Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [6]
Like every preacher who had walked in before me, I could not resist taking in the view from the high pulpit. In a space so small, it was a true antique, left over from a time when preachers really did speak from on high to sinners down below. Climbing the small staircase, I found the aerie stacked with old glass vases, a few green cubes of Styrofoam, and a broken chair. Clearly, I was the first preacher who had been up there in a while. This told me two important things: (1) In this church, clergy engaged the congregation at eye level, and (2) the altar guild was out of storage space.
Shifting the broken chair to make room for my feet, I straightened up to see the pipe organ in the balcony for the first time. The gold-painted pipes reached all the way to the ceiling without an inch to spare. They were housed in a carved wooden cabinet that looked as old as the church. Looking straight into the balcony, I realized that the slaves who had once sat there had occupied the best seats in the house. From the high pulpit, the same preacher who looked down on their owners could have met the servants’ eyes straight on.
Climbing back down the stairs, I let myself out the altar gate and sat down on the red velvet kneeler. There were so many panes of wavy glass in the windows that the place swam with dust motes dazzled by the light. The branches of a hemlock swayed in the breeze outside. When Ed touched me on the shoulder, I looked up at him and said, “I want this church.”
CHAPTER
2
By falling in love with a building before I ever met the people who worshiped in it, I participated in a popular misunderstanding of the word church. Properly speaking, the noun refers not to a piece of real estate but to a community of people, who may or may not meet inside of a church building. As I learned in the weeks following my first visit, Grace Church met for the first time in the living room of the Reverend Ezra Kellogg, a missionary from New York, in 1838. The congregation of some thirty souls that formed that day met wherever they could for the next several years, and it was not until four years later that the church took up permanent residence in a building at the corner of Green and Wilson Streets.
The village of Clarkesville had been on the map for only about twenty years at that point, carved out of Indian Territory by a treaty with the Cherokee Nation that was rendered moot when President Jackson signed the Removal Act of 1830. As defeated Cherokee and Creek people were herded down the Trail of Tears toward Oklahoma, wealthy planters from Charleston and Savannah arrived to take their land. Fleeing the heat and danger of fever back home, these aristocrats settled in the breezy foothills of the Appalachians. Resort hotels and boardinghouses sprang up around the Clarkesville square as more well-to-do families built elaborate summer homes in the surrounding countryside.
Once their own congregation was up and running, the people of Grace Church established several missions in the area. They built a chapel of ease called Holy Cross three miles out of town near the minister’s home so that he could hold services there when the roads were impassable by horse and buggy. In 1848 they commissioned a five-rank tracker organ from the Erben Organ Factory in New York, and in 1852 a church bell cast by George Hildbrook of East Medway, Massachusetts, arrived by wagon for installation in the bell tower.
In 1861 the Civil War put a lid on all such expansiveness. When the South was defeated four years later, Grace Church