Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [42]
Given the history of Christians as a people who started out beholding what was beyond belief, this struck me as a lamentable state of affairs, both for those who have learned to see no more than they are supposed to see as well as for those who have excused themselves from traditional churches because they see too little or too much. If it is true that God exceeds all our efforts to contain God, then is it too big a stretch to declare that dumbfoundedness is what all Christians have most in common? Or that coming together to confess all that we do not know is at least as sacred an activity as declaring what we think we do know?
I had become an Episcopalian in the first place because the Anglican way cared more for common prayer than for right belief, but under stress even Episcopalians began vetting one another on the virgin birth, the divinity of Jesus, and his physical resurrection from the dead. Both in Clarkesville and elsewhere, the poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent. I began to feel like a defense attorney for those who could not square their love of God and neighbor with the terms of the Nicene Creed, while my flagging attempt to be all things to all people was turning into a bad case of amnesia about my own Christian identity. My role and my soul were eating each other alive. I wanted out of the belief business and back into the beholding business. I wanted to recover the kind of faith that has nothing to do with being sure what I believe and everything to do with trusting God to catch me though I am not sure of anything.
Because I did not know how to give my soul what it wanted, I continued to play my role, becoming more brittle with every passing day. I moved papers around on my desk without focusing on any of them. I quit answering the telephone on my days off. Some Fridays I would stand in the kitchen looking at the blinking red light on the answering machine without ever finding the strength to reach out my hand and press Play. What if someone had died? What if someone really needed help? Because I had become that someone, I could not answer the telephone. Whoever was on the other end would have to call the next person on the list.
Even Sundays began to shut down on me. When the baptismal covenant was part of the service, I could feel myself stiffen as I approached the fourth question.
“Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons,” I asked the congregation, “loving your neighbor as yourself?”
In unison they read the answer printed in the Book of Common Prayer.
“I will, with God’s help,” they responded faithfully, while I stifled my protest. All persons? How could I possibly seek and serve Christ in all persons? Did the author of that response have any idea how many hungry, needy, angry, manipulative, deeply ill people I saw in the course of a week? I knew that I could treat most of them with courtesy and care. I could offer the rest a fair hearing. I could even take a stab at mediating God’s love to them, but the idea of opening myself to every one of them as I opened myself to Christ had become out of the question.
Like Grandfather Abraham, I tried to bargain God down. I can do twenty, maybe thirty, I offered. Will you accept twenty-five? Along with the difficult people there were people whose feet I would have gladly washed if I could have gotten them to take their socks off. Unlike the difficult ones, these people did not ask for much from me. They tended to be givers, not takers, and if they asked for help then I knew that their resources were truly exhausted. I am not sure that I served Christ in them as much as I met Christ in them, but either way they were not the problem. The problem was that I wanted everyone to be like them.
Having tried as hard as I knew how to seek and serve Christ in all persons, I knew for sure that I could not do it. I was not even sure that I wanted to do it anymore, and I felt increasingly deceitful saying that I would.