Dedication
For
Ray Cleere, who hired me,
James Mellichamp, who retired me,
and Timothy Lytle, my closest ally all along
Epigraph
And silently their shining Lord replies:
“I am a mirror set before your eyes,
And all who come before my splendor see
Themselves, their own unique reality;
You came as thirty birds and therefore saw
These selfsame thirty birds, not less nor more;
If you had come as forty, fifty—here
An answering forty, fifty would appear;
Though you have struggled, wandered, traveled far,
It is yourselves you see and what you are.”
FROM THE CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS BY
FARĪD UD-DĪN ʻAṬṬĀR, TRANSLATED BY
DICK DAVIS AND AFKHAM DARBANDI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
A Note on Creative Nonfiction
Introduction: The Smaller Picture
1: Religion 101
2: Vishnu’s Almonds
3: Wave Not Ocean
4: Holy Envy
5: The Nearest Neighbors
6: Disowning God
7: The Shadow-Bearers
8: Failing Christianity
9: Born Again
10: Divine Diversity
11: The God You Didn’t Make Up
12: The Final Exam
Epilogue: Church of the Common Ground
Acknowledgments
Notes
Recommended Reading
About the Author
Also by Barbara Brown Taylor
Copyright
About the Publisher
A Note on Creative Nonfiction
I have taught world religions at the college level for almost twenty years now. When I began, I did not know that I would be writing a book about it in the future. Although many of my memories remain clear to me, I cannot back them up with transcripts or recordings. Where I have told the stories of others, I have disguised their identities or left them easy to identify, depending on what they asked me to do when they gave me their permission. In some cases I have gathered memories from several different years and put them into the same time frame. In every case I have told the truth to the best of my ability, fully aware of how many tricks memory can play. The best disclaimer I have ever heard is broadcast at the beginning of every Moth Radio Hour, my favorite program on public radio: “Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storyteller.” So are mine.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR
CLARKESVILLE, GEORGIA
APRIL 1, 2018
Introduction: The Smaller Picture
What do they know of England, who only England know?
RUDYARD KIPLING
The book in your hands is a small window on a large subject. Set at a private liberal arts college in the foothills of the Appalachians, it is the story of a Christian minister who lost her way in the church and found a new home in the classroom, where the course she taught most often was not Introduction to the New Testament, Church History, or Christian Theology, but Religions of the World. As soon as she recovered from the shock of meeting God in so many new hats, she fell for every religion she taught. When she taught Judaism, she wanted to be a rabbi. When she taught Buddhism, she wanted to be a monk. It was only when she taught Christianity that the fire sputtered, because her religion looked so different once she saw it lined up with the others. She always promised her students that studying other faiths would not make them lose their own. Then she lost hers, or at least the one she started out with. This is the story of how that happened and what happened next.
It is my story, but it is also the story of a generation of young Americans who are growing up with more religious diversity than their parents or grandparents did and who are still trying to decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. The Christians among them can sense the anxiety in their churches, where changing the music and hiring more millennial pastors have not brought the young people back. Will the Christianity they know best survive, or is it dying of old age? Is the Holy Spirit at work in what is going on, or is a more sinister spirit at work?
Some are questioning whether the churches they grew up in have anything to offer them as they make their ways in a culture of many cultures with many views of truth, some of which make a great deal of sense to them. For those who counted on God to protect them from so many choices, it is as if the heavenly Father let go of their hand in a crowd one day and vanished into a sea of divine possibilities. I cannot protect the students in my classes from this any better than I can protect myself. Existential dizziness is one of the side effects of higher education, and it affects teachers too.
I came to the classroom through the back door. Parish ministry was my front-door job, the one I had been doing for fifteen years when the president of a nearby college called and said there was an opening for someone to teach religion. Would I be interested? I said no the first time. My only credentials were a master’s degree in divinity, deep immersion in one Christian denomination, and a lifelong curiosity about religion. All three were do-it-myself projects, since my parents had worked hard to protect me from God while I was growing up. When I was fifteen, I found my father sitting cross-legged in the dining room meditating in front of a biofeedback machine. When I told my mother I wanted to be baptized, she told me I would get over it. Both had such a poor opinion of religion that they raised my two younger sisters and me to believe in higher education instead of a higher power. We went to the library every week, not church. We read Shakespeare, not the Bible.
This left me little choice but to rebel by joining every church in driving distance as soon as I got my license. I was Baptist for a while, then Presbyterian. In college I was an evangelical Christian who hung out with Methodist seminarians during the week and ate supper with Catholics on Sunday nights. But casual conversations were not enough. I wanted thick books, smart teachers, hard theological nuts to crack. I became a religion major, finding more of what I was looking for in the classroom than I had ever found in church. When my adviser suggested seminary, I went, with no ambition but to learn as much as I could about the divine mysteries of the universe from anyone willing to teach me more. A divinity school sounded like exactly the right place.
My favorite professor was an Episcopal priest who taught New Testament with nothing but a tiny Greek edition open on the table in front of him. Above the table he was immaculate, dressed in a black clergy shirt with a starched linen collar and a worsted wool jacket that made him look like a duke. Under the table he wore laced-up leather hunting boots with mud on them, as if he had barely made it to class on time after an early morning walk in the woods. He showed up in my dreams. He also taught me a great deal about the New Testament. When he returned my essays, every page was marked with neatly circled numbers that matched his handwritten comments on lined pages at the back.
No one had ever paid such careful attention to my scholarship, so when I sought him out for spiritual guidance, I did exactly what he said: I began attending Mass at the Anglo-Catholic church downtown, where the divine mysteries on display exceeded anything in my prior experience. Though I quickly learned how to genuflect, chant psalms, and cross myself at the name of the Trinity, it took me a full year to work up the nerve to take Communion. I was too afraid I would do something that caused the Communion wafer to combust in my palm—reach out with the wrong hand, for instance, or fail to confess a particularly subtle sin. When I finally found the courage to approach the altar rail and nothing terrible happened, I became a confirmed Episcopalian. Th
e combination of fixed prayer and free thought was exactly what I had been looking for. It was the last church I joined, and the one I still call home.
Ordination was out of the question at the time, since the Episcopal church did not admit women to the priesthood until after my graduation from divinity school. Several years later, when things changed, I completed all the requirements for receiving what are still called “holy orders.” The bishop signed the papers, the date was set, and in due time I knelt before the altar of a beautiful church with gold crosses painted on the red ceiling, holding very still as my soon-to-be-fellow priests gathered around to lay their hands on my head.
In the years that followed I got as close to the divine mysteries as I could. I learned to perform baptisms, marriages, house blessings, and funerals. I learned how to name and handle all the ritual items involved in a Sunday celebration of Holy Communion: chalice, paten, flagon, ciborium, pall, corporal, purificator, lavabo. I learned which vestments to wear on which occasions and how to hold my hands when I pronounced the benediction at the end of every service. As an alchemist of God’s grace, I was allowed into the most private rooms of people’s lives, which gave me a more spacious heart. In exchange for these privileges I attended dozens of committee meetings, ordered reams of Sunday school materials, proofread hundreds of church newsletters, and filed drawers full of annual reports.
It was a good life for a long time. Then it was not. Ask me what happened, and I can offer you a variety of stories that are all true: I was not a skilled leader; I was gone too much; I succumbed to compassion fatigue; I lost faith in the church. All these years later there is another story that sounds as true as any of those, which goes like this: the same Spirit that called me into the church called me out again, to learn the difference between the living water and the well. As surely as priesthood had given me a sturdy bucket for dipping into that well—and as clearly as I could smell the elemental depths of the divine mystery every time I bent over to draw some of it up—the well was not the water. It was a container and not the source. My Episcopal well, beloved as it was, was no longer enough for me to live on. I was dry as a bone.
That was when the president of the nearby college called to ask if I might be interested in teaching religion. I said yes this time. It was the best way I could think of to start learning again—about buckets and wells other than my own this time, about other ways of approaching the divine mystery that were strange enough to upset my parched equilibrium. In short order I traded an altar for a desk, a pulpit for a whiteboard, a parish register for a roll book, and a black clergy shirt for a green dress.
My first class met at 8:00 a.m. in a room that could have passed for an autopsy suite. The cinder-block walls were painted slick white. A poster of the periodic table sagged from the bulletin board. The trash can needed emptying. I lined up a row of religious symbols on my desk, so there would be something to point to when students asked if they were in the right room: a brass menorah, a large image of Shiva, a seated Buddha, a carved wooden cross, and an open copy of the Qur’an on a stand. I plugged a boom box into the wall and put on a disc from the Fez Music Festival in Morocco, which drowned out the buzz from the fluorescent lights overhead.
Two dozen students drifted into the room over the next few minutes, pausing a moment at the door and then choosing their places at one of the long tables. One girl went straight to a chair in the front row, opened a three-ring binder to a blank page, and wrote “Religion 101” at the top. Two big guys in athletic jackets headed to the back row, where they sat eating tater tots and scrambled eggs covered with cheese out of Styrofoam boxes. At 8:05 a.m. I welcomed everyone to class, so high on first-day adrenaline that some of the students shrank back as I strode among them passing out syllabi.
The stapled sheets of paper looked so official that even I believed in them. They had required and recommended books on them. They had a bulleted list of learning outcomes. They included a summary of graded assignments, guidelines for written work, a point system for attendance, and warnings about late papers. There was a complete class schedule at the end, which had worked out perfectly with the chapters in the textbook. We would spend five class sessions on each major world religion, with a ten-point quiz at the end of each unit, two short papers on topics of the students’ own choosing, and a final exam. Those assignments, plus ten more points for attendance, added up to a perfect one hundred.
Laid out like that, it looked completely doable. Students who could not distinguish Hinduism from Buddhism would be able to describe the differences between them by the end. Students who knew nothing about the division between Protestants and Catholics would be able to explain it to their roommates. In these ways and more, they would learn enough about the great religions of the world to think more deeply about what they believed and why. By the end of the course, their religious literacy would have taken a giant leap, equipping them to be better neighbors in both their personal and professional lives.
That was my welcome speech, more or less. By the time I finished it, the girl in the front row had gone through her syllabus with a yellow highlighter and taken a full page of notes. The two guys in the back had finished their breakfasts. A ginger-headed fellow in the middle had fallen asleep with his head on his arm and was breathing wetly through his mouth. When I asked for questions, there were a few about excused absences and whether it was okay to wear hats in class. Then the students were gone, apparently confident that I knew where we were going.
If I thought I did, it was because I had never been there before. I was on the first leg of a whole new journey, starting out in a covered wagon full of carefully selected supplies, a map on the seat beside me with a clear path drawn from the first day of class to the last. At this point I do not even remember when the compass broke or how many times I had to revise the map, because it did not match the territory. What I do remember is that I got exactly what I wanted: new views of the divine mystery, new worlds of meaning, new buckets for lowering into new wells, new words to describe the living water I fetched up.
The mistake was to think I could add these to the old Christian ones that had served me so well for so long with no upsetting consequences. The problem was that I could not teach other people’s religions without loving them as I loved my own, or at least giving it my best shot. This turned out to be much more difficult than I thought.
Contrary to popular opinion, all religions are not alike. Their followers see the world in very distinct ways. Their understandings of the human condition proceed from different assumptions, leading them to propose different remedies. If I had been able to resist the wisdom they offered me—if I had been able to keep my Christian glasses on, so that I only saw what those prescription lenses allowed me to see—then I might have emerged unchanged. But that is not how it went for me.
Instead, I found things to envy in all of the traditions I taught. Some were compatible with Christian faith, like the Jewish Sabbath or the Buddhist focus on compassion. Others forced a choice, like the Muslim understanding that God has no offspring or the Hindu view that humans create their own destiny through many lifetimes. This left some important questions on the table. Is there a sovereign God who rules the cosmos or not? Can someone else die on a cross for my sins or not? As much as I envied the spiritual independence of people who answered “not” to those questions, my tradition depended on “yes” answers to both of them. Could I still learn something by taking the opposite answers seriously? Could my faith be improved by the faith of others?
Clearly, the answer to that last question was yes, or you would not be holding this book in your hands. But this is not the book I set out to write. I wanted to write a book about teaching world religions to undergraduates at a small rural college in northeast Georgia, with students in all the starring roles. The plan was to narrate what they learned, how they learned it, and why it was important for you to learn it too, at least if you want to make better sense of the dizzying new world in which you live. I want
ed to offer insights that would not cost you anything. I wanted to make life easier for you.
Fortunately, that book refused to be written. What took its place is a book about the teacher of the class, not the students, and what she learned about the high cost of seeing the divine mystery through other people’s eyes. As the title suggests, it is a book about how my envy of other traditions turned into holy envy, offering me the chance to be born again within my own tradition. It will take me a while to get there, but since the classroom remains my small window on a large subject, you need to know something about Piedmont College and the rural county where it was founded in 1897.
Legend has it that some of the first students arrived barefoot, with their parents pulling a live pig on a rope behind them in exchange for tuition. After the first president, a Methodist minister named Spence, cashed in his own life insurance policy to keep the place going, he turned to the American Missionary Board of the Congregational Church for help. Since 1901, Piedmont has gone forward as an independent, church-related, four-year liberal arts institution in Demorest, Georgia. Today the student body hovers around twenty-three hundred. The student–faculty ratio is fourteen to one. Some students are the first in their families to go to college.
Piedmont means “foot-mountain,” which is an exaggeration, since most of the mountains are in the next county, but “foot-hill” works, since the campus is nestled in the lower swells of the Appalachians. There are still pig sheds and chicken houses nearby, along with one of the largest poultry producers in the country. According to the Chamber of Commerce, slightly more than 43,000 people lived in Habersham County in 2010, with 1,823 of them in the two-stoplight town of Demorest. This means Piedmont students outnumber full-time residents, with whom they share a very short main street with the post office and city hall on one side and a restaurant and the college art gallery on the other.
What the Chamber website does not say is that Demorest was once a “sundown town,” where “colored people” were not welcome after dark. Now Habersham County is home to significant numbers of people with roots in Central America, along with smaller populations of Southeast Asian and African Americans. Though there are not enough Jews to make a quorum for prayer or enough Muslims to keep a halal butcher in business, there are enough Buddhists to support a temple nine miles south of the college, which means that it is not unusual to see a monk in orange robes testing the ripeness of the mangoes at the Super Walmart. College students hang out there too, since it is the closest thing they have to a mall. There is one movie theater in the county, one bowling alley, three rivers, and sixty-two churches.
Holy Envy Page 1