Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [59]
There is also a difference between singing hymns that you yourself carefully chose and singing hymns that someone else chose. For me, at least, familiarity is not the point as much as message, since sung words affect me in ways that said words do not. Where sermons slide off, hymns sink in. Days later, I can be minding my own business, doing something as secular as sweeping the kitchen floor or balancing the checkbook, when I begin to hum a hymn tune. If I stop to identify it, I can usually recover the words, which are often so pertinent to my situation that they arrive like Priority Mail from God. For this reason, I loathe singing hymns that rhyme blame and shame, or foes and oppose, so that I cannot shake the sharp tacks of their message from my mind, but when someone else is choosing the hymns, there is no telling what will slide down the chute into my subconscious. This should by all rights increase my sympathy for those who once endured my hymn choices, but it does not. All it increases is my wish to be in charge.
I was, however, no longer in charge. I was no longer leading the prayers, reading the gospel, preaching the sermon, or breaking the bread. I was no longer wearing special clothes or sitting in a reserved seat. I was not the focus of anyone’s attention. I was not essential to anything that was going on. Instead, I was sitting in a pew wearing a nice dress following someone else’s directions, and this was not going particularly well for me. At the passing of the peace, I embraced the woman who had slid in next to me.
“Wow,” I said, “things look really different from back here.” She smiled a gnostic smile.
“You’re used to being in the play,” she said without irony. “Now you’re watching the play. Welcome to the audience.”
I hardly know what to call this loss. Like the loss of my job, it involved the loss of identity. I no longer had a prime place to sit or a big role to play. I had also lost the beloved community with whom I had worshiped for five and a half years. But I think that the word I am looking for, which I am also loath to use, is power. I had lost my institutional power, which offered me the first of many lessons in the difference between church teachings and the view from the pew.
The church teaches—I myself have taught—that liturgy means “the work of the people.” The priest serves as the people’s representative in worship, who does on their behalf what they are all called to do. When the priest prays, proclaims the gospel, or blesses bread and breaks it before handing it around, he or she is standing in for the priesthood of all believers, who are called to do the same sorts of things in their own lives in the world. Worship is a communal practice, I have explained to hundreds of inquirers. Although there may only be one person standing behind the altar, we are all offering our thanksgiving to God.
Maybe so, but there is no denying that it feels much truer when you are the one behind the altar than it does when you are sitting eight rows back on the right, speaking only when you are spoken to while someone else carries the play.
Behind the altar, I felt as if I were standing in a concentrated beam of pure glory. Perhaps it was the collected energy of the gathered community focused on one spot, or perhaps it was the presence of the bright, invisible God. Whatever it was, it could make the hair stand up on my arms. Pronouncing sacred words on behalf of sixteen, sixty, or six hundred other people multiplied the power of the words just that many times so that the language made my head swim as it came out of my mouth.
When I raised my hands in the air above the bread and the wine, I could sense