Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [73]
While I heard drums in the forest and saw people walking with machetes on the road, I spoke with no more than the same five people every day. The nearest telephone was a twenty-five-minute drive away, in the same town as the post office and the grocery store. When I rode in once a week to shop with Corky, we finished in record time since there was only one kind of milk, one kind of cereal, one kind of rice, and one kind of bread in the little market that we frequented. I never knew how he procured the red wine that we drank with dinner, but we wrapped the empty bottles in newspaper and hid them in the garbage can since good Kenyan Christians do not drink.
When my time there was up, I cried the whole first hour of the ride to the airport. Back home, I realized how many survival skills I had lost during my time away. The mail came too often. The ringing telephone drove me mad. On my first trip to the grocery store, I abandoned my cart in the cereal aisle, utterly overwhelmed by how many kinds of oatmeal there were. Walking out of the store empty-handed, I felt half a dozen pairs of eyes on me, which stung me as badly as a swarm of buzzing bees.
Eventually I remembered how to shut all of these things out, by numbing myself to the vast majority of them. I stopped flinching when city buses zoomed past me while I was standing on a street corner waiting for the light to change. I grew back the nerve required to cross three lanes of traffic in a compact car when my highway exit appeared. I remembered how to handle myself at large gatherings of talking people, and how to spill excess information when my brainpan was already overfull.
I learned to withstand human inspection again, but after I left church I fell back into my rain forest ways. How would I face twenty-five college students in less than a month’s time, when going to the grocery store was all I could presently manage? How could I ever wear pantyhose again? Preparing a syllabus seemed like the natural first step. I would choose the books for my world religions course, decide how I wanted to teach it, and write up a road map that I could follow if I lost my way.
“Religion 101: Religions of the World,” I typed at the top of a fresh page. This was the class I would teach twice my first semester and at least once every semester thereafter. In fifteen weeks, I would cover Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shinto, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for a grand total of three hours each on the major wisdom traditions of the world. Since I had never tried this before, it seemed entirely possible to me. Plus, I had visited countries where each of those traditions was dominant. All I really had to do was stay two weeks ahead of the students.
Since I was the only faculty member in religion, I would also be responsible for teaching Introduction to the Bible, Introduction to Christian Theology, Life of Jesus, and Life of Paul. As often as I had presented these subjects devotionally at church, I had never taught them academically before. While the prospect of doing this was daunting, it was also exciting to me. One of the most redemptive features of my new job was the clarity of the expectations. I was to teach a set number of students a set body of material. I was expected to spend time in the library in order to do this. I was expected to attend professional meetings in order to continue my own education. I was expected to make a distinctive contribution in my field. After years of stealing hours to read and begging time for study leave, this was like being made to lie down in green pastures, beside still waters that restored my soul.
“Spring 1998,” I typed in the top right-hand corner. As a priest,