Leaving Church Barbara Brown Taylor HarperSanFrancisco, 2006, 234
This year’s GAYA winner in the memoir division might just as well have been entered in the inspirational division or the self-help division, because it is all of these, and it is also a love story, between Barbara Brown Taylor and God. Taylor, once named “one of the twelve most effective preachers in the English language,” with a gift for writing as well as interpreting the message of the Gospel, struggled to find her place as a priest in the Episcopal Church, and did so with such élan that she almost lost her soul in the process. This gracefully written book tells the story of her journey of faith, and, incidentally, of the insidious power of success to wear away its own foundations.
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The cover of the book portrays a bird flying from an open cage, and Taylor uses the bird imagery to great effect throughout the book. From girlhood, she had been drawn to care for fledglings and foundlings, and when she was serving as an assistant at Atlanta’s All Saints’ Church—her first post after seminary—she finally managed to raise one of those tremulous baby birds to adulthood. She was to find she had raised a starling. Rather than fly away when it was grown, it preferred to dig its claws into her scalp and leave poop on her desk.
This should have been her first warning.
Taylor’s main theme is Jesus’ mysterious instruction that you must lose your life in order to find it. How does this paradox work? Taylor says: You do not have to die in order to discover the truth of this teaching . . . . You only need to lose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you wind up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live.
Brown takes us back to her non-religious childhood, where she first felt the Divine presence in a Kansas field. . . 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 discover 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 matter because lying there is very good.
All she knew then was that she wanted to be close to God, and so began to search for that closeness that led eventually to divinity school and then ordination in the Episcopal Church. During her first ministry in downtown Atlanta, which lasted ten years, she fell in love—with Grace-Calvary, a small historic church in the north Georgia mountains. Of course, the church already had a beloved rector who was somewhat of a legend.
When, by an eerie stroke of fate, the rector suddenly died, she asked the bishop to put her on the list of candidates. When she was called, she and her husband were more than ready to put the city behind them. In this church, she could know every soul by name. She could baptize the babies and watch them grow. She could sit on the front porch in a rocking chair and look out over the mountains. She could be close to bubbling crystal streams and “thin places”—places where the divide between this word and the next is very slight.
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True bliss is never far from sorrow, she says, and over the years the bliss that she and the congregation shared grew. Soon, more people arrived, hoping to share in it, too. So many people arrived that the overwork she had left Atlanta to escape caught up with her, and a building program was proposed, along with all the strife that such a move engenders. She held her frustration in so tightly that tears, blamed on dust motes, leaked down her cheeks unbidden.
One afternoon, while she was sitting on her front porch reading, a bird flew into the glass door and was killed instantly. Turning around to see what the bird had seen, I looked at the reflection of Mount Yonah in the window glass.Poor bird. She had thought all that was ahead of her, had perhaps even chosen the spot she wanted to scout for a nest, when it was really behind her instead, in the direction from which she had come.
Seemingly for Taylor, the cage door was shut and she could not even see the sky beyond. Then, out of that far blue came a telephone call from nearby Piedmont College. A job was offered teaching religion. Stunned at the sudden vision of a cage sprung open, she accepted.
Now the task was learning how to be with God in a whole new way, without all the trappings of authority. I hesitate to use the words “born again” here, but that is what occurred to me as I read how she took hesitant steps in learning a new way of dressing, of teaching, of relating to others. She found out how people talk when clergy are not present—and she found that God was too big to be confined to church. She found, in the teeming mass of humanity outside of the church, what it means to be fully human.
The book ends with the visit of a homing pigeon, which descended in a flutter of wings to visit, which ate cracked corn from her hand. It was fitting, finally, that the bird that descended was a member of the dove family, for the Holy Spirit is most often pictured as a dove.
{mosimage}Anne Lovett, a Georgia native, began her writing career with a humor column for her high school newspaper, hoping to write science fiction. She was educated at Emory and Georgia Tech, receiving a Ph.D. in natural products chemistry. She helped to found a manufacturing and technical supplies company now doing business nationwide and eventually made her way back to writing, though not science fiction. A member of Georgia Writers, Georgia Romance Writers, AWP and Rosemary Daniell’s Zona Rosa Alpha Babes, her short fiction has appeared in Aethlon: Journal of Sport Literature, The Distillery, The Jewish Women’s’ Literary Annual, and Red Wheelbarrow. Non-fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared locally, and several novels are in the pipeline. She is a regular contributor to the online journal The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon (www.barbaraknott.net).
