Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [62]
Gradually I remembered what I had known all along, which is that church is not a stopping place but a starting place for discerning God’s presence in this world. By offering people a place where they may engage the steady practice of listening to divine words and celebrating divine sacraments, church can help people gain a feel for how God shows up—not only in Holy Bibles and Holy Communion but also in near neighbors, mysterious strangers, sliced bread, and grocery store wine. That way, when they leave church, they no more leave God than God leaves them. They simply carry what they have learned into the wide, wide world, where there is a crying need for people who will recognize the holiness in things and hold them up to God.
Although I never found a church where I felt completely at home again, I made a new home in the world. I renewed my membership in the priesthood of all believers, who may not have as much power as we would like, but whose consolation prize is the freedom to meet God after work, well away from all centers of religious command, wherever God shows up.
CHAPTER
14
In the months following my resignation from Grace-Calvary, I spent a lot of time interpreting my decision to people who cared about me. One day I received a long e-mail from a clergy friend I had met seven years earlier in Israel. We were both parish priests back then, spending part of our sabbaticals at Saint George’s College in Jerusalem. Bouncing around the Holy Land on the back bench of a tourist bus, we formed a bond based in large part on a shared sense of irreverent humor. When he was elected a bishop some years later, I was relieved that he did not change the way he talked, at least to me. He continued to tell me stories that made me laugh out loud, risking impieties he might otherwise have censored because he knew I was as committed as he was to the Church.
The long e-mail arrived after he learned of my resignation. In it, he was as kind as ever, but the humor was all gone. He wondered how I was doing, he said. He hoped that I would not waste any time finding a spiritual director who might help me through my crisis. He wanted me to know that no matter how far I felt from God, God was not far from me. Reading his reassurances, I remembered how much time bishops spend bandaging clergy who have walked off the edge. In my reply, I blessed my friend for his concern and told him to relax. I had not lost my faith. If anything, my decision to leave church was a bid to live into that faith more fully. When he wrote back, he was his old self again. He was so immersed in the life of the Church, he said, that he occasionally forgot that the life of faith was not always the same thing.
I’ll say. By fleeing the church to seek refuge in the world, I had reversed the usual paradigm, and I had to learn my way around the new one. For half my life, the axis of my world had run through the altar of a church. I spent most of my time in church, with church people, engaging in the work of the church. My view of reality grew from that center. I looked at life through the windows of the church, using the language I had learned there not only to describe what I saw but also to make sense of it. My context was so tightly focused that even my junk mail was Christian.
Within a matter of weeks, much of that had changed for me. Without a place to be every Sunday, without a collar to define my identity or a job to lend me institutional power, I found myself on the outside looking in. This was almost literally true some Sundays, when I wanted to hide in the hedges at Grace-Calvary until the service started and then rise up just high enough to get a good look at my old congregation.