Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [4]
After weeks of driving around, Ed and I both felt strong pulls to the mountains of northeast Georgia. Part of it was the sheer beauty of the place, with cows grazing green pastures in front of blue mountains. A mechanical engineer with a farmer’s heart, Ed had come into our marriage with two tractors that he was aching to use. I was looking for a smaller church and a different vocabulary. After ten years of focusing on the needs of an urban congregation, I wondered how the gospel might sound in a different landscape. I knew how to speak to people who worked in skyscrapers and volunteered in homeless shelters, but what did I have to say to people who lived on dirt roads and kept bees?
One weekend we set out for Clarkesville, population 1500, tucked up in the corner of Georgia between North and South Carolina. An old resort town, Clarkesville had an equally old Episcopal church with a full-time and much-beloved rector in place. This meant that the church was not available, but since our goal was to see what life outside Atlanta was like, we went anyway. About ninety minutes out of the city, we headed north on highway 197, past an old gristmill with a working water wheel and pastures full of spotted cows. When we stopped for gas about a mile out of town I bought a copy of the Northeast Georgian, which turned out to be the local weekly. I had heard about weekly newspapers, but I had never actually read one. Who could wait a whole week for the news? What kind of community generated so few notable events that every seven days was often enough to catch up on them?
While the headlines were forgettable, things became more interesting with the arrest report on page two. Almost two dozen people had gotten in trouble the previous week, with crimes that ranged from public drunkenness to failure to pay child support. Their full names were printed along with their ages and offenses, which struck me as a print version of putting them in stocks in front of the courthouse. What would it be like to open the newspaper and see your name there? Barbara Brown Taylor, 40, driving with expired license, no proof of insurance. “Do we have proof of insurance with us?” I asked Ed.
Page six featured photographs of Rotary members handing giant replicas of bank checks to high school students, along with backyard gardeners holding huge yellow squash. The fiftieth wedding anniversary announcements were on the same page as the birth announcements. There were almost as many letters to the editor as there were specials at the grocery store, and the obituaries included someone who died in her bed when her house trailer caught fire during the night.
While we waited for the first of Clarkesville’s two stoplights to change, I read the letter board at the Magic Spray Car Wash. “God Loves You” it said. “Doesn’t That Car Need A Bath?” The same block held a Huddle House and a Hardee’s separated by a used car lot. Things improved closer to town, where a couple of antebellum mansions served as bed-and-breakfast inns. Just past the second one stood an old church that was the same vintage as the one we were looking for, but the sign outside said First Presbyterian Church. We kept going, past two banks, two funeral homes, and a small string of shops that led to the town square.
Since Grace Episcopal Church had been in Clarkesville for a hundred and fifty years, I figured that it would be easy to find, but I was wrong. The man at the filling station said that he had never heard of it, and there were no trademark blue “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You” signs pointing the way. If I had been able to