Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [39]
“I’m not crying, really,” I would protest, wiping my cheek with my sleeve. “I just got something in my eye.” I believed this myself until one Sunday when I climbed in my car after everyone else had gone home. I thought that maybe if I just let my eyes run for a minute instead of mopping them, then whatever was stuck in them would come out. So I stopped fighting the tears, and what was stuck in them really did come out. In moments I was sobbing out loud, upended by great waves of grief that caught me entirely off guard.
I belonged to at least three clergy groups at that time, including one in which I could tell the truth, but many of the things that were shifting inside of me seemed too shameful to talk about out loud. Laid low by what was happening at Grace-Calvary, I did not have the energy to put a positive spin on anything. It was as if I were strapped in a chair, watching the film I had worked on for the past five years get stuck in the projector. Unable to move, I watched the lovely frame in front of me melt and burn, opening up a hole through which I saw things I had managed not to see before.
Behind my luminous images of Sunday mornings I saw the committee meetings, the numbing routines, and the chronically difficult people who took up such a large part of my time. Behind my heroic image of myself I saw my tiresome perfectionism, my resentment of those who did not try as hard as I did, and my huge appetite for approval. I saw the forgiving faces of my family, left behind every holiday for the past fifteen years, while I went to conduct services for other people and their families.
Above all, I saw that my desire to draw as near to God as I could had backfired on me somehow. Drawn to care for hurt things, I had ended up with compassion fatigue. Drawn to a life of servanthood, I had ended up a service provider. Drawn to marry the Divine Presence, I had ended up estranged. Like the bluebirds that sat on my windowsills at home, pecking at the reflections they saw in the glass, I could not reach the greenness for which my soul longed. For years I had believed that if I just kept at it, the glass would finally disappear. Now, for the first time, I wondered if I had devoted myself to an illusion.
One quiet afternoon while I was reading at home I heard a loud thump from the front porch, as if someone had pitched a newspaper against the front door. Opening it, I saw the soft bird with the broken neck lying on the floorboards. When I picked her up, her eyes were still clear. Turning around to see what the bird had seen, I looked at the reflection of Mount Yonah in the window glass, flanked by deep trees and crowned with a great expanse of sky. Poor bird. She had thought all that was ahead of her, had perhaps even chosen the spot she wanted to scout for a nest, when it was really behind her instead, in the direction from which she had come.
CHAPTER
9
Because this is a love story, it is difficult to say what went wrong between the Church and me. On the one hand, it was the best of parish ministry that did me in. Grace-Calvary was in trouble because the congregation was growing. I was in trouble because I was doing my job the only way I knew how. On the other hand, there was a definite hardening taking place, not only at Grace-Calvary but at every church I knew. The presenting issue was human sexuality. While the Episcopal Church had gladly received the ministry of gay and lesbian people for as long as anyone could remember, it had done so without blessing the “gay and lesbian” part. The unspoken deal was that the ministry could continue as long as the sexuality stayed under cover. When the Episcopal Church began to question this duplicity at the legislative level, the tremors spread quickly in every direction.
Because Christians are people of the Book, these tremors led quickly to a search of Holy Scripture by partisans on both sides. This, in turn, led to passionate debates about the authority of scripture, the mind of Christ, and the will of God. At the same time that Grace-Calvary was