Leaving Church by Barbara Brown Taylor

Author:Barbara Brown Taylor
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Religon
ISBN: 9780061748332
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-10-01T10:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

Losing

Vocation puts an end to you in order to disclose your true end.

RICHARD LISCHER

CHAPTER

11

What do you do the day after you change your life? I left Grace-Calvary so quickly that I had spent the last weeks tying up every loose end I could. Like a prisoner who wanted to leave her cell neat after her jailbreak, I was so focused on finessing my escape that I did not spare a thought for what I would do the next morning. Then the next morning arrived and I stood looking at a vast salt plain without the first idea what to do next. I was unemployed. There was nowhere I had to be and no one waiting for me to show up. I had a whole Monday on my hands, soon to be followed by a whole Tuesday, a whole Wednesday, and eventually, a whole Sunday to decide what to do with.

The house was as silent as a desert. The hands on the clock were stuck at 9:45 AM, which was when I normally left for church. There were certainly closets to clean and course plans to prepare. I had three substantial speeches to give later in the fall, which still needed plenty of work, and a stack of unanswered correspondence that stretched back at least three months. I had plenty to do, in other words, but that was not unusual. What was unusual was that for once I had plenty of time to do it all, with no one but myself to blame if I did not.

I recognized the feathery panic I felt from a winter long ago, when I was an aspiring short story writer who typed other people’s letters for a living. When I was twenty-seven, I saved up a whole year’s vacation time from my secretarial job in hopes of being accepted at Yaddo, a writer’s colony in upstate New York where John Cheever, Flannery O’Connor, and Sylvia Plath had all lived for short periods of time. If I were granted a winter residency, I would have the whole month of December to do nothing but eat, sleep, and write. There would be no telephone in my room. All of my meals would be prepared for me. Socializing with other residents was forbidden until cocktail hour each day. The rest of the time I was expected to write.

When the acceptance letter arrived, I prepared to enter paradise. I bought and delivered all my Christmas presents ahead of time, paid my bills, packed my most comfortable clothes, and headed north to Saratoga Springs, where snow was already hanging heavy on the hemlocks. When I looked out the leaded glass windows of my charming bedroom, green and white were all I saw. Quiet was all I heard. I arranged my desk with all the faith of a priest setting an altar. The next morning I sat down at it and prepared to receive the inspiration that had been waiting to pour forth.

Instead, I stared at a blank sheet of

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