Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [58]
For this reason, I did not set foot back inside Grace-Calvary Church until a woman I cared about died. Another priest was set to conduct the funeral. All I wanted was to be there in street clothes. Delaying my arrival so that I would not have to talk to too many people, I reached the porch of the church just as one of the ushers began tolling the bell. Rushing past him, I stepped into the narthex of the church, where a second usher blocked my path. “It’s full,” he whispered, “but there may still be a few seats up there.” He pointed up the steep steps leading to the balcony, where I knew fifteen or twenty folding chairs flanked the old pipe organ.
He said it kindly enough, but he might as well have been a bouncer in a nightclub for all the affront I felt. Refused entrance to the dance floor I had once ruled, I climbed the steps to the balcony, almost as stung by the loss of my old privileges as I was embarrassed to have forgotten that they were no longer mine. There was no seat waiting for me up front any longer. From now on I would have to arrive early and hunt for a place like everyone else.
This was easier to remember in churches where I had never worked. In the months following my resignation from Grace-Calvary, I decided to attend an Episcopal church in a neighboring county where a friend of mine was rector. The forty-five-minute drive was tedious, especially since I lost the NPR signal in the mountains before I was halfway there, but my friend could not have been more welcoming. He even invited me to preach one Sunday so that I would not lose my serve, which was how I learned that I did not belong there. My sermon was so weak that I punched up the delivery to try and save it, but I could not strike a single spark in the eyes of those who were listening to me. Both they and I knew that I did not love them. How could I? I did not even know them. At the door after the service, a sweet-faced woman shook my hand.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, bunching her shoulders into a small shrug. “It was fine, I guess. It’s just that we love Sam.”
After that I tried an Episcopal church twenty minutes in the other direction, where I knew more people. Arriving ten minutes before the hour, I chose a pew on the back right side and sat close to the aisle next to a stuffed brown bear. Instinct had led me to the pew for restless children, but so far I had the bear all to myself.
As I waited for the service to begin, people arrived to take their places. While I sat looking at the backs of their heads, I felt the anticipation growing in my body, like muscle memory in a limb that is gone. Those moments just before the liturgy began were always packed with tension. Had all of the lectors showed up? Were the acolytes’ robes clean? Those were the moments when people chose to give me prayer requests I would never remember, when I realized that I had not counted the pages of my sermon to make sure that they were all there. In sixty seconds it would be too late to do anything about these things. When the organist struck the first note of the first hymn, I would loosen the last rope and the boat would leave the dock. Sailing down the aisle behind the crucifer, I would watch the heads on either side of me bow before the cross. Seeing them in profile, I would begin to tally who was there. Soon I would stand before them, looking out at their sea of shining faces, and it would be the best moment of the morning so far.
The boat left without me that morning. I bowed before the cross, the celebrant walked past me, and when he turned around to say the opening sentences I realized that I had been robbed. He could see all of our faces, but