Going My Way

Barbara Brown Taylor's "memoir of faith".

Garret Keizer | posted 5/01/2006

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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).

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