Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [54]
I did not know how to stand in the dress or where to put my hands. I could not think of anything to say that went with the dress. All of the things I was used to talking about went with the serious clothes in my closet, while this dazzling outfit called for something that Billie Holiday might say, or Dorothy Parker at least. When I saw people I knew from church, I saw my own discomfort mirrored in their faces. Seeing their priest in a blue sequined dress at a New Year’s Eve party was like running into their dentist in a Speedo at the beach. They could hardly look at me. I asked Ed if we could go home early, and the following year I helped design a New Year’s Eve liturgy that took place at church instead.
The gap between my public persona and my pastoral role was always one of the more disorienting aspects of my job. In public, people treated me like the Virgin Mary’s younger sister. They watched their language. They shielded me from their darker natures. They guarded my purity. But sooner or later many of them needed a pastor, and when that time came neither of us could afford the pretense of my innocence any longer. Like most clergy, I know how to post bond, lead an intervention, commit someone to a mental health care facility, hide a woman from her violent husband, visit an inmate on death row, and close the eyes on a dead body. One summer when a frightened murder witness showed up at the church door I even learned how to arrange an appointment with the district attorney for testimony before a grand jury.
I also know how to listen to far less spectacular stories about the kinds of things that routinely upend human lives. Whether the subject is divorce, job loss, serious illness, troubled children, or aging parents, these confessions can expose such raw places in the people who make them that the anonymity of the old-fashioned confessional makes a great deal of sense to me. If I had used one of those, then the people I listened to would not have had to let on that we knew each other, even if we learned to recognize one another’s voices. We would still have been able to see one another around church without having to acknowledge what had passed between us. While some people develop an attachment to the pastor who has witnessed their grief or fury, others are so ashamed that they never again seek counsel. Having found someone kind enough to accept their radioactive waste, they have no intention of ever going back to visit.
To survive in parish ministry, one learns not to take such things personally. When I first started out, I welcomed all attachments to me as positive responses to my ministry and all avoidances of me as invitations to try harder. Gradually I learned that both attitudes had more to do with things that happened in people’s lives a long, long time ago than they had to do with me. I was in the right role, was all. I was the one whose job was to take care of people, and when I failed I took my place in the long line of unsuccessful caretakers who had come before me. A bishop with decades of ministry behind him finally supplied me with the insight that became my mantra. “The people you think love you don’t love you as much as you think they love you,” Frank said to me, “and the people you think hate you don’t hate you as much as you think they hate you.”
This was easier to accept once I was no longer face-to-face with them. I could also see more clearly where my role had cut into my soul. I needed the soul’s wisdom to do my work. I needed its compassion. But I had too often failed to set it loose in its own pasture at night, where it could kick its heels and roll in the dirt. I had kept my soul so hitched to the plow that it stood between the traces even after the harness was off, oiled, and hung on