Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [77]
“In peace, we pray to you, Lord God.”
“Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you…”
“We celebrate the memorial of our redemption, O Father…”
“And now, as our Savior Christ has taught us, we are bold to say…”
I had said these words so often that they were cemented in my consciousness like old Beatles songs, but when I said “we believe” on the first day of class, I saw a look pass over the face of a young man named Kamal that let me know my we was too small for him. Later I would learn that he was a Hindu from Sri Lanka who had lots of practice with pronouns snapping shut on him. On that first day, all I knew was that my language had left him out, so that his face became the icon I focused on as I learned to speak anew.
As I warmed to my topic that first Thursday morning, I found myself saying things that were not in my notes. I told the students that while they might think they were there to fulfill one of the general education requirements for graduation, my class was going to give them a straight shot at making the world a better place. By learning more about what their neighbors held most sacred, they were going to be better equipped to love them, or at least slower to condemn them for conceiving God in a different way. In fifteen short weeks, they were going to feel less stupid about the rapidly changing country in which they lived. They were going to know better than to step on their roommate’s prayer rug or to order a ham-and-cheese sandwich at a kosher delicatessen. They were going to know how to tell the difference between a Greek Orthodox church and a Roman Catholic church just by looking, and they were going to know the name of the elephant-headed god behind the cash register at the Indian restaurant. They were going to understand why the First Amendment made the United States such an interesting place to live. They were going to be better citizens of the world.
With any luck, they were even going to be saddled with questions that would keep them awake at night, increasing both their awe before the mystery of life and their kinship with other mortals. I hoped they would like my class, I told them, but that was not my main concern. My main concern was their utter transformation. I wanted their education to change their lives, their dreams, and their futures. I wanted what they learned to call all their old certainties into question and enlarge the boundaries of their known worlds. I wanted them to discover how capable they were, how rich their imaginations were, and how much their choices mattered in the grand scheme of things.
As the students warmed to what I was saying, I discovered things that still worked even without props. The call to higher purpose still worked. The promise of greater understanding still worked, along with the live current that linked human beings. The more I gave to the students, the more they gave back. We rose to the occasion of one another’s presence, and before the hour was over I knew that while the scenery had changed, my vocation had not. I was still on holy ground. All the familiar human sorrows were in that room, all the human hunger for meaning and for love. I was still in the privileged position of choosing words that fell into deep water, and of asking the kinds of questions that mattered. I would have to become better at charades, by which I mean I would have to act out virtues that I had once taken shortcuts through with words, but I was in a room full of eighteen-and nineteen-year-olds—a group of people most clergy see very little of in church—and until I said or did something incredibly stupid they seemed inclined to trust me.
When I dismissed them at 9:15, I registered all that I had lost: my congregational base, my liturgical language, my exquisite vestments, my clerical distinction. They were the same things I had wanted so badly to lose in the swimming pool that night of the lobster party. Watching them fall away from me now,