Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [57]
After I left church, the same thing happened to me on foot. Cruising the aisles at the Winn-Dixie, I did not get the same looks that I was used to. When I gave strangers the smile that went with the clerical collar, most of them sailed right past, which was how I remembered that I was wearing street clothes. While people I knew still flashed their lights, we treated one another as gingerly as onetime lovers who had resolved to remain friends. But such encounters happened less often than I expected in a town as small as Clarkesville. As it turned out, there were a whole lot of people I did not know, including teenaged cashiers at the hardware store who treated me as indifferently as they treated everyone else, and motorcyclists at the filling station who did not clean up their language when I pulled up to the pump.
While there was a certain thrill in discovering how people talk when they do not think there is an ordained minister around, I was shocked to discover how civilians are treated, especially when they are women. When I stood at a busy store counter waiting to be helped, I watched the clerk attend to every man in the vicinity before turning at last to me. When Ed and I met someone new at a concert, I learned to stand quietly while our new acquaintances tried to find out what Ed did for a living. Without my collar, I became invisible. Nothing set me apart from any other middle-aged woman who had not bothered to color her hair. But that was what I had wanted, wasn’t it? Not to be set apart? As I fought the instinct to flash my lights, I tried to remember that was what I had wanted.
If my second loss upon leaving church was the ease of a given identity, then my second gain was the fellowship I felt with a far wider swath of humanity once I took my collar off. As on the night of my rebaptism in the swimming pool, I found myself bobbing in the water with everyone else instead of standing on the cement tossing life preservers. There was shame in this at first, as I watched other people step in to fill the role of lifeguard, but I was so sure I wanted to stay in the water that I resolved to get used to it. When I did, the shame changed to something closer to humility. I was neither as good as I hoped I might be nor as bad as I feared. I was simply another of God’s beggars, grateful to have found my way into the pool.
I finally wrecked my old Saab on the Cross-Bronx Expressway. A bunch of white bottles lying in the road turned out to be a spilled carton of motor oil that sent cars sliding in all directions. When the tow truck driver retrieved my green hood from the center lane, it had the twin treads of a tractor-trailer running right across it. To this day, I do not know whether to remember that car as the one in which I almost lost my life or the one in which my life was saved.
CHAPTER
13
In the normal course of things, clergy leave churches in order to go to other churches. Since I was staying in Clarkesville, I had to figure out another way to get some distance on Grace-Calvary. While my friend at Clarkesville Baptist Church routinely looked out upon one or two of his retired predecessors sitting in the congregation, the Episcopal Church does not handle the transition of its leaders in that way. Once you are gone, you are gone. You find somewhere else to worship on Sundays, and if any of your former parishioners approach you about doing things they do not feel comfortable asking their new pastor to do,