Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [49]
The house was as silent as a desert. The hands on the clock were stuck at 9:45 AM, which was when I normally left for church. There were certainly closets to clean and course plans to prepare. I had three substantial speeches to give later in the fall, which still needed plenty of work, and a stack of unanswered correspondence that stretched back at least three months. I had plenty to do, in other words, but that was not unusual. What was unusual was that for once I had plenty of time to do it all, with no one but myself to blame if I did not.
I recognized the feathery panic I felt from a winter long ago, when I was an aspiring short story writer who typed other people’s letters for a living. When I was twenty-seven, I saved up a whole year’s vacation time from my secretarial job in hopes of being accepted at Yaddo, a writer’s colony in upstate New York where John Cheever, Flannery O’Connor, and Sylvia Plath had all lived for short periods of time. If I were granted a winter residency, I would have the whole month of December to do nothing but eat, sleep, and write. There would be no telephone in my room. All of my meals would be prepared for me. Socializing with other residents was forbidden until cocktail hour each day. The rest of the time I was expected to write.
When the acceptance letter arrived, I prepared to enter paradise. I bought and delivered all my Christmas presents ahead of time, paid my bills, packed my most comfortable clothes, and headed north to Saratoga Springs, where snow was already hanging heavy on the hemlocks. When I looked out the leaded glass windows of my charming bedroom, green and white were all I saw. Quiet was all I heard. I arranged my desk with all the faith of a priest setting an altar. The next morning I sat down at it and prepared to receive the inspiration that had been waiting to pour forth.
Instead, I stared at a blank sheet of typing paper until lunch, which gave me such a headache that I lay on my bed the rest of the afternoon with a damp cloth over my eyes. The next day I managed to outline a story, which did not seem worth writing the day after that. The trash can filled up with wadded paper while my first week of paradise ran through my fingers. Soon I was waking up with headaches, which persisted until the night I lay on the floor of my room and confessed the truth to the white ceiling. The pain really was inside my own head. Nothing outside of me had ever prevented me from writing. All of the distractions I had blamed for my lack of traction back home were no more than handy excuses for my own distracted heart. If I wanted things to change, then the place to start was from the inside out and not the other way around.
The week after I left church, I was back on the floor again. For years I had kept hoping that intimacy with God would blossom as soon as I got everything done, got everyone settled, got my environment just right and my calendar cleared. I counted on it to come as a reward for how hard I had worked, or at least as the built-in consequence of a life of service, but even when I managed to meet all of my conditions for a day or two, I was so exhausted from the effort that I could not keep my eyes open. Slumber spirituality took over, and when I woke up I was right back where I started, with miles to go toward the home I never quite reached.
Soon after I moved to the country, a friend from the city set out to see me and got seriously lost. These were the days before cell phones, so she was on her own with nothing but my directions and a badly out-of-date map. Already an hour later than she wanted to be, she was speeding through the little town of Mount Airy when she saw the blue lights in her rearview mirror. I forgot to warn her that Mount Airy was a speed trap. Busted, she pulled over on the shoulder of the road and had her license