Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [78]
There was no mastering divinity. My vocation was to love God and my neighbor, and that was something I could do anywhere, with anyone, with or without a collar. My priesthood was not what I did but who I was. In this new light, nothing was wasted. All that had gone before was blessing, and all yet to come was more.
PART THREE
Keeping
What we are all more or less lacking at this moment is a new definition of holiness.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN
CHAPTER
17
In the twenty-first year of my priesthood, I empty the bag of my old convictions on the kitchen table to decide what I will keep. The clerical collar I once wore like a wimple is brown where it has rubbed against my skin. My human dirt has come off on it, and I have lost all will to bleach it clean. I wear it very seldom now, both because the plastic band bites into my neck and because it draws more attention than I want. I love watching people, which becomes far more difficult when they are watching me. Street clothes are good camouflage, and my gray hair is enough to get me a seat on the subway without changing the way people talk when they see me. Since I still serve as a guest preacher some Sundays, I will keep the collar. The neckline of my cassock does not stand up right without it, and the jolt I receive when I see it in the mirror tells me that I am not through with this mark of office yet.
The pectoral cross made from two old carpenter’s nails is still sharp enough to prick my hands. After I left church I could not find it anywhere and thought I had lost it for good. Then the same man who made it for me brought it back to me, fished up from a crevice in the sacristy where I had dropped it. I am glad to have it back, although I have many more, which I liked to wear back when a cross meant only love to me. Now I know too many people who regard it as a weapon. Some have been cut deeply by it, not once but over and over again, while those who wield it like a rapier seem to believe that their swordplay pleases God. Either way, I find myself reaching for symbols with less violence in them.
The one I wear most often now is a silver circle with three waves curling toward each other in the center. Jesus is one of those waves, but he is not the only one. When his wave breaks, the Holy Spirit’s wave picks up where his left off, and when the Holy Spirit’s wave breaks, the water spills back toward the Wave Maker. The clerk who sold me this circle told me that it did not stand for anything, but I knew better. I knew I needed a symbol for the fullness of God, which cannot be reduced to any one name alone. While I wear the circle, I will keep the cross, even though I am not sure that the symbol can survive its abuse. For me, it is a reminder of Jesus’s willingness to risk everything for the love of God’s little ones. The cross he died on reminds me that his Way is not the way of violence against his enemies or victory over those who do not believe in him, but the way of self-annihilating love for God and neighbor.
Because this is such a difficult way, I can understand why some Christians see it as a kind of bluff on God’s part—the temporary casting of Jesus in the role of a humble servant until the last act of the play, when he will return to the stage a mighty victor—but I cannot make any more sense out of “triumphant Christians” than I can out of “conquering servants” or “warrior babies.” If Jesus meant for his followers to rule the world, then why did he teach them to wash feet? As difficult as it is to accept, I believe that his death on the cross reveals the God who suffers for love instead of punishing the unloving, the God who lays down his life for his friends. In the words of W.H. Vanstone, set to a hymn that never fails to bring tears to my eyes, “Here is God: no monarch he, throned