Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [38]
More visitors at church meant fewer seats for members. More church services meant that people who went to the early service did not always know people who went to one of the later services. Two strangers who met in an exercise class at Gold’s Gym could talk for quite a while before discovering that they were members of the same church. When a beloved member died, there was not always room in the church for all who wanted to attend the funeral, and parish suppers required at least two seatings in order to serve everyone in the parish house.
The obvious solution was to expand our facilities, although I could not imagine adding a capital campaign and a major construction project to our list of things to do. The lay leaders of the parish and I explored the idea for more than a year, holding congregational meetings and hiring consultants to help us clarify our vision, only the vision would not come. While a few members championed the new building, the majority resisted the idea. People were afraid that paying off a new mortgage would decimate our outreach budget. They were afraid that making room for more members would put an end to the intimacy that had drawn them to Grace-Calvary in the first place. Deeper down, they were afraid that leaving the old prayer-soaked church full of memories would break their hearts, rendering them impotent to worship in a new space that stank of paint.
People were afraid, and, even though I thought it was my job to ease their fears, I was afraid too, of all the same things that they were and more. I was afraid that I was not as good at being in charge as I had hoped. I was afraid that I would not be able to manage the conflict that was arising. Above all, I was afraid that I had led the congregation directly into this impasse, which I knew some people blamed openly on me. “We are not going into debt to build you a preaching emporium,” one man said during a congregational meeting. When I walked around the parish hall afterward, reading the sheets of newsprint that discussion group leaders had hung on the walls, I saw the same phrase in one form or another on three different sheets: “Wait until Barbara leaves to decide this,” they read, which was how I first learned that it was time for me to go.
Like most clergy, I know how to read the signs of depression in others: too many hours in bed, too little affect, too little hope that the deepening darkness will ever lift. According to those who have survived it, depression feels just like it sounds. A great weight descends upon you, pressing you down so that you cannot even lift a hand to help yourself. During the weeks that followed my revelation in the parish hall, I never considered that I might be heading in that direction myself.
For one thing, I was sleeping less instead of more. If a barking dog woke me up in the middle of the night, I would lie there for hours while every demon in the neighborhood came to play on my bed. I imagined being fired. I imagined losing my mind. I imagined discovering that the ache in my back was really a cancer that was eating my bones. After my second cup of tea the next morning, I usually recognized such fears as imaginative ways to be released from my responsibilities without the burden of making a choice.
But if I was low on the sleep scale, then I was high on affect. When I shook people’s hands on the porch of the church after services on Sunday, my eyes would start stinging for no reason at all. Had I developed a late-life allergy to boxwood? Had my mascara gone bad? I could not imagine what the problem was, but whatever it was made tears run down my face as I stood there trying to greet people. The children who hugged my knees after services could not see what was going on up above, but their elders could. Every now and then someone would hold out a Kleenex, offering a word of consolation about whatever was weighing