Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [64]
According to the Bible, both the center and the edge are essential to the spiritual landscape, although they are as different from one another as they can be. The wilderness of Sinai provided the people of Israel with an experience of God that was distinct from their experience in the Temple in Jerusalem. The Judean desert showed Jesus a side of God’s Holy Spirit that was not apparent while magi knelt before his manger in Bethlehem. There is life in both places because the same God is in both places, but they are so different from one another that it is often difficult for people to be one place without wanting to be the other place or to agree that both places really belong on the same map. Much that is certain at the center is up for grabs in the wilderness, while much that is real in the wilderness turns out to be far too feral for the center.
Once, when I attended a workshop on teaching religion, a presenter talked about how he took his students on wilderness trips to give them a taste of life nearer the edge. Whether they went hiking or white-water rafting, the point was to step outside their high-carb comfort zones long enough to encounter the untamed holiness of the wild.
“Excuse me,” a member of the audience said, “but are there predators in those places who are above you on the food chain?”
“Well, of course not,” the presenter said. “I wouldn’t put students in danger like that.”
“I wouldn’t either,” the man in the audience said, “but don’t lull them into thinking that they have experienced true wilderness. It’s only wilderness if there’s something out there that can eat you.”
I had been under the care of Mother Church for so long that I had not spent a night out of her sight in years. Now all of a sudden I was outside more nights than I was in, which allowed me to see my mother in a new light. What I saw above all was how well she had provided for me. Lying in the yard all by myself with the spiritual equivalent of a can of cold beans, I looked in through the windows of the church and saw people bathed in golden light eating the meal that I had once shared with them. I saw how Mother Church had not only fed me, clothed me, and housed me but had also given me brothers and sisters to learn to love, even when we did not like each other very much.
I saw how she had taught me the same things that had helped her older children find their way in the world as well as a few that she hoped might keep me safe. Be careful. Don’t leave the
yard. No more questions. Because I’m the mother, that’s why. Like any mother, she had also taught me to behave in ways that would reflect well on the family. Watch your mouth. Tuck in your shirt. Don’t play with those children. Wait till your father gets home. If Mother Church had delivered her advice to me in far more theological language than my own mother had ever used, her intent remained the same. Her job was to take care of me. How else had she come by her name?
Having left the house for the first time in twenty years, I did what most grown children do. I left the yard. I asked lots of questions. I sought out the grown children my mother had taught me not to play with, and in every case I learned that she had not told me the whole truth. While the world was an often frightening place, there was also a great deal of goodness in it. I met people