Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [63]
The definition of faith that I heard most often had to do with being certain what you believed. When two girls from the Christian Missionary Alliance Church knocked on my dorm room door during my sophomore year in college, they were certain who God was, what God wanted from them and from me, where they were going to spend eternity, and what I needed to do to join them in heaven. At nineteen, I could not answer any of the questions they asked me from scripture, about how I was going to get across the abyss between God and me. So they drew me a picture on the pad of paper they carried with them, of a cross spanning a chasm. Then they told me exactly how the cross-shaped bridge worked, adding a stick figure on it that they said could be me. Stunned by the sheer volume of the information they possessed about God, I wilted before them, kneeling where they asked me to kneel and saying what they asked me to say. Phrase by phrase, they prompted me in the sinner’s prayer, which I hoped might sow the same certainty in me that was so evident in them.
Six months later, I had experienced something I perceived to be the Holy Spirit at work in me. As best I could describe it, it was an illumination of ordinary people, trees, sidewalks, dogs—the world, in a word—so that everything seemed to be lit from within. While I was certain this had happened, I was not certain what it meant. I had read everything the campus Christians had given me to read by then. I had done everything they had told me to do, without arriving at the same confidence that they seemed to possess. I possessed curiosity. I possessed awe. I possessed hope, doubt, and fear, but nothing like certainty about what I believed. When I brought this up in Bible study, the other girls looked at me as if I had just passed gas. Clearly, I was not where I was supposed to be in my walk with God. As my friend Becca once said, “The church answered all my questions while I was growing up, but they also gave me the questions I could ask.”
By the time I resigned from Grace-Calvary, I had arrived at an understanding of faith that had far more to do with trust than with certainty. I trusted God to be God even if I could not say who God was for sure. I trusted God to sustain the world although I could not say for sure how that happened. I trusted God to hold me and those I loved, in life and in death, without giving me one shred of conclusive evidence that it was so. While this understanding had the welcome effect of changing faith from a noun to a verb for me, it was an understanding that told me how far I had strayed from the center of my old spiritual map.
Like any other map, mine had both a center and an edge. At the center stood the Church, where good women baked communion bread, ironed altar linens, and polished silver that had been in the church family for generations. Parents presented their children for baptism, and those children grew up with dozens of church aunts and uncles who knew them by name. The Christian education committee recruited Sunday school teachers, the youth group leaders planned pizza parties at the bowling alley, and the choir rehearsed from 6:30 to 8:00 in the parish house on Thursday nights. At the center, some people never picked up a prayer book on Sunday morning because they knew the communion service by heart, and even those who had to look said the Nicene Creed all the way through without leaving any parts of it out. These people at the center kept the map from blowing away.
As it turned out, the edge of the map was not all that far from the center. It was not as if I or anyone else had to take a mule train for three weeks to