Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [83]
When my father’s older brother visited Clarkesville recently, I took him to visit Grace-Calvary Church. He had never seen it. I had not seen it for quite some time, but since the door is never locked I knew we would be welcome. Walking up the painted gray steps with my uncle, I could feel my heart grow larger in my chest, as if we had suddenly gained more altitude than we had. I tugged on the brass door handle and it opened, allowing us both inside the dollhouse church that I had fallen in love with before I ever met the people. The day must have been a Saturday, since I could smell the communion bread that someone had left in the sacristy—either that or it was Jesus, coming to me in the form that I had held in my hands so often. That smell alone was enough to tell me that I would never leave church, not really. I am too in need of the regular reminder that falling is the way of life. Where else do human beings recognize the bread of heaven in a broken body, or know that their lives depend on eating that food?
MANY YEARS AGO now, when I was invited to speak at a church gathering, my host said, “Tell us what is saving your life now.” It was such a good question that I have made a practice of asking others to answer it even as I continue to answer it myself. Salvation is so much more than many of its proponents would have us believe. In the Bible, human beings experience God’s salvation when peace ends war, when food follows famine, when health supplants sickness and freedom trumps oppression. Salvation is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk, regardless of how they got there or whether they know God’s name. Sometimes it comes as an extended human hand and sometimes as a bolt from the blue, but either way it opens a door in what looked for all the world like a wall. This is the way of life, and God alone knows how it works.
Although we might use different words to describe it, most of us know what is killing us. For some it is the deadly rush of our lives; for others it is the inability to move. For some it is the prison of our possessions; for others the crushing poverty that dooms our children to more of the same. Few of us can choose our circumstances, but we can choose how we respond to them. To be saved is not only to recognize an alternative to the deadliness pressing down upon us but also to be able to act upon it. Even those who have no choice but to be carried toward safety on stretchers will eventually be given the chance take up their mats and walk, and even those whose legs still will not work can discover how agile a healed spirit can be.
On the twentieth anniversary of my ordination, I would have to say that at least one of the things that almost killed me was becoming a professional holy person. I am not sure that the deadliness was in the job as much as it was in the way I did it, but I now have higher regard than ever for clergy who are able to wear their mantles without mistaking the fabric for their own skin. As many years as I wanted to wear a clerical collar and as hard as I worked to get one, taking it off turned out to be as necessary for my salvation as putting it on. Being set apart was the only way I could learn how much I longed to be with everyone else. Being in charge was the only way I could learn how much I wanted to be in community.
Teaching school is saving my life now. While I am still in charge of my classroom, I am not God’s designated representative in my students’ lives. They can take me or leave me, and few need me to authorize their understanding of how the world works. Because we do not rely on one another for ultimate meaning, we are able to talk about things that might be too hot for us to handle if we were more dependent on one another. Our covenant exists on a syllabus, not in the Bible, which allows us to ask unorthodox questions of one another. Since we are in a classroom and not a church, we are free to wonder instead of to witness. Our answers