Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [37]
Since true bliss is never more than a hair away from sorrow, I learned not to cling to such mornings. The chances were always good that I would be called to the hospital that same afternoon to say a prayer with someone already passing from this world to the next. As much as I hated hospital waiting rooms, I never doubted that I could do some good in them, simply by showing up and staying put. It was one of the times when transference worked in my favor, by letting me into the parts of people’s hearts where only God has any right to go. When the old woman who lived in the octagonal house was taken to the emergency room, I sat with one of her three daughters under the fluorescent lights in the waiting room. “I knew Mother would die one day soon,” the daughter said when we had read all the battered magazines. “I just didn’t think it would be today.”
In years to come, when people would ask me what I missed about parish ministry, baptisms and funerals would be high on the list—that, and the children who hung on my legs after the service was over, clinging to my knees while I shook their parents’ hands at the door. Because they were not old enough to serve on committees or wrangle over the order of worship, the children often had a better grasp of what church was all about than the rest of us did. When one four-year-old rode by the church with his mother and her out-of-town friend, he interrupted them by tapping at the window. “That,” he announced to the friend, “is where God gives us the bread.”
Because he was right about that, the congregation grew. God gave us the bread and we gave it to one another. Then we carried it into the community, dishing up soup at the soup kitchen, handing out food at the food pantry, setting the table for mothers and their children at the battered women’s shelter. I gained a reputation for preaching. The redheaded organist was succeeded by another gifted musician. Before long we were setting out folding chairs at Sunday morning services, which was when we decided to go from three services to four. Even with a capable associate who shared leadership of the liturgy, this meant preaching four times, celebrating communion four times, making announcements four times, and shaking hands four times. It also meant standing from 7:30 in the morning until after 12:00 noon, so that my old back trouble returned. When I complained of this to the deacon, he wrote me a prescription for an orthopedic corset, which became part of my Sunday vestments. Like Wonder Woman, I acquired a midsection that was hard as steel.
I was not doing so well on the inside either. In spite of my best intentions, I had dug myself back into the same hole that I had left All Saints’ to escape. My tiredness was so deep that it had seeped into my bones. I was out more nights than I was home. No matter how many new day planners I bought, none of them told me when I had done enough. If I spent enough time at the nursing home then I neglected to return telephone calls, and if I put enough thought into the vestry meeting then I was less likely to catch mistakes in the Sunday bulletin. As soon as I managed to convince myself that these were not cardinal sins, one of them would result in an oversight that caused a parishioner’s meltdown.
The demands of parish ministry routinely cut me off from the resources that enabled me to do parish ministry. I knew where God’s fire was burning, but I could not get to it. I knew how to pray, how to bank the coals and call the