Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [61]
When I lost my power, at least three things happened. The first was that I felt a great welling up of tenderness for everyone still trying to make a go out of church the way it was. I felt tender toward the clergy, since I knew that most of them did not feel powerful at all and were in fact baffled by the strong resistance they sometimes roused in their parishioners. I felt tender toward the parishioners, for remaining loyal to churches that revolved far too tightly around the personalities of their ministers. I even felt tender toward myself, for continuing to open myself up to other people’s agendas when I came to church to worship God. When I was in charge, I knew nothing about the kind of vulnerability this requires. Now that I know, I understand what an act of courage it can be to trust other human beings to give voice to one’s prayers.
The second thing that happened when I lost my power was that I got a taste of the spiritual poverty that is central to the Christ path. Since this virtue has all but vanished from the American church scene, it is often hard to recognize. With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore. Yet his way endures as a way of emptying the self of all its goods instead of shoring up the self with spiritual riches. Only those who lose their lives can have them.
Sometimes known by its Greek name, this kenosis is captured best in the second chapter of Paul’s letter to the Philippians. “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,” he writes, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.” The important thing to notice is that no one emptied this Christ Jesus. He willingly emptied himself, leaving his followers a baffling example of how powerful the surrender of all power can be. While my taste of this truth was admittedly no more than a drop on my tongue, I could still taste it. My new powerlessness in church gave rise to such a riot in my ego that I became freshly aware of how much emptying I had left to do. The wish to be in charge was, among other things, the wish to avoid the pain of not being in charge, of my life or anything else.
The third thing that happened when I lost my power was that my priesthood emptied into the world. As I became a sojourner in congregations where I had no official role, I began to understand that while I had lost institutional power, I was still a priest. No longer tied to one particular community, I began to sense myself part of the far larger congregation of humankind. No longer responsible for one particular altar, I began to see altars everywhere. There are surely as many definitions of priesthood as there are priests, but I have always thought of myself as someone whose job is to recognize the holiness of things and then hold them up to God. When I served one particular congregation, my job was to officiate at the offering of that community’s life to God, whether that took place in worship, around a hospital bed, at the soup kitchen, or in the nursery. Over and over, being the priest meant that I was the one who got to set these things on the altar, presenting them to God along with our deep thanks for the privilege of being alive.
After I left church, I did not expect to do this anymore, at least not officially. Then one day while I was waiting in line at the post office, I realized that I could unofficially thank God for every person standing in that line with me, lingering just long enough on each one of them to become aware of another human being as much in need of love as I. When Ed invited