Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [65]
In the company of Jewish friends, I went way out into the wilderness where I could see my tradition through their eyes instead of my own. They taught me what messiah means to a Jew, which is quite different from what it means to most Christians. They taught me things about Second Temple Judaism and first-century life under Rome that enriched my reading of scripture. They gave me a whole new view of Paul. But they also showed me places where the followers of Jesus twisted the truth about Judaism or at least wrote things in such a way that their interpreters could. Once I understood that the gospel writers had not told me the whole truth about the Pharisees, I wondered what else they had not told me. Once I noticed that Luke said things about Paul that Paul denied, I wondered what other quarrels Luke had hidden from my view.
I had never read scripture more carefully in my life, which caused scales to fall from my eyes. Over and over, I discovered how the traditional interpretation of a passage had so determined my reading of it that it was hard for me to see what was actually on the page. For the first time, I noticed that Jesus’s frame of reference for himself in Luke 4 was “prophet” and not “messiah” and that the reason his hometown congregation tried to throw him off the cliff was because he proclaimed in their hearing that God did not belong to them. For the first time, I noticed how many books of the Bible are at glorious odds with one another, as Job argues with Proverbs, Ruth with Ezra, Mark with John, and James with Paul.
If none of this had ever come to my attention before, one reason was because I had never had so much time to read before, but another reason was because Mother Church had little interest in the things that were interesting me. Her job was to take care of her family. Why should she get into discussions that might cause them to lose confidence in her? Why encourage them to raise questions for which she had no answers? Even more important, why waste valuable time rehashing things that had been settled centuries ago when there was so much to do around the house right now? I understood her reasons, I really did. I was just looking for some way to stay related to her that did not require me to stay a child.
Because I had left the house, I found less and less to talk about with people who were still happily engaged inside. At clergy gatherings I felt like a single woman listening to dedicated parents discuss day care and home remedies for colic. When I spoke of things that I found fascinating, the resounding silence told me how far I was from the center of the map and how much my distance sounded like disloyalty. Church people who could tell I was in the wilderness were kind enough to invite me back inside the house, but even when I went to visit I did not want to stay. I did not know how to behave anymore. I could no longer speak the lines that I had been given to say. I wanted to go back outside.
If my time in the wilderness taught me anything, it is that faith in God has both a center and an edge and that each is necessary for the soul’s health. If I developed a complaint during my time in the wilderness, it was that Mother Church lavished so much more attention on those at the center than on those at the edge.
Because I lived with chickens, I was able to see up close how a mother hen protects her babies. One white hen who sat patiently on twenty-one eggs for as many days finally hatched fourteen chicks, who did their best to stay within the safety of her shadow. In the evening, so many little heads poked out of her feathers that she looked