Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [60]
When I broke the bread, the smell of wheat and honey made my mouth water. No matter how many times I did it, I could not wait to taste the bread. Then I lifted the chalice of fragrant port wine to my lips, making myself stop with one sip. This rare restraint focused my senses as excess never did. The bridegroom had saved the best until then.
As people made their way toward the altar rail, I came as close as I ever did to seeing who they really were. They were hungry, just like me. They were as helpless as I was to be as whole as God made them to be. They were doing the best they could. They were also praying, most of them, so that they did not look at me. Outstretched hands took the place of upturned faces. Looking down at them, I could see how each pair of hands told me the story of a life. Whether that life had been short or long, rough or smooth, it was opening up to me then, ready to receive God’s food and I—I—got to place the holy bread there in the center of each palm, watching the fingers curl around it as if Jesus himself had given it to them.
When people ask me what I miss most about serving a church, the answer is: this. I miss baptisms and funerals, parish picnics and hospital calls, but what I miss most of all is celebrating communion with people I love. I miss being a lightning rod, conducting all that heat and light not only from heaven to earth but also from person to person. Most of us do not live especially holy lives, after all. We spend most of our time sitting in traffic, paying bills, and being irritated with one another. Yet every week we are invited to stop all of that for one hour at least. We are invited to participate in a great drama that has been going on without us for thousands of years, and one that will go on as long as there is a single player left standing.
If this terrific mystery is not apparent to most people sitting in the pews, then there are at least two things wrong. One is that worship has become too tame, and the other is that those who come have stopped bringing their own fire. The two may even be related, but neither is easily solved, nor am I sure that many people want them to be. Tame worship is easier to agree on than any other kind, and bringing fire requires a lot more energy than simply showing up. When life is pretty good and church is pleasant enough, who needs resurrection?
But there may also be something wrong with giving one person so much power, so that the starring role in the drama goes to the same person every week. I did not think about this much when I was one of several clergy on a large church staff, but at Grace-Calvary I felt the heat more keenly. Week after week, I was permitted to stand up in special clothes and talk while everyone else sat quietly and listened. Week after week, they heard the gospel filtered through my sensibilities. On Sunday mornings they sang the hymns I had chosen, and on Wednesday evenings they engaged the topics I had picked. While this situation was relieved somewhat by a couple of fine clergy associates and several gifted parish leaders, I remained aware of my (and their) inordinate power. Once, a man who routinely sent me clippings from the Christian Science Monitor included an essay of his own on a topic close to his heart. “We know a lot about what matters to you,” he wrote, not unkindly. “I thought you might like to know about something that matters to me.”
If I sometimes felt like a hostile parent and my parishioners like overmanaged children, it was not all our fault. We needed a different way of being together before God, shaped