Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [8]
When I heard the news back in Atlanta, I was stunned, not only because Julian was such a good man, but also because I had just coveted his church. I waited three days before I called the bishop and asked him to put my name on the list of candidates to fill the new vacancy at Grace-Calvary Church.
CHAPTER
3
Almost a decade earlier, a shirt box had arrived at my house the week before I was ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Church. The customs form, filled out by a shipping clerk at J. Wippell and Company, Ltd., in Exeter, England, said “clergy apparel.” Inside the box were three black, long-sleeved shirts, three stiff white plastic clerical collars, and three pairs of brass-plated collar studs. As long as I had waited for them, my stomach lurched at the sight of these new clothes. Who did I think I was? More to the point, who would other people think I was once I put these things on?
Since I had been a late-blooming flower child, my choice of vocation struck many who knew me as odd. When I announced that I was going to seminary straight out of college, my mother turned from doing the dishes at the kitchen sink and said, “You will get over this.” Even my college adviser worried about me. Although I had majored in religion, my transcript listed more courses in mysticism and environmental ethics than it did in Bible and theology. I had no intention of being ordained, which was a good thing since I did not belong to any church that might ordain me. I was simply drawn to spend as much time reading, thinking, and writing about God as I could, and seminary seemed to offer me the best chance of doing that.
As hard as I have tried to remember the exact moment when I fell in love with God, I cannot do it. My earliest memories are bathed in a kind of golden light that seemed to embrace me as surely as my mother’s arms. The Divine Presence was strongest outdoors, and most palpable when I was alone. When I think of my first cathedral, I am back in a field behind my parents’ house in Kansas, with every stalk of prairie grass lit up from within. I can hear the entire community of crows, grasshoppers, and tree frogs who belong to this field with me. The smell of the grass is so sweet that it perfumes me from within, while the sun heating the top of my head brings out my own fragrance too. There is more in this field than I will ever be able to discover—not only the abandoned shells of land snails and the shed feathers of blue jays but also round holes in the earth that might have been dug by field mice or black snakes, but I will never know which, because as long as I lie there watching the hole, no creature ever appears to go in or come out of it.
This does not really matter because lying there is very good. My skin is happy on the black dirt, which speaks a language my bones understand. If I roll over and think only about the places on my back that are touching the ground, then pretty soon I cannot tell whether I am pressing down on the earth or the earth is pressing up on me. The feeling is the same as when my father holds me up in the swimming pool, teaching me to float. As frightened as I am of getting water up my nose, I gradually relax into his open arms, trusting him to bear me up. One day he will let go of me, but he has not yet done so. Until he does, there is no better feeling in the world than resting on his open arms with my body half in and half out of the pool, the sun on my face, and enough water in my ears so that all I can really hear is the beating of my heart.
I am floating in this field, held up toward the sun by the black dirt under my back. I am this earth’s child, and I know it. When I am done lying here, I will visit the small crystal stream that runs through this field to see what is moving in it today. The Presence will be there too, lighting up everything that moves.