Courtesy HarperSanFrancisco
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Web-Exclusive Book Review
Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith
By Barbara Brown Taylor (HarperSanFrancisco)
Review by John F. Baker, June 2006
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The author of this eloquent memoir is a self-confessed "late-blooming flower child" who seems from her earliest years to have had a strong sense of a religious vocation. When she announced that she planned to go straight from college to seminary, her mother confidently predicted, "You will get over this." She never did.
Her book, luminously written, tells the story of her life in religion, from her early days flirting with various branches of the Christian faith to her ordination, appointment to a small church in rural Georgia, and her eventual renunciation of her ministry to teach religion in college and become a wandering guest preacher. (Today she is regarded as one of the finest of her generation.)
Like many of that idealistic generation, Taylor came to spiritual awareness through a pantheistic sense of the inner beauty of nature. "You're an ecclesiastical harlot," an Episcopal priest advised her when she sought to be confirmed in that church, and indeed her wanderings in search of an institutional home led her from birth as a Catholic (in 1951) through Baptism, Methodism, and the Presbyterians before settling in Episcopalianism, in the same year the church recognized the possibility of a female ministry.
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Taylor became an ordained minister in 1983 and served initially at a big Atlanta parish before the pressures of city life led her and her husband Ed, both passionate farmers and gardeners at heart, to seek a small rustic parish where they could live close to the earth and to a small, cherished congregation. They found it in the Grace-Calvary Church in little Clarkesville, Georgia. For five years Taylor was happy there, though awkwardly aware, she says, of the elevated role her clerical robes gave her among her trusting flock. It was the struggle within the church over allowing ministry by openly gay people that finally persuaded her that she could no longer remain in that exposed position. "My role and my soul were eating each other alive. I wanted out of the belief business and back into the beholding business" (as in "Behold, I bring you tidings of great joy"). Taylor's approach to divinity was always more celebratory than cerebral.
After she decided she must leave Grace-Calvary, there followed a period of great pain and dislocation, her only balm the continuing solace of the weather and creatures of the countryside and the steadfastness of Ed, whose own sense of religion had turned in the direction of some Cherokee friends. In a beautiful passage Taylor writes of the time he hosted a Sun Dance, in which she could be only a bemused observer of a religious practice that seemed more primal and essential than anything she had known.
In the end she decided she could best fulfill her function as a teacher rather than in the exemplary role of the minister—to give her students of religion "a straight shot at making the world a better place." Taylor's ultimate decision, in this beguiling and profoundly encouraging book: "My vocation was to love God and my neighbor, and that was something I could do anywhere, with anyone, with or without a collar."
John F. Baker recently retired as editorial director ofPublishers Weekly, and is a longtime reviewer.
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