Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [9]
Because I was not brought up in church, I had no religious language for what happened in that golden-lit field or in any of the other woods or fields that followed it. I had no picture in my mind of a fantastic-looking old man named God who lived in a heaven above my head. I did not know to close my eyes and bow my head to speak to this God, and I certainly did not know that there was anything wrong with that field or what I experienced in it. If anyone had tried to tell me that creation was fallen or that I should care more for heaven than earth, I would have gone off to lie in the sweet grass by myself.
When I was seven I went to church for the first time, where I got the same feeling of being held that I knew from the field. I furthermore got the impression that the people who were there that morning had figured out a way of talking about that feeling. They seemed to know where it came from, who was responsible for it, what it meant, and how to respond to it. They read from a big book that apparently taught them these things, and when the minister talked he seemed to know more than anyone about how special the feeling was and how important it was to thank God for it. I was impressed, with him and with the singing, if not with the readings from the book. An hour later, I was back in the car with my family, permanently hooked on finding out more about God.
Because we moved a lot, and because my parents were not as taken with divinity as I was, my religious quest was largely do-it-yourself. I paid careful attention to movies with Christians in them, which spanned the gamut from Spartacus to The Lilies of the Field. I read everything Pearl Buck ever wrote with a missionary in it. While I read Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede, I longed for a mother superior, and when The Flying Nun appeared on television, I found the nun far less interesting than her hat. I hitched rides with friends to the churches and synagogues they attended without ever finding what I was looking for. The services lasted for only an hour, for one thing, and I never got to ask any questions during them, for another. When I went to Sunday school, it was like being back in regular school again except that the subject matter was different. The teachers worked from a set curriculum with specific things in it that they wanted me to learn, but I was hard-pressed to find any connection between those things and the Divine Presence that I knew from the field.
By then my family had moved far from Kansas, but the Presence was still with me. On warm Georgia nights I would climb over the fence of the golf club near my house and walk the manicured greens bathed in moonlight. There was a crystal stream there too, which ran under a small wooden footbridge between two fairways. Some nights I would sit there until the stars came out, seeing them first in the water and then seeing them in the sky. During the summer months, when the fireflies were out, it was hard to know whether the lights belonged to heaven or to earth. This is a line that has remained forever blurry for me.
Though it was night instead of day, I still felt held in arms that I could not see. No words came with the feeling. I received no visions or directions, which would have surprised me in any case since the Presence was not outside me. I lived inside the Presence, which placed me in communion with everything around me, including my parents and my two sisters in the house I had left behind, every neighbor behind the lit windows that stretched down my street, and all the creatures I could hear rustling in the dark.
Day by day, the practical implication of this feeling of communion was that I could not walk by a