On Leaving

A response by Mary Jo Cartledgehayes.

This essay is the second section of a three-part discussion, beginning with Kendra Irons' review of Barbara Brown Taylor's Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith."

First, let me clear up a misconception created by the title of Barbara Brown Taylor’s 2006 literary memoir Leaving Church. Taylor has not left the Episcopal Church, nor has she left the ordained ministry. In 2007, she remains a priest in good standing. The difference now is that rather than practicing the ministerial office as the leader of a congregation, she does so as an educator, teaching classes in religion at Piedmont College and in Christian spirituality at Columbia Presbyterian Seminary.

Why, then, the title of the book? And what’s the big deal about a woman’s leaving parish ministry anyhow?

To answer the second question first, it’s a big deal when the only woman named on the Baylor University list of the best preachers in America steps down from the pulpit. It’s an even bigger deal if you were hanging around a divinity school in the mid-1990s (as I was) and heard the awe and admiration in the voices of preaching professionals when they spoke of her. Scuttlebutt had it that Taylor was offered positions in various homiletics departments but turned them all down because she felt called to what United Methodists call parish ministry. Even more remarkable to the speakers was the fact that she chose as her parish a small congregation in an even smaller church building in northeast Georgia, rather than a high-steeple church in a major city.

It’s a big deal when that person chooses to leave parish ministry and then goes on to write an elegy, aching with sorrow, about her departure.

I was introduced to Taylor’s sermons in 1993 in my first preaching class at Duke University’s divinity school. Ever since, I’ve admired her extraordinarily thorough exegesis, her brilliant mind and diction, her wisdom, and her elegance. Underlying these qualities are other strengths that hallow both her work and her listeners: a seemingly boundless joy in the gospel message and an astonishing power in her presentation.

I will never forget hearing Taylor preach to a small group of academics in Duke Chapel in 1994 or thereabouts. The word Yahweh made an appearance late in the sermon. As she drew out the first syllable—Yaaaaah—the breath from her mouth became the wind of the Spirit, a cyclone twirling down the center aisle of that stone-cold edifice, and as she breathed the second syllable—Weeeeeeh—the cyclone turned on itself and tumbled back up the aisle, unseen leaves and twigs rustling in its wake.

Because of that moment, when I was pastoring I often turned to Taylor’s sermons when I needed to be reminded that, even in ordinary time, preachers are about the work of the holy.

Here is the great dichotomy within Leaving Church. Taylor had every reason to continue in parish ministry. She didn’t lose her faith. She didn’t suffer burnout in the usual way that is defined. She didn’t reject the Episcopal Church as an institution. She only had one problem, but it was the kind that trumps everything else: She couldn’t stop crying. She lived a life some people can’t even dream of—a happy marriage, a house in the country with chickens to feed and horses to brush, sufficient income, a meaningful job—and the only flies in her soup were her constant, no-evident-reason-for-them tears.

Such great grief … Where did it come from? What was it about?

Certainly, it was not the result of poor self-care. Unlike every other pastor I know, Taylor learned, most likely in her year-long residency in Clinical Pastor Education (CPE), that self-care is essential, and she acted upon the knowledge. She availed herself each month of the services of a pastoral counselor. She belonged to three clergy groups, in one of which, she says, people were actually honest. She was one of the religious leaders who reintroduced the concept of Sabbath, the nearly heretical idea that clergy need a day set apart for rest, rather than the more usual “day off” spent in sermon preparation. Perhaps sabbaticals are more often taken among Episcopalian clergy than among United Methodists, but she’s the only pastor I know who actually took recommended sabbaticals in order to read, travel, write, and be refreshed. Taylor did everything right.

What, then, went wrong? And is wrong even the right word?

If the sorrow that accompanied her departure weren’t evident on every page of Leaving Church, then we could pretend that it was okay, her leaving; that in the great tide of Christendom it doesn’t mean anything; that pastors come and go for reasons both outward and visible and inward and spiritual; that it doesn’t really matter.

And yet Taylor’s book doesn’t allow for the easy surcease of “so what?” She speaks too forthrightly about feeling defeated and bitter. She—in spite of her evident commitment to self care—reveals that she thought being faithful meant “ignoring my own needs and [the needs] of my family.” She remarks upon the “toxic effect of being identified as the holiest person in the room.” Above all, she offers a truth that we’d rather not hear: that doing everything right was destroying her.

It is difficult to describe how important Taylor’s pulpit ministry has been in my own life. I, who myself resigned from the ordained ministry in the United Methodist Church in February, 2006, found myself feeling bereft at the thought that she is no longer preaching each Sunday. If she could not remain in the pulpit, I thought, what about the rest of us? And what a confusing question, given that I had already opted out of the rest of us due to my denomination’s refutation of its historic commitment to inclusivity.

Adding to my confusion over Taylor’s departure, I was not only bereft but deeply annoyed each of the three times I read her book. I wanted to be reading about that other Barbara Brown Taylor, the perennially joyful one in my imagination, rather than the flesh-and-blood woman she presents herself as in Leaving Church. I’m less content with this woman. I didn’t want to know about the incredible radiance on her husband’s face after he participated in a native American healing ceremony, her thrill in his changed demeanor tempered by fear that her congregation would get wind of his quintessentially non-Episcopalian worship experience. I prefer love to be easier, and free of competing trajectories, in her life, if not in my own.

But that’s not the real issue. It’s taken me months to understand that perhaps I and others who admire her may be responsible for her decision. While Taylor takes unflinching responsibility for her departure (even when quoting a snide and unfathomable statement from a congregant about her “building an empire”), I think her leaving had to do with our salvation as much as her own.

Since the first time I read one of Barbara Brown Taylor’s sermons, a little piece of my soul, about the size of a chipmunk, has lived on the verge of groveling at her feet. Her sermons give me access to the holiest of holies within the errata of my life. In response—and, I must add, through no fault of hers—I balance on the cusp of offering her, if not oblations, then at least devotion. Like an adolescent who thinks life inviolably improved if he or she can wrest an autograph from Britney Spears, I am closer to salvation—can smell it, can almost taste it—as long as Taylor is out there preaching somewhere.

Perhaps my feeling of near-adoration, which I’ve seen reflected on other faces, is the source of Taylor’s tears and an underlying reason for God’s leading her away from the ministerial tasks she loved so well.

If you are a faithful person, and Taylor assuredly is, the idea of somebody groveling at your feet must be an anathema. And she’s too savvy to have missed the evidence, the trusting, startled faces turned toward her when she preaches; the respectful tones of her colleagues; their unstinting admiration. She says that she had to leave in order to find out what it is to be human. What she doesn’t say is that she may have been alone in wanting such a thing for herself. The rest of us are like methadone addicts craving a fix, with God as our drug and Taylor as our dealer.

When she pointed to God, we admired her graceful fingers.

When she unleashed the wind of the Spirit, we stayed sheltered in the pews and let her take the buffeting when it returned.

She ushered us down the path of righteousness for Jesus’ name’s sake, and we hurried to catch up because we wanted to be nearer to her rather than to God.

Perhaps I exaggerate. Perhaps I’m like an Elvis fan standing outside the gates of Graceland on the anniversary of his death. Perhaps the sea of adoring faces never sent shivers down her spine.

In any case, I find Taylor’s book to be, above all, courageous. Her essential claim, the heart of the book, is that we—all of us, including her—get to be (are called to be, God wants us to be) who we are; that we are permitted (required, empowered) to live and love authentically; and that a reputation for exceptional goodness has nothing to do with the life of faith.

If you haven’t been in the pulpit, I’m not sure you can comprehend the joy that comes with preaching. Preaching, and the ordained status in which the authority for preaching rests in Taylor’s tradition and mine, is a complicated, enriching, stultifying, expansive, maddening, miserable, glorious way to live. There is the intrigue of research, the enchantment of writing, the pressure of presentation, and the responsibility that would be onerous if you didn’t know yourself as part of a triumvirate, with God and the congregation able to make of your words what they will.

If you haven’t been in the pulpit, I’m not sure you can understand the grief that accompanies leaving it. It’s been nearly six years since I preached, and I still mourn the challenge and the sweaty palms that morphed into serenity when I took that first long breath on a Sunday morning and, with the first word of my sermon, gave over control of the event to God.

That time of preaching is over for me and, perhaps, for Taylor. We, like many others in this generation of preachers, are left to limp into the future, a bit bloodied and yet daring to trust that this new path, too, is one of faithfulness.

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Mary Jo Cartledgehayes lives, writes, and loves in Kentucky, where she was recently named the newest member of the Louisville Craft Mafia. You can contact her at . A review essay about her book, Grace, was published in our Winter 2003 issue and on eewc.com.

Photo credit: Newton Photography

© 2007 Evangelical and Ecumenical Women's Caucus