Leaving Church

Things have been quiet here at Hope Like Mad because I’ve been in more of a reflective place with lots of questions running through my head. At times I feel like there is just clutter that fills my mind, and if i try to articulate any of the thoughts that I think i do have, they just come out flat… with no life in them.

Like the story of the paralyzed man whose friends carried him when he could do nothing for himself, who let him down through the roof where Jesus was teaching to find healing. I found some words that helped articulate what I could not and to found healing in them.

In Barbara Brown Taylor’s book Leaving Church she writes of her exprience after leaving the church after years of finding her identity there.

I had never read scriptures more carefully in my life, which caused scales to fall from my eyes. Over and over, I discovered how the traditional interpretations of a passage had so determined my reading of it that it was hard for me to see what was actually on the page…

If none of this had ever come to my attention before, one reason was because I had never had so much time to read before, but another reason was because 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? Even more important, why waste valuable time time rehashing things that had been settled centuries ago when there was so much to do around the house right now? I understood her reasons, I really did. I was just looking for some way to stay related to her that did not require me to stay a child.

Because I had left the house, I found less and less to talk about with people who were still happily engaged inside. At clergy gatherings I felt like a single woman listening to dedicated parents discuss day care and home remedies for colic. When I spoke of things that I found fascinating, the resounding silence told me how far I was from the center of the map and how much my distance sounded like disloyalty. Church people who could tell I was in the wilderness were kind enough to invite me back inside the house, but even when I went to visit I did not want to stay. I did not know how to behave anymore. I could no longer speak the lines that I had been given to say. I wanted to go back outside.

If my time in the wilderness taught me anything, 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.