Welcome Guest [Log In] [Register]
Welcome to The New Coffee Room. We hope you enjoy your visit.


You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free.


Join our community!


If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features:

Username:   Password:
Add Reply
Leaving Church
Topic Started: Apr 25 2011, 09:24 PM (153 Views)
Dewey
Member Avatar
HOLY CARP!!!
That book I've been reading the last few days, by Barbara Brown Taylor. I don't want to be accused of just posting anything to get closer to the million mark or anything, but here's the reflection paper on the book that I just emailed the professor in advance of tomorrow's class:

=====

At her best, Barbara Brown Taylor is a very insightful and thoughtful writer. Unfortunately, at her worst, she can be annoyingly whiny, elitist, and self-absorbed, and in Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, you have to slog through a fair amount of the latter in order to enjoy the former. The book is organized into three overarching parts. the first part, Finding, details the origins of her sense of call to the ordained ministry, her installation and gradual disillusionment as assistant clergy at a large, affluent suburban congregation, and her eventual belief that she was being called to serve as senior clergy to a much smaller rural congregation in northern Georgia. In the second part, Losing, she explains her gradual realization that she experienced all the same problems, and eventually the same burnout, in the rural congregation that she’d experienced in the suburban one, and she details her decision to leave the parish ministry altogether, in favor of becoming a college professor, teaching religion in a small nearby college. In the final part, Keeping, she takes stock of where this journey has brought her, both theologically and personally.

Some of Taylor’s journey resonates deeply with me. Like her, I grew up with my own backyard epiphanies and crystal streams that were later seen to be merely drainage ditches (23), which were instrumental in my sensing God’s presence. I was also the “tall and bookish child” whose classmates “groaned out loud when the teacher forced me to play on their teams… since I could not throw a ball or swing a bat without suffering the torments of hell” (27). Neither of us were raised in the church as children, and when coming into the faith, we were both “ecclesiastical harlots” for some time, trying to find the right spiritual fit for ourselves, and therefore, not being too rigidly tied to religious tradition. While not clergy at the time, like her, I came out of the governing body of a large, affluent suburban church. Perhaps a byproduct of my professional life as an architect, I naively fell in love with the picturesque building of my own small rural congregation, knowing that, potential disfunctionalities be damned, I wanted to pastor this church before I’d even met the people who worshipped inside it, just as Taylor did with Grace-Calvary (15). My church has a bell in the tower with “a thick rope … draped over a hook just taller than a second grader.” Like Grace-Calvary, I even have a “redheaded organist (who is) fiercely inventive” (91). Many of the stories Taylor told about the best and worst of serving as a pastor in such a setting spoke very deeply to me, and I found myself laughing, and sometimes crying, as she recounts some of her pastoral experiences.

However, Taylor’s experience really isn’t mine, either. As she describes it in the book, Grace-Calvary seems to be anything but a typical rural congregation – being much more white collar, much more highly educated, much more elite than even most mainline congregations in similar settings. It is certainly more so than my own congregation - which consists primarily of farmers, people who provided goods and services to farmers, and people who are retired from having done so.

Also, while I love the opportunities and culture of living within a metropolitan area, Taylor seems to be much more the stereotypical self-absorbed, navel-gazing, aging liberal yuppie than I managed to pull off in even my worst of yuppie years: She drove an ugly old Saab - before they became relatively common, of course, a self-admitted badge of smug superiority (151). Of the many things that she might have written about when moving from Atlanta to Clarkesville, one of the key things that she specifically mourns is the lack of a local NPR station and the loss of her daily relationship with Nina Totenberg and Noah Adams. I enjoy occasionally listening to NPR myself, of course, but I could think of any number of more significant losses to mourn had I made the same move as Taylor. She doesn’t simply grouse about ruining a good pair of shoes while tramping around looking at farmland to buy – and who in their right mind wears good shoes to do that, anyway? – but it’s important to her to note that they’re Cole-Haan shoes (78), as if perhaps her sense of personal style and brand-consciousness offsets her lack of common sense for not just wearing a pair of boots or sneakers to begin with. Once the land for their new home is purchased and a well is being drilled, she stumbles upon what to her is apparently a profound realization that their well would divert water for their use and away from somewhere else, taking water away from speckled trout, wood ducks and mountain laurel (and presumably, many other less attractive things like catfish, buzzards, and poison ivy). She notes, “At that moment of high awareness, I promised the land that I would go easy on the water. I would remember where it came from. I would remain grateful for the sacrifice” (88) – a comment which prompted me to jot in the margin, “Please. It’s just a freaking well.” These sorts of observations make me suspect that if I ever found myself in a conversation with Barbara Brown Taylor at a cocktail party, I’d be trying to find an excuse for the door in no more than ten minutes.

And yet, despite that suspicion, I admit that she makes many theological and pastoral observations that I believe are spot-on. A theme that seems to run throughout her personal searching during her pastoral experience is that of trying to find a way to be both “holy,” i.e., separated, set apart, for service to God, while also remaining approachable, human, connected at a basic and personal level with people. She writes about being at a party where people were being thrown into a swimming pool, and wishing that someone would throw her in, too (in a way, wishing to be part of that grade school team without coercion or groaning), but, to her disappointment, having people initially shy away from doing that to the priest. When she is eventually tossed into the pool by someone, she feels relief, writing “I never found out who my savior was, but when I broke the surface, I looked around at all of those shining people with makeup running down their cheeks, with hair plastered to their heads, and I was so happy to be one of them. If being ordained meant being set apart from them, then I did not want to be ordained anymore. I wanted to be human. I wanted to spit food and let snot run down my chin. I wanted to confess being as lost and found as anyone else without caring that my underwear showed through my wet clothes” (120). I think that a part of Taylor’s problem in ministering to Grace-Calvary, and what eventually caused her burnout- and the congregation’s tiring of her - was that she never found a way to meld the two equally important modes of pastoral existence. She clung to the separateness, the remoteness, of her priesthood like she had clung to her Cole-Haan shoes, and in so doing, she damaged the former just as much as the latter. As she very perceptively writes, “By my rules, caring for troubled people always took precedence over enjoying delightful people, and the line of troubled people never ended” (119). In essence, by applying this rule – and we’re all tempted to follow it – Taylor set the stage for her own emotional starvation. Improperly defining parish ministry eventually forced her to leave it.

One of the shining points in the book is in chapter 9, where initially addressing the human sexuality issue, Taylor fleshes out in some detail her understanding of the nature and authority of scripture. Very accurately, in my opinion, she writes, “…defending the dried ink marks on the page becomes more vital than defending the neighbor. As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God. … If I am not careful, I can begin to mistake the words on the page for the realities they describe… I can decide that I am really much happier reading my Bible than I am entering into what God is doing in my own time and place, since shutting the book to go outside will involve the very great risk of taking part in stories that are still taking shape” (106-7). And again, specifically addressing the gay/lesbian issue; “The doctrines are works of genius, for the most part, but like books they tend to draw people’s attention away from the living human neighbors who are standing right in front of them… at Grace-Calvary, a parish with both gay and lesbian members, I grew increasingly weary of arguing over what Paul and the author of Leviticus may or may not have meant in half a dozen passages written a couple of thousand years ago while I watched living human beings wince at the vitriol they heard from those with whom they worshipped God” (108). She picks this idea up again in the final part of the book, Keeping – where, as Taylor is pulling together the results of her entire journey, I found some of her greatest observations. There, she writes, “I will keep the Bible, which remains the Word of God for me, but always the Word as heard by generations of human beings as flawed as I. As beautifully as these witnesses write, their divine inspiration can never be separated from their ardent desires; their genuine wish to serve God cannot be divorced from their self-interest. That God should use such blemished creatures to communicate God’s reality so well makes the Bible its own kind of miracle, but I hope never to put the book ahead of the people whom the book calls me to love and serve. I will keep the Bible as a field guide, which was never intended to be a substitute for the field” (216)

I think she is also absolutely correct when she writes about “the central truth of the Christian gospel: life springs from death, not only at the last but also in the many little deaths along the way. When everything you count on for protection has failed, the Divine Presence does not fail. The hands are still there – not promising to rescue, not promising to intervene – promising only to hold you no matter how far you fall” (218); and even more strongly, “Everybody is trying to patch us up and get us back to who we were, when in fact what we need to be told is, ‘You’re dead. Who are you going to be tomorrow?’”(221)

Taylor’s book has a lot to offer readers – not just ordained clergy, and not even just church people. In fact, a part of the appeal to this book is that it bridges some of the gap between churchgoers and non-churchgoers, offering some eye-opening insights and possible surprises for both as they try to better understand themselves, and each other.

I enjoyed reading this book, and I appreciated Taylor’s theological points. In the end, though, I was left with some nagging questions: Was Taylor’s leaving the parish ministry a correct discernment of God’s will for her, leading her away from a parish setting to a place where she was more appropriately serving God’s will? Or was it just the latest of a series of surrenders, a flight mechanism - a refusal to adjust her perfectionist and separatist thinking about what parish ministry really should be? Taylor obviously has the heart of a pastor (if not the ability to provide self-care), and if she feels as deeply as it would seem about her sometimes nontraditional theological views, the parish would seem to be the place where she could have the largest effect on people’s lives, further advancing those thoughts and beliefs, even while continuing to write. Whatever the answer, I hope that she is where God wants her, and not just where she feels most comfortable at the moment.
"By nature, i prefer brevity." - John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, p. 685.

"Never waste your time trying to explain yourself to people who are committed to misunderstanding you." - Anonymous

"Oh sure, every once in a while a turd floated by, but other than that it was just fine." - Joe A., 2011

I'll answer your other comments later, but my primary priority for the rest of the evening is to get drunk." - Klaus, 12/31/14
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
ZetaBoards - Free Forum Hosting
Join the millions that use us for their forum communities. Create your own forum today.
Learn More · Sign-up Now
« Previous Topic · The New Coffee Room · Next Topic »
Add Reply