Going My Way

I struck the board, and cry’d, No more,” begins George Herbert’s famous poem on religious rebellion, “The Collar” (1633). The title does not refer to clerical collars, which were not in use in the 17th century, though it has often been taken that way and perhaps might as well be since the trials of Herbert’s own priesthood are probably what inspired the poem. At its close, after the speaker tells how he “rav’d and grew more fierce and wilde,” he hears a voice calling, “Child!” and he replies, “My Lord.”

Herbert served a parish for all of three years and died at the age of 39. Had he lived longer, or had he lived in our century instead of his, he might not have been subdued so easily. He might have lived to tell a different tale. It could not have been much lovelier, more revealing, or more poignant than Barbara Brown Taylor’s latest book, Leaving Church.

Her “memoir of faith,” as it is subtitled, focuses on the fifteen-plus years she spent in ordained ministry and especially on her decision to leave the church in Georgia where she served as rector for the final five and a half. It recounts how she did “everything I knew how to do to draw as near to the heart of God as I could, only to find myself out of gas on a lonely road, filled with bitterness and self-pity,” and how she has “never found a church where I felt at home again.” We’re a long way from Mitford.

But never in the Slough of Despond. Leaving Church is also about Taylor’s new ministry as a college teacher and her developing sense that “the call to serve God is first and last the call to be fully human.” Not least of all, it is about what Taylor has managed to preserve and rediscover in her vocation and religious tradition. Appropriately, the book’s three sections are called “Finding,” “Losing,” and “Keeping”—one kept thing being a deep respect for what Jesus had to say about the relationship between those three.

Notable among the many strengths of this book is Taylor’s refusal to load her story. Hers is no Psycho with a church sexton in the role of Norman Bates; nor is it a tale of her own ever-unfolding inner wonderfulness. There are parts of this story that make one sad; I found nothing in it that made me sick. I found more than a little that made me cheer.

Though I served a church under very different circumstances and left it for reasons very different from Taylor’s, a good deal of the pleasure I took in her book came from the reassuring familiarity of her observations. Is it hot in here or is it me? Taylor says it may be her, but it’s also pretty hot. Remarking on the baptismal promise to “serve Christ in all persons,” she declares, “Did the author of that response have any idea how many hungry, needy, angry, manipulative, deeply ill people I saw in the course of a week?”

It would be a shame, however, if the only readers of this book were clergy in the process of “leaving church.” I would recommend Taylor’s story to anyone who attends church more than twice a year, if only to advance this question: “What if they [the members of a congregation] were blessed for what they are doing in the world instead of chastised for not doing more at church?” And I would heartily recommend it to anyone considering ordination.

Finally, I would recommend it to those who ask, “Why do people leave church?” That is not to say Taylor gives us the definitive answer—even for her own disaffection. “Because this is a love story,” she writes, “it is difficult to say what went wrong between the church and me.”

But she does give us enough material to ponder the question on our own. For example, did Taylor’s departure have to do with the exaggerated demands of professional ministry, with what she describes as the conundrum of trying to provide a “wholesome example” even as one is deprived of the time and space in which to remain whole?

Or, did Taylor grow restless because there was too little room for her to grow in other ways, including more theologically heterodox ways? “If my time in the wilderness taught me anything,” she writes, “it is that 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.” True enough.

Of course, one can turn that observation around and ask if the problem isn’t rather that “the center” will no longer hold because “the edge” has gotten so, well, edgy. Taylor evinces a robust interest in things exotic and “heretical,” an eclecticism that is typical of the Anglican tradition both at its brave best and at its dotty worst. If a good review ought to have at least one caveat, then let mine be nothing less gentle than to say that even with no denominational moniker I could have discerned that Taylor’s book was the work of a fellow Episcopalian.

We read books in the light of other books, with recent reads often providing the sharpest illumination. Shortly before reading Taylor’s memoir, I read Francine du Plessix Gray’s biography of Simone Weil. In the first of several mystical experiences that altered her life, Weil witnessed a religious procession in a Portuguese fishing village and concluded that “Christianity is preeminently the religion of slaves.” The impression stuck with her, and the account of it has stuck with me.

A graduate of both Yaddo and Yale, Barbara Brown Taylor is no slave. Nor is any parishioner who appears in her book; nor is any woman or man likely to be writing or reading a review of her book. And that raises the most difficult question related to Leaving Church: Is middle-class Christianity even possible?

In his Confessions of an Original Sinner (1990), the historian John Lukacs writes: “One cannot be deeply bourgeois and deeply Christian at the same time.” Taylor’s memoir has led me to think on that statement, perhaps harder than I ever have before. Are many of us predestined, sooner or later, to be “leaving church”? And if so, is that because our enjoyment of “the good life” is too far removed from “a religion of slaves,” or because North American Christianity itself no longer professes such a religion, having become instead a trade show of pathologies and fussy preferences, which any sane person with a will to survive must eventually flee?

That Taylor’s book could lead me to engage such questions is but one of its achievements. That it could do so without depressing me is another. At a time in my life when the invitation to “share our stories” has me inching toward the door, I found in Taylor’s narrative a companionable voice, painfully honest but daringly hopeful. The subtitle is not a clip-on; the book really does exemplify what it means to act on the basis of faith. Were the author of Leaving Church ever to find herself keeping church, close to my house and on a Sunday when I was in town, I would go to hear her, and I would ask to speak with her after the service.

Garret Keizer is the author of A Dresser of Sycamore Trees: The Finding of a Ministry (David R. Godine).