Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [44]
When the president called back to offer me the job, I took it. The next day I began making telephone calls. Beginning with the nine members of the vestry, I worked my way down the parish directory, calling everyone whom I wanted to hear the news from me instead of from someone else. Some were shocked and some were saddened, while others sounded plainly relieved. “If that’s what you want, then go for it,” said the captain of the church softball team, while someone else accused me of breaking my word.
“You said you would stay ten years,” she reminded me. “I know,” I said. “I really believed it too.”
After I had finished the calls I composed a letter to send to everyone on the parish mailing list. After that I sat and stared at my office. In church circles, the word means not only the room where a pastor keeps a desk, a chair, and enough books to look educated but also the position of trust that he or she holds. While a visitor might have noted the Bibles and prayer books on my desk or the ordination certificate hanging on the wall as evidence of that trust, I knew that the real signs were in the bathroom.
That was where I kept the things people had given me over the years, in the old linen closet with a single lightbulb overhead. I pulled the string and the light came on, illuminating the red Saint Barbara candle someone had found in the international food section at the grocery store, the giant sand dollar someone else had brought back from vacation, and the child’s papiermâché sculpture of me in a clerical collar riding a brown horse.
Behind that stood a forest of old flower vases, a black plastic box that had once held the ashes of someone with no family left, and a small needlepoint that read “Jesus” if you could discern the letters in the geometrical design. There was a pastel drawing on black construction paper of one candle burning in a window, made for me by a young man in a psychiatric hospital, and underneath that, some pen-and-ink sketches of churches given to me by a retired priest. What was I to do with these things, especially since it was not the things themselves but the act of receiving them that had mattered?
Next to the linen closet stood a storage cabinet installed over the old pink bathtub, which held everything from Grace-Calvary stationery to answer blanks for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Most of that could stay, I decided, but the four-drawer file cabinet was going to need some careful weeding. Sitting down on the lid of the pink toilet, I began to go through the folders. There were close to two hundred of them in the first two drawers, where I kept resources for every Sunday in the three-year lectionary cycle. Crowded in the third drawer were folders for every one of Grace-Calvary’s many parish groups and committees. Children’s Chapel. Confirmation Class. Journey to Adulthood. Daughters of the King. Stewardship. Annual Budget. Parochial Report. Buildings and Grounds. A/V Equipment. Northeast Georgia Convocation. Clarkesville Ministers’ Association. The bottom drawer held everything that would not fit anywhere else. Years of church correspondence were there, along with fat folders full of ideas for Christian education classes, parish retreats, and Wednesday night suppers.
The folders went on and on, convicting me by their sheer numbers of the sin of omnicompetence. Who could be good at so many different things? What had driven me to try? According to a vocational test I once took, I would have made an excellent accountant or research librarian, both specialized vocations that might have allowed me to focus on doing one thing well. Instead I became a generalist,