I recently discovered a couple of books by Barbara Brown Taylor. She has the rare ability to describe the journey of faith in the way Hemingway described a fishing trip. The first of her books that I read was titled “Leaving Church” and it described her experiences as a priest and how she left a busy life in a big city parrish to move to rural north Georgia and then left that role to become a professor of world religion at a small college.

My favorite part of the book was a description of how she struggled at times with being uncomfortable in the clothes she wore. She describes her first clumsy but humbling experience with her priestly collar then later she describes how uncomfortable it was to ware something that made her look more like a woman again.

“I didn’t not know how to stand in the dress or where to put my hands. I could not think of anything to say that went with the dress. All of the things I was used to talking about went with the serious clothes in my closet, while this dazzling outfit called for something that Billie Holiday might say, or Dorothy parker at least. When I saw people I knew from church, I saw my own discomfort mirrored in their faces. Seeing their priest in a blue sequined dress at a New Year’s Eve party was like running into their dentist in a Speedo at the beach. They could hardly look at me.”

As I have recently come to understand, studying world religions has a way of changing your perspective about faith. Unlike today, early Christianity was all about searching for identity and finding faith on the edges of established and accepted traditions.

“The emperor Constantine knew that a faith with no center would never anchor his crumbling empire. So he called all the bishops together, fed them lunch, and asked them to say something definitive about the nature of God in Christ… When the bishops had finished crafting a central confession of Christian faith, those who did not choose this option became known as heretics.”

Many people have called Barbara Brown Taylor a heretic for questioning some fundamental values of the traditional church but as she so eloquently states:

“While the center may be the place where the stories of the faith are preserved, the edge is the place where the best of them happened.”

If I have learned anything in the last 4 years as I have delved deeper into studying the Bible and rediscovering my own religion, it is that the Bible has been misread and misused. Like Barbara, I spent the early part of my life making the Bible an idol but never bothered to understand it. The mistake I made with the Bible was equivalent to marrying a beautiful woman and loving her based only on her surface appearance without ever asking where she was born, who her parents were, and what she dreamed about the future. Barbara has this to say about her love of the Bible…

“I do not pretend to read the Bible any more objectively than those who wrote it for me. To read it literally strikes me as a terrible refusal of their literary gifts. I will keep the Bible, which remains the Word of God for me, but always the Word as heard by generations of human beings as flawed as I.

…I hope never to put the book ahead of the people whom the book calls me to love and serve. I will keep the Bible as a field guide, which was never intended to be a substitute for the field.”

I have many things in common with Barbara Brown Taylor and spending time living in rural north Georgia is only one of them.