Finding a Kindred Voice

I just finished reading Leaving Church, by Barbara Brown Taylor and I found myself wanting to post in here, after a long time away. I came upon Ms. Taylor's name in an article in Time Magazine. Although her journey is very different from mine in many, many ways, it spoke to me and resonated at its core with a kind of quiet profundity. Her understanding of Christianity and God, and the humility and open-mindedness with which she explores that understanding, connected with me. Reading her story made me think back over my own journey and look at all its steps with reverence and affection. It made me want to reconnect with things from which I have drifted away. It renewed my desire to approach my job, my vocation, as a teacher with a sense of holiness, with the notion that my time in the classroom is a prayer and that teaching is how I serve God. When she described looking over her hymnals and the other items from her time as a rector, I found myself thinking warmly about my own well-worn Bible, with its note cards and papers tucked into the pages, and feeling so very grateful for all of the life experiences it held in its pages, moments great and small and most often profound. Ms. Taylor's book gave me a gift of seeing my journey through new eyes, and of knowing I am not alone in the "neither this nor that" it represents. I never lost my faith, but my faith changed and evolved. It is so hard to explain it clearly to someone else, and to read a book that spoke from such a similar place, to discover another voice that shared that perspective, was a great blessing. I'm posting about it here with the thought that it might be a blessing to someone else, too.

A Bit About My Journey

I wasn't brought up religious.  My family didn't go to church.  Once I was too old for the Easter bunny, Easter faded in significance for me (until I found a different significance for it).  It's not that we were anti-religious.  My father was a deep seeker and has read the foundational texts for most of the world's religions.  The deeper things of the soul were highly valued, but there was a wide open view of what those might be when I was growing up.

Which brings us to the part of the story that I never seem able to fully convey to someone who hasn't been there.  Sometimes I just say, "I used to be born-again."  But that is a pale half-description of it.  Though it gets the gist across, for anyone who hasn't been there, they see it a bit the way you'd see the confession of a former cult member.  They joke about being "in recovery."  It's not that simple.  My understanding of faith and God has shifted, and the way in which I connect with the higher power has changed.  But "recovered" seems the wrong word.  And it makes me sad that I can't really convey what the journey meant for me, or that the entire notion of religion and Christianity has become so tainted with politics, so besmeared with human confusion, that it is reduced to something flat and bland when the exact opposite should be true.

Certain moments stand out in my mind for their depth and mystery - the moment when I "came to Christ," as it is most often described, the moment I was baptized, Easter sunrise services.  When I write, sometimes I am trying to find a way to convey the depth of such  experiences, without veering into the known, overused, misunderstood words, phrases and perspectives.  Whatever God may be, it is far, far beyond what we can capture.  The effort to reach for that understanding should be rich, textured, layered, anything but simplistic.