Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith

by Barbara Brown Taylor

even if you cannot find a church big enough to hold all that you know to be true about God, what do you do with this strange attraction but go where other people go when they feel it too?

To be a priest is to know that things are not as they should be and yet to care for them the way they are.

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.

The whole purpose of the Bible, it seems to me, is to convince people to set the written word down in order to become living words in the world for God’s sake. For me, this willing conversion of ink back to blood is the full substance of faith.

God is found in right relationships, not in right ideas,

If it is true that God exceeds all our efforts to contain God, then is it too big a stretch to declare that dumbfoundedness is what all Christians have most in common? Or that coming together to confess all that we do not know is at least as sacred an activity as declaring what we think we do know?

Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead.

“The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you,” he said, “by the grace of God.”

As enjoyable as it could be to spend a couple of hours on Sunday morning with people who were at their best, it was also possible to see the strain in some of the smiles, the effort it took to present the most positive, most faithful version of the

self. Sometimes I could almost read the truth written out above people’s heads: “Please don’t believe me. This is only a shard of who I really am.” The cost of the pretense was the loss of the real human texture underneath, but since we all thought that was what was expected of us, that was what we delivered.

church is not a stopping place but a starting place for discerning God’s presence in this world.

I trusted God to be God even if I could not say who God was for sure. I trusted God to sustain the world although I could not say for sure how that happened. I trusted God to hold me and those I loved, in life and in death, without giving me one shred of conclusive evidence that it was so.

These people at the center kept the map from blowing away. As it turned out, the edge of the map was not all that far from the center. It was not as if I or anyone else had to take a mule train for three weeks to find ourselves in the wilderness. All we had to do was step outside the Church and walk to where the lights from the sanctuary did not pierce the darkness anymore. All we had to do was lay down the books we could no longer read and listen to the howling that our favorite hymns so often covered up.

These people at the edge kept the map from becoming redundant.

both the center and the edge are essential to the spiritual landscape,

There is life in both places because the same God is in both places, but they are so different from one another that it is often difficult for people to be one place without wanting to be the other place or to agree that both places

really belong on the same map.

Mother Church had little interest in the things that were interesting me. Her job was to take care of her family. Why should she get into discussions that might cause them to lose confidence in her? Why encourage them to raise questions for which she had no answers?

faith in God has both a center and an edge and that each is necessary for the soul’s health. If I developed a complaint during my time in the wilderness, it was that Mother Church lavished so much more attention on those at the center than on those at the edge.

recognize this as the way that winners often speak of those they have harmed beyond repair. Trying to find

some way to live with what we have done, we find solace in the idea that their doom was their own doing.

If Jesus meant for his followers to rule the world, then why did he teach them to wash feet?

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.

We follow a Lord who challenged the religious and political institutions of his time while we fund and defend our own.

What if church felt more like a way station than a destination?

This wilderness experience sets up a real dilemma for some of us, since we know how much we owe to the traditions that shaped us. We would not be who we are without them, and we continue to draw real sustenance from them, but insofar as those same traditions discourage us from being with one another, we cannot go home again. In one way or another, every one of us has gotten the message that God made us different that we might know one another, and that how we treat one another is the best expression of our beliefs.