Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [56]
While I knew plenty of clergy willing to complain about high expectations and long hours, few of us spoke openly about the toxic effects of being identified as the holiest person in a congregation. Whether this honor was conferred by those who recognized our gifts for ministry or was simply extended by them as a professional courtesy, it was equally hard on the honorees. Those of us who believed our own press developed larger-than-life swaggers and embarrassing patterns of speech, while those who did not suffered lower-back pain and frequent bouts of sleeplessness. Either way, we were deformed.
We were not God, but we spent so much time tending the God-place in people’s lives that it was easy to understand why someone might get us confused. As Christians, we were especially vulnerable, since our faith turned on the story of a divine human being. Those who became ordained were not presented with Moses or Miriam as our models, so that we could imagine ourselves as flawed human beings still willing to lead people through the wilderness. We were not presented with Peter or Mary Magdalene as our models, so that we could imagine ourselves as imperfect disciples still able to serve at our Lord’s right hand. Instead, we were called to fill in for Jesus at the communion table, standing where he once stood and saying what he once said. We were called to preach his gospel and feed his sheep. We were, in other words, presented with Jesus himself as our model, so that most of us could only imagine ourselves disappointing everyone in our lives from God on down.
The vocational crisis that put an end to my wearing a collar every day exposed the pale neck of my lunar soul. My real human texture came out of hiding for the first time in years, and I had so much catching up to do that I was not always pleasant to be around. I rode my mood swings as far as they would go instead of trying to get them to stop. I yelled a lot and practiced colorful language. I went to the grocery store in blue jeans and spent too much money on red clothes.
Like an Amish youth entering my rumspringa, I embarked on a period of running around on my faith community. I let down my hair, although as my friend Martin says about himself, I do not have very long hair. My experiment, such as it was, had more to do with my identity than my behavior. Both as a priest and as the rector of a parish, I had been given my identity for so long that I hardly knew how to start making up one of my own.
For fifteen years, my clericals had been like my car. Once I was inside of them I did not think about them much, although my identification with them was complete. Back before Saabs were well known in the United States, I drove one that was shaped like a leaf beetle. These were the same cars that Swedish police and mail carriers drove, which gave those of us who drove them a certain sense of superiority. In the event of mud, sleet, or snow, our front-wheel drive took us places no Buick would ever dream of going. Until then, we had a look that set us apart from every other car on the road.
When I passed other Saabs on the highway, we flashed our headlights at one another in recognition. We knew that our headliners would sooner or later begin to sag because Saab used glue made from reindeer hooves. We also knew that if our cars broke down out of town we might have to wait three days for a new water pump to arrive, but that almost never happened until the second hundred thousand miles. Meanwhile we enjoyed the camaraderie of our oddness. There were not many of us, which meant that people noticed us, and even when they did not notice us we noticed one another.
One day when I needed to take a big dog to