Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [82]
I may have left the house, but I have not left the relationship. After twenty years of serving Mother Church at the altar, I have pitched my tent in the yard, using much of what she taught me to make a way in the world. Perhaps I should have remained a deacon and never become a priest, but it is too late for that now. I prefer to think that I have been given another chance to be a priest, although with few of the assurances that attracted me before.
During my early years in parish ministry, I conceived of faith as the core certainty about God and godly things that equipped me for ministry. When people had questions about Jesus’s divinity or the activity of the Holy Spirit, I had reasonable answers for them. When they wanted to know why terrible things happened to good people, I could at least introduce them to the language of theodicy.
Not until my father died did I feel my way into a different concept of faith. As many things as he and I talked about through the years, faith was not one of them. I knew that he had gone to Catholic school in Sioux Falls, where he remembered both the constraints placed on his curiosity and the cruelty of the nuns. After I was ordained, he told me hair-raising stories about how his mother made him miniature vestments when he was a boy so that he could play priest at a cardboard altar. When he was fifteen, he left home to get as far away from all of that as he could and ended up working in the San Francisco shipyards. Although he and my mother became confirmed in the Episcopal Church in their late fifties, I never knew whether that was because they believed in God or because they believed in me.
My father’s demise was a slow one, during which he lost body parts to three kinds of cancer. The tumors in his brain were finally what killed him, but not without first robbing him of the mental keenness that had been his most prized faculty. Spoken words escaped him. He forgot how to spell. Finally, when he could no longer lift a spoon to his mouth, he suffered a seizure that landed him in the emergency room. Five days later he was admitted to Hospice Atlanta, where my family and I sat with him for the six days more that it took him to die.
He and I were past talking by then, which meant that I never found out where he was with God. All I found out was how helpless love can be, with nothing left to do but suffer alongside with the beloved. Marooned by my father’s bed day after day, listening to him whimper in the night, unsure what he believed about God, unsure that it mattered, wanting to pray, for him and for me, without managing anything much beyond “Please,” I discovered that faith did not have the least thing to do with certainty. Insofar as I had any faith at all, that faith consisted of trusting God in the face of my vastly painful ignorance, to gather up all the life in that room and do with it what God alone knew how to do.
Since then, I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place. We are a motley crew, distinguished not only by our inability to explain ourselves to those who are more certain of their beliefs than we are but in many cases by our distance from the centers of our faith communities as well. Like campers who have bonded over cook fires far from home, we remain grateful for the provisions that we have brought with us from those cupboards, but we also find them more delicious when we share them with one another under the stars.
This wilderness experience sets up a real dilemma for some of us, since we know how much we owe to the traditions that shaped us. We would not be who we are without them, and we continue to draw real sustenance from them, but insofar as those same traditions discourage us from being with one another, we cannot go home again. In one way or another, every one of us has gotten the message that God made us different that we might know one another, and that how we treat