Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [46]
CHAPTER
10
Although I have never found a proper way to use it, I keep a small wooden box full of index cards on the table next to my writing chair. On each card I have recorded some startling fact or pungent quotation that I mean to do more with some day. One reminds me that people who live on ventilators rank their happiness at 5.1 on a scale of 7 while people who breathe on their own score only four-tenths of a point higher for an average of 5.5. “Happiness is reality divided by expectations,” says Dr. John Bach, respiratory expert at the University Hospital in Newark, New Jersey.
Sometimes, when I am lost for words, I sort through the cards and pull out those that speak to me. While the possible combinations approach infinity, there are days when some of the cards practically stick to my fingers. “God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by subtracting,” reads one by Meister Eckhart. Next to that one goes another by Thérèse of Lisieux. “If you are willing serenely to bear the trial of being displeasing to yourself, then you will be for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter.”
A Wallace Stevens card rounds out this small hand. “Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake,” the poet says.
As I prepared to leave Grace-Calvary Church, these cards had my fingerprints all over them, but there was one card I did not have to look up because I knew the words on it by heart. The quotation came from Walter Brueggemann, prolific scholar of the Hebrew Bible. “The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you,” he said, “by the grace of God.”
To get the full punch of that prophecy, I had to pause for breath at least twice along the way. The first pause came as I acknowledged how carefully I had been prepared for priesthood. Counting my four years as a religion major, I had seven years of higher education behind me, plus twenty-one more of working in churches, hospitals, and seminaries. I had completed a full year of Clinical Pastoral Education. I had passed my weeklong General Ordination Exams. I had invested four years in the Clergy Leadership Project and served a couple more on the Commission on Ministry. While there was always more to learn, I had no doubt that I had been carefully prepared. To pause there was to breathe the crisp air of accomplishment.
To keep going was to acknowledge something else that I knew was true. While my friends were becoming bishops and deans of cathedrals, I was falling off the ladder of success. The fact that I had willingly let go of the rungs did nothing to diminish my sense of failure. By leaving church, I was about to leave everything I knew how to do and be. I had no way of knowing whether my choice would turn out to be a good one, and by the time I discovered the answer there would be no going back. To pause there was to feel weightless, with my head on fire while I tried to draw breath.
To finish the sentence was to abandon everything I knew for something I could only trust: that God was in this loss, which was not robbery but relinquishment. I had found the perfect parish in the foothills of north Georgia, where there was no excuse for my not becoming the perfect rector of it. I had built a reputation for preaching and writing, both at the local level and beyond. I had done everything I knew how to do to draw as near to the heart of God as I could, only to find myself out of gas on a lonely road, filled with bitterness and self-pity. To suppose that I had ended up in such a place by the grace of God required a significant leap of faith. If I could open my hands, then all that fell from them might flower on the way down. If I could let myself fall, then I too might land in a fertile place.
Once I had decided to leave Grace-Calvary, I left in a hurry. It would take me years to understand all the reasons why, but at the time all I knew was that I had to get out fast. I felt the same urgency I had felt one morning when I leaned too close to the gas stove in my terrycloth