Leaving Church

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses
And all the king's men,
Couldn't put Humpty together again

I just finished Barbara Brown Taylor's Leaving Church, a Memoir of Faith, and wanted to share some thoughts on this book.

The author was an Episcopalian Priest who walked away from a very strong identity to her church and it rattled her to the foundations of her faith. Anyone who has left a church, regardless of the religion, can relate to the universal truth about feeling betrayed and dislocated without something so pivotal as to how we connect with God.

Like so many of us who bring our idealistic notions into church with high expectations of both serving God and experiencing God, a popped church balloon can send us plummeting to the ground. The ground is very hard and for many of us we end up splattered everywhere and it takes a long time to put Humpty Dumpty back together again--and then we're not the same--what with those cracks all over!

When I left the guru church, I had no idea that others had left--I'm serious when I say that I thought leaving was impossible because I'd taken a pledge (and told I would suffer a thousand years of rebirth without the guru as punishment), but also, I had know idea that Christians had similar "exit" experiences of betrayal, hurt and grief when leaving their churches. The damages done when leaving a church does not seem to be about religion, but more about leaving a conviction in God. We feel betrayed by God. We question how it was even possible to be led down this path? Is it God's fault? Is it our fault?

For the author, she literally had to decide what to do the day "after" she left her clergy position with her church, whereas for some the realization they've left might take a long time.

In my own case, I didn't make a sudden decision to leave, rather I left because of the back-biting and un-devotee behaviors, and my inability to reconcile my mother's death with their comments that she didn't mind dying of cancer, the same as Christ did not mind dying on the cross!

While I was having my hiatus, it began to dawn on me that something was wrong with their beliefs and their hold on their devotees. The contrast really began to shout at me when I read the Bible for the first time. I kept saying, "This isn't what they told us!" It's interesting to note that guru churches make claims of harmony with Christ but they don't read the Bible.

Barbara Brown Taylor went through actual physical withdrawals, finding herself on the floor with horrible headaches. It seemed she started pulling herself together by remembering the Sabbath and making time for a personal relationship with God, rather than all the doing for everyone else. Her healing came through nature and by opening her mind to other religions, weighing them against her own, and finding peace somewhere in the middle.

The author found it hard to go to other churches, and her the transition from leader to follower was unsettling. For me, just attending a Christian church felt like betrayal on the highest order! I'd jumped off the jet and onto the bullcart! Oh what we can do to our spiritual lives.

Like the author, I couldn't find spiritual or emotional support. Local Christian Pastors had no experience to counsel me, and for Barbara she'd been the counselor!

Our differences part here, as Barbara went off looking for the meaning behind other religions and embraced them, while I had been down those "many roads," and had settled onto the Road to Damascus.

She wrote a moving story of her father's decline and death from cancer, another subject that I'm very familiar with, and she made this astute observation while watching him die and wondering about his relationship with God: "All I found out was how helpless love can be, with nothing left to do but suffer alongside with the beloved."

I highly recommend this book to affirm that the loss of a church can be devastating but the return to spiritual health entirely possible.