Book: Leaving Church by Barbara Brown Taylor

Eunice loaned me this book and Bill has also read it. Both liked it.

It is subtitled "A Memoir of Faith" which seems a more accurate title to me than Leaving Church. Still, Barbara did sort of leave her church. She was an Episcopal priest, first in a large church in Atlanta, and then for 5-1/2 years at Grace-Calvary Episcopal, a much smaller congregation in the small town of Clarkesville, Georgia. It wasn't her faith or her belief in God that wavered; it was the institution of Church that caused her to question if she really did want to remain in her priestly role. She tells how "faith in God has both a center and an edge and that each is necessary for the soul's health..." The center is each traditional church with its faithful church members and staff; the edges are all the rest of humanity. She became more and more concerned about those at the edges. She came to feel that the Church "lavished so much more attention on those at the center than on those at the edge." She didn't choose to stop attending church, but she began to look around at the larger world and the people who live in that world and who either worship in different ways, who struggle with their personal history with churches and doctrines or those who live beautiful lives, full of grace and giving, but who do not attend church.

At first, she greatly missed her position, her power and her prestige as a priest. She is very honest about her pride and then the sorrow and sense of loss that she experienced on this journey.

Soon after her decision to resign, her husband. Ed, offered their land as a place for the Cherokee North Georgia Sun Dance, which caused her great angst and fretfulness, with with the Porta-Potties and drumming and general milling about, and she kept her distance until the last day when she brought a blackberry cobbler. She was asked to offer a blessing and, while taken aback since she had been aloof and at a remove throughout the week, she also again understood that this event and these people were a part of her decision to leave her church.

Perhaps I am not explaining her decision very well, but it seems to fit with what I think of as "preaching to the choir.." not that there is anything inherently wrong with that, but it seems to sanction particular ways of behavior that are often distant from the truly needy and troubled in our world. Going to church is usually a safe and relatively easy activity, but sometimes it provides a perch from which those who are not in the pew are judged. It is often a community of like-minded souls. Barbara did not dismiss that but was also bothered by it. I think she wanted church to be more, and some churches do and work very hard at reaching beyond their walls to help others. But, certainly, not all of them.

She now teaches religion at Piedmont College in Georgia. She says the her students "were going to know better than to step on their roommate's prayer rug or to order a ham-and-cheese sandwich at a kosher delicatessen. They were going to know how to tell the difference between a Greek Orthodox church and Roman Catholic church just by looking, and they were going to know the name of the elephant-headed god behind the cash register at the Indian restaurant. They were going to understand why the First Amendment made the United States such an interesting place to live. They were going to be better citizens of the world....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...All that had gone before was blessing, and all yet to come was more."