lamaze breathing. If she hates it, then everyone else over fifty is going to hate it too, which includes just about everyone who risked offering me this job. The service starts in eleven minutes. What am I going to do?
“Makes me want to dance,” Helen said, lifting her hands above her head and snapping her fingers as she sashayed around the sacristy in her flowered print dress.
When the mission became the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection, I lost my associate, Steve, who became that congregation’s full-time rector. Soon the vestry and I decided to hire another full-time staff member to work with youth before we had any idea where the money was coming from. When we found Rob, he was fresh out of seminary, with such gifts for ministry that the money followed. So did enough newcomers to fill every pew. Two Sunday morning services turned into three, as visitors arrived to check out what was going on at Grace-Calvary Church. When I asked one woman with two young daughters why she had come, she said, “You don’t scare my kids. I didn’t know there was a church like this.”
Sundays were the best. I know clergy who say they cannot worship and lead worship at the same time, but I am not one of them. I never liked the panic before the service, when I served as a human memo board for every question and concern that people had to post somewhere before they could settle down to pray, but once everyone was seated and the first hymn began, it was foretaste-of-heaven time.
Our bread was given, not earned. We had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do but sit there together, saying sonorous words in unison, listening to language we did not hear anywhere else in our lives. Take heart. Go in peace. Bear fruit. Although we could have sat quietly with Bibles on our laps and read these things to ourselves, we took turns reading them out loud to each other instead. The words sounded different when Kline read them than they did when Kathy read them. They sounded different from the mouth of a young mother than they did from the mouth of a widow. This was because the words did not come straight off the page. They percolated up through the silt and gravel of real people’s lives so that the meaning in them was fluid, not fixed. Listening to one another read Holy Scripture, some of us learned what is meant by “the living word of God.”
We also sang things we could more easily have said. The Lord be with you. And also with you. None of us would have dreamed of doing this in the grocery store, but by doing it in church we remembered that there was another way to address one another. Lift up your hearts. We lift them up unto the Lord. Where else did any of us sing anymore, especially with other people? Where else could someone pick up the alto line on the second verse of “Amazing Grace” and give five other people the courage to sing in harmony? Sometimes, when we were through, we would all just stand there listening until the last note turned entirely to air.
We could even be quiet together, which was something else that did not happen many other places in our lives. Silence was so countercultural for most of us that it took a lot of practice before we could do it together. At first, when one of us paused after reading a prayer out loud, the rest of us would tense up. Did she lose her place? Is it someone else’s turn to speak? Maybe mine? But after a while we learned how many ripples one prayer can spread when another does not land right on top of it.
I learned to love hearing the world outside while we were praying for it inside. The sound of an airplane brought all those aboard into church—the fussy babies,