Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [41]
Human sexuality was only one of the issues dividing Christians in those days. We could also argue about the inspiration of scripture, the uniqueness of Jesus, and the salvation of non-Christians. We could argue about abortion, gun control, just war, and capital punishment. Few of these were live fights at Grace-Calvary, where the congregation had long ago learned to live with its own religious diversity, but the tension in the larger church and culture took its toll on people already alarmed by the rapid changes in their midst.
The things dividing us at Grace-Calvary concerned me less than what the division itself was doing to the community. Because church people tend to think they should not fight, most of them are really bad at it. Many prefer writing long, single-spaced letters to the rector in lieu of direct confrontation. Some sit on their grievances with pained looks on their faces until internal combustion occurs and fire shoots out of their mouths, while others simply vanish, calling the church office months later to remove their names from the rolls. When face-to-face conflict does occur, it is often hard for church people to say what is bothering them in personal terms, especially when what is bothering them cuts close to the bone of what they hold most dear. Many find that they can avoid confessing their sorest fears by speaking of church doctrine instead, or appealing to orthodox Christian belief for support.
Once I had begun crying on a regular basis, I realized just how little interest I had in defending Christian beliefs. The parts of the Christian story that had drawn me into the Church were not the believing parts but the beholding parts.
“Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy…”
“Behold the Lamb of God…”
“Behold, I stand at the door and knock…”
Whether the narratives starred hayseed shepherds confronted by hosts of glittering angels or desert pilgrims watching something like a dove descend upon a man in a river as a voice from heaven called him “Beloved,” Christian faith seemed to depend on beholding things that were clearly beyond belief, including Jesus’s own teaching that acts of mercy toward perfect strangers were acts of mercy toward him. While I understood both why and how the early church had decided to wrap those mysteries in protective layers of orthodox belief, the beliefs never seized my heart the way the mysteries did.
I did not think I was alone in this. Both at All Saints’ and at Grace-Calvary, I had spent hours talking with people who had trouble believing. For some, the issue was that they believed less than they thought they should about Jesus. They were not troubled by the idea that he may have had two human parents instead of one or that his real presence with his disciples after his death might have been more metaphysical than physical. The glory they beheld in him had more to do with the nature of his being than with the number of his miracles, but they had suffered enough at the hands of true believers to learn to keep their mouths shut.
For others, the issue was that they believed more than Jesus. Having beheld his glory, they found themselves running into God’s glory all over the place, including places where Christian doctrine said that it should not be. I knew Christians who had beheld God’s glory in a Lakota sweat lodge, in a sacred Celtic grove, and at the edge of a Hawaiian volcano, as well as in dreams and visions that they were afraid to tell anyone else about at all. These people not only feared being shunned for their unorthodox narratives, they also feared sharing some