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Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith
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Average Rating:  out of 80 Reviews
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Price: $14.95
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Sale: $7.95
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Manufacturer: HarperOne
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EAN (European Article Number): 9780060872632
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Paperback
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Author: Barbara Brown Taylor
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Publisher: HarperOne
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Dewey Decimal Number: 283.092
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Publication Date: 2007-04-01
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Reading Level: 272
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Description: By now I expected to be a seasoned parish minister, wearing black clergy shirts grown gray from frequent washing. I expected to love the children who hung on my legs after Sunday morning services until they grew up and had children of their own. I even expected to be buried wearing the same red vestments in which I was ordained. Today those vestments are hanging in the sacristy of an Anglican church in Kenya, my church pension is frozen, and I am as likely to spend Sunday mornings with friendly Quakers, Presbyterians, or Congregationalists as I am with the Episcopalians who remain my closest kin. Some-times I even keep the Sabbath with a cup of steaming Assam tea on my front porch, watching towhees vie for the highest perch in the poplar tree while God watches me. These days I earn my living teaching school, not leading worship, and while I still dream of opening a small restaurant in Clarkesville or volunteering at an eye clinic in Nepal, there is no guarantee that I will not run off with the circus before I am through. This is not the life I planned, or the life I recommend to others. But it is the life that has turned out to be mine, and the central revelation in it for me -- that the call to serve God is first and last the call to be fully human -- seems important enough to witness to on paper. This book is my attempt to do that. After nine years serving on the staff of a big urban church in Atlanta, Barbara Brown Taylor arrives in rural Clarkesville, Georgia (population 1,500), following her dream to become the pastor of her own small congregation. The adjustment from city life to country dweller is something of a shock -- Taylor is one of the only professional women in the community -- but small-town life offers many of its own unique joys. Taylor has five successful years that see significant growth in the church she serves, but ultimately she finds herself experiencing "compassion fatigue" and wonders what exactly God has called her to do. She realizes that in order to keep her faith she may have to leave. Taylor describes a rich spiritual journey in which God has given her more questions than answers. As she becomes part of the flock instead of the shepherd, she describes her poignant and sincere struggle to regain her footing in the world without her defining collar. Taylor's realization that this may in fact be God's surprising path for her leads her to a refreshing search to find Him in new places. Leaving Church will remind even the most skeptical among us that life is about both disappointment and hope -- and ultimately, renewal.
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Customer Reviews
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Review Summary: Sometimes It's Good to Leave Church |
Date: 2006-06-19 |
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Details: To thousands of readers, Barbara Brown Taylor is best known as a writer of resources for the ordained (Home By Another Way; The Seeds of Heaven; etc.). Her books have become a staple in the mainline Protestant clergy diet, like casseroles or Frederick Buechner. Clergy will find multitudes in this new book, as well. Just as Buechner's memoirs helped clergy twenty years ago, Barbara Brown Taylor's will, today. Clergy will understand when she tells what she's thinking and how she's scrutinizing while administering communion (p. 34), or as she movingly describes what it felt like to be ordained a priest (p. 43). Her descriptions of unease and insecurity in the role will speak most profoundly to fellow clergy, but also to anyone who has counted a priest, pastor, or deacon, a friend.
On the other hand, Leaving Church is too limiting of a title for Taylor's new memoir. I hope that the phrase will not keep those in the pews, or even those who left the church long ago, from reading it. A quote from William Faulkner opens Part One of the book, and would do well to open every memoir: "The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself."
The simple facts are these: Baptized Catholic, she wanders in and out of a few Protestant denominations. Drawn to a life of divine importance during high school in the sixties, she attends Yale Divinity School in the seventies on a scholarship; is among the first women ordained in the Episcopal Church USA a few years later; serves a large church in Atlanta (All Saints') for a decade as one of several clergy; seeks and finds a rural parish to lead on her own (Grace-Calvary in Clarkesville, GA); and after several years, quits, exhausted, taking a job teaching religion to college undergraduates.
Part One, "Finding," begins with Taylor's desire (at age 40) to leave the large staff of that Atlanta congregation in search of a country life and parish. "The idea was to skip right over the suburbs and head for the countryside," she explains, as she and her husband take day-trips around northeast Georgia searching for a new life. Eventually, upon arriving in Clarkesville and finding the small Episcopal church there, she yearns so deeply for this new life that her yearning becomes a series of physical reactions to touching the church building itself: "I could feel the clenched muscle of my mind relax. My shoulders came down from around my ears. I shook out my arms and put my hands flat on the side of the church." (p. 11) And that was before she ever stepped inside.
But things did not go as planned. Having originally given a commitment of a decade, she is burned out within a few years. The demands of being priest to all people at all times get to be too great. Ultimately, Taylor's leaving the church and the priesthood put her in a jeopardy that is easily understood by anyone who has questioned or struggled to find their vocation: "By leaving church, I was about to leave everything I knew how to do and be." (p. 122)
In the movie version of Leaving Church (not such a crazy idea, actually; Susan Sarandon as BBT?), a director might return dramatically via flashback again and again, as Taylor herself does, to the emotion of opening the box that contained her first clergy shirts, and readying herself to wear a clerical collar. "Who did I think I was? More to the point, who would other people think I was once I put these things on?" (p. 21) She confesses to great doubt in the midst of pastoral work, and she also confesses to levels of certainty that are somehow unfair when presented to people in the pews, and do not carry through into her life after the collar. Other occasions--of confessed naiveté--come from wisdom sadly won only after her professional ministry had ended: "When it came time to decide what to do with my life, I decided to go to seminary. What else do you do when you are in love with God?" (pp. 27-8)
It can be a joy to be there with Taylor as she remembers a scene, painting a picture with simple lines like, "Since the man was intent on what he was doing, I did not introduce myself right away. Instead I leaned against the counter and watched him work." At other times, she writes like a poet and the rhythms of her most introspective prose remind me of Gerard Manley Hopkins. "Sometimes I even keep the Sabbath with a cup of steaming Assam tea on my front porch, watching towhees vie for the highest perch in the poplar tree while God watches me." (p. x)
Most poignant in Leaving Church are the revelations of an ironic fulfillment of her ordained ministry after her priestly work has ended. This priest has found not just solace, but intense meaning, in the change from parish priest to full-time college professor and spiritual explorer. "I have never felt more engaged in what I was ordained to do," she explains. In fact, I would not be surprised if many parishioners in churches may want to screen their pastors and priests from reading such an honest account of clergy troubles that are ultimately solved by "leaving church."
Gone from her pulpit, Taylor revels in being a religious amateur once again. Her first Sunday after leaving her post seems perfect. She sits on her front porch and reads the Book of Common Prayer in solitude. "No one complained about the hymns. I did not sweat the sermon. The best part was the silence." (p. 138)
But the climax to her story comes on page 120, just past the midway point in the book and after she has given notice at the church. She is playfully pushed into a swimming pool during an outdoor party. Others had already gone in, both kids and adults, and Taylor wished that she, too, would be shoved in as one of the gang. "Whatever changes were occurring inside of me, I still looked waterproof to them," she worries, while standing there as an observer. But then, she feels two hands on her shoulder, and in she goes with the others.
Her revelation at that moment reminds me of the monk, Thomas Merton, standing on the corner of Fourth and Walnut streets in downtown Louisville, realizing for the first time that he is connected to every stranger he passes on the street. In The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton wrote: "I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people. . . . even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness." Taylor reflects: "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 simply 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. Bobbing in that healing pool with all those other flawed being of light, I looked around and saw them as I had never seen them before, while some of them looked at me the same way. Why had it taken me so long to get into the pool?"
In the final section of the book, Taylor really gets humming (p. 218 and beyond) about what it means to be human, and church, and Christian--reflecting as one who has deliberately left the priesthood--and every reader will be underlining passages, as I did.
Now, I have looked closely at the author photo on Leaving Church. It is cleverly done, perhaps by Taylor's publisher. She wears a solid black shirt--seemingly identical in fabric and design to a clergy shirt--only without the white clerical collar at the top. Her clerical readers will immediately recognize her, but many newcomers will also feel invited to her writing. Even without the collar, Barbara Brown Taylor is one of our most important spiritual writers today. And without that piece of plastic, like it or not, her wisdom will undoubtedly reach that broader audience to which her ordination had originally pledged her.
--Jon M. Sweeney (Sweeney is a writer living in Vermont. His memoir, Born Again and Again: Surprising Gifts of a Fundamentalist Childhood, published last year, has just received an Award of Merit in the Spirituality category from Christianity Today magazine.
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Review Summary: Straight from the heart |
Date: 2006-06-10 |
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Details: I was fascinated by Barbara Brown Taylor's searchingly honest story of her struggle between wanting to serve God as an Episcopal priest and wanting to love God as one of God's beloved children. Doesn't sound as if the two desires conflict, does it? But in fact they do, and this is her story of that profoundly wrenching conflict and how she has tried to resolve it.
Taylor, who as a child fell in love with God as first revealed in the beauty of nature, became a famous preacher and famous writer in the Episcopal Church. She describes how much she loved the people both in and out of church that she served. She also describes how much she loved God, and how the busy-ness of her ministry came between her heart and God. Finally she got to a breaking point, and she chose: she ceased her "professional" ministry and became a college professor of religion. And after a dark night of the soul she found herself where she believes she needs to be -- back in "right relationship" with the Divine. But this all came at a high price. She is quite unsparing in her description of what she's lost as well as what she's gained.
She's also eloquent about the pressures on the Episcopal Church, and sounds a prophetic warning about its future if it continues in the hierarchical way it currently follows.
If you yourself are involved in ministry, or if you know someone who is, this is a vitally important book. Read it! |
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Review Summary: Pure spoken honesty |
Date: 2006-06-15 |
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Details: Many scholarly people have written intelligent and poetic reviews of Barbara Brown Taylor's new book, "Leaving Church: a Memoir of Faith. My reading of it was on an emotional level and I was filled with respect and awe for Barbara's strength and honesty. Priests are trained to reserve their emotions, mask their opinions, and set the self aside for the job of ministering to their community. To bare her soul, admit her weaknesses, doubts, and desires, and finally to share her resolve to bring the Divine back into her life was a task beyond most people's ability. She has laid her life out there for scrutiny and that took a lot of courage. Simply put, to be honest with and about ones self and reveal that self to others to not only see but to learn from and ultimately to forgive and grow.
Many people have read the book and picked out the parts they want to use to fight battles within the church or defend issues they have with the church. The book was written for exactly the opposite reason- to set all that aside and find the divine in your life, spread the word, and share the love of God. Barbara has not given up her collar, is not an "ex- priest" She is an Episcopalian priest who has for the time ceased to be a parish priest. She is now searching, growing, learning, and sharing the word of God with the community of man outside four walls.
I want to thank Barbara for her honesty and for sharing the good and the bad from her journey thus far. Barbara has the ability to reach into your soul and speak the gospel on a personal level that we can absorb and lead each of us to examine our own souls and our relationship with God. Her book has opened many hearts to the possibility of a more personal relationship with the divine and freed many to let go of guilt and the feeling of not belonging, to one of basking in God's love and sharing that joy with our fellow man.
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Review Summary: 4 1/2 Stars...Holy Ignorance |
Date: 2007-02-21 |
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Details: The title of this book caught my eye from a bookstore shelf. It rang like a tiny bell, like one only I could hear. I had spent years in official "ministry," only to discover the alienation and drain that such a thing imposes on a person. I'd watched people change their demeanor and speech patterns in my presence. I'd realized the unintentional gulf that went against everything Jesus himself came to overcome. When I left that position, I did so hoping to know people as they really are, to meet them along the road, dusty and dirty as I.
On the surface, Taylor's book is more gracious and reverent than an Anne Lamott title, but her heart beats with the same frustrations and struggles. Her words ring true. The first third of the book covers her move toward ministry in the Episcopalian church, then we read of her slow disenchantment brought on by long hours and spiritual draining. Finally, we discover with her the freedom and true faith found in serving other people as one of them--not as one set above them.
There are numerous rich passages here, told with clarity and wisdom, sometimes revealed through symbolism. Although I don't necessarily agree with a few of Taylor's theological angles, I fully relate to her desire to serve God, to love others, and to stay somewhat sane in the process. While the motives of many clerics and priests may be sincere, the Mother Church (as Taylor refers to it) often takes over. The congregants, the baby chicks, are expected to stay within the safe shadows of the Church, and treated like heretics if they wander outside the yard. When Taylor describes her hunger to be part of the Mother's family, while also wanting to move on from being treated like a kid, I know just what she means. When she expresses her appreciation for holy ignorance over religious certainty, I nod my head vigorously.
For those still carrying the scars of organized religion, this book is a welcome glass of cold water--bracing, refreshing, invigorating. There is life out there. And beauty. And God's love still brings salvation to those who may never step through the doors of a church. |
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Review Summary: Provocative and Wonderful |
Date: 2006-06-15 |
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Details: Truth tellers are rare, especially if they are telling hard truths from deep love. Taylor's deep love for the church and for the God worshiped there provide the basis for her faithful and critical truth telling. Her truths -- which others whisper -- include the ways in which churches wound their leaders, overly limit the laity's ability to engage God and one another theologically, and need new visions of God and the people of God in these hard days. As ever, Taylor writes beautifully as well as truthfully. This isn't by any means a "Dear John" letter to the church -- it's a love letter demanding the best of what each person can bring to and receive from communities of faith. |
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