Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith by Barbara Brown Taylor
|
List Price: Our Price: $4.05 You Save: $10.94 (73%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $1.70 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith
Book Review: Always a good read
Summary: 5 Stars
BBT has been a favorite author for many years. This book is just another in a series of thoughtful, spiritual and hope-filled writings from a great author.Book Review: Inspirational
Summary: 5 Stars
Book delivery was what I expected, on time. Book is in very good condition. I recommend this vendor.Book Review: A moving, powerful book
Summary: 4 Stars
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 my church, I had no idea that others had left. 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.
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.
Book Review: Too abstract to be a real memoir, but thought-provoking
Summary: 4 Stars
I read a lot of memoirs these days. In fact they are probably my favorite literary genre. Maybe I should have been warned by Taylor's subtitle - not simply "a memoir," but "a memoir of faith." Because this is not a memoir in the usual sense. There is precious little of Taylor's childhood, youth or young adulthood - no real concrete stories and examples from her life. Too much of this book remains caught in the abstraction of ideas and beliefs, with not nearly enough examples. The people who show up in the book remain undeveloped vague outlines. And I have a hard time identifying with Brown's spiritual "quest," if that is what it is. I don't think it's because she's a woman either. What few facts that do emerge about her life outside this "quest" do not really serve to make her a sympathetic character. Daughter of a psychotherapist, sister of a lawyer, wife of an engineer - all these tidbits add up to what appears to have been a life of privilege and ease, and continued to be even after her ordination, as she speaks of her Saab and Audi and how they didn't fit into her rural community, and goes on at some length about everything she "wanted" in her custom-built home outside of town (in lieu of a parsonage near her church). What comes through in Barbara Brown Taylor's book is a story of a driven overachiever, who in fact drives herself into a near nervous breakdown, which finally causes her to leave her church and the active priesthood. While I do not doubt the sincerity of her quest for her true vocation and place in God's world, I do wonder about her motives. She became more likeable - more human - in the final section of the book, after she had left the priesthood, when she talks about her crisis of faith and things like her fears of inadequacy and the death of her father. Having said all of this, I still have to say that I'm glad I read the book, which has left me with much to think about in regard to my own role in the Church (Catholic in my case)and my relationship with God and my place in His world. I also think that Taylor is a person I'd like to know, but these 200-plus pages have not given me that opportunity. A memoir of faith? Perhaps. A "memoir"? No. - Tim Bazzett, author of Reed City BoyBook Review: Less about faith than I expected
Summary: 4 Stars
This is my first book by Ms. Taylor, so I knew very little about her history or her place in the world, although it was clear she didn't really leave "the church" from the dust jacket and a cursory look at reviews. I thought she might cover more about a crisis in faith that she was able to surpass, or how she retained her faith while moving toward less connection to organized religion, which is a common scenario in America. Those two possibilities would probably have resonated more for me personally.
In any case, her story was quite interesting and finely crafted. The first section, from her youth down a path that eventually led her to ordination (in another religion, no less) mixed nicely the events, her motivation, and the unexpected turns without feeling too self-conscious "me" autobiography. One can appreciate her yearning for a small, highly personal congregation in a lovely little church.
The second part was more about on-the-job training and the inevitable burn-out from trying to do everything for everybody, pushing her own worship and honoring of God to the background. Rather than stepping back and finding a better balance, she chose the path of leaving her position and moving on to another career.
Perhaps she could have found the balance needed to survive long-term as a priest. I don't know. From the third section, I suppose it's clear she made the right choice and found a more natural calling for her gifts and personality. One may even conclude her faith found a more complete flowering once out from under the constraints a practicing priest must follow. I had the vague feeling that she was presenting her "outside looking in" story as more difficult than it really was, as the woman I learned about in the first two sections seemed made of what was necessary to find success in her new life without a true crisis.
Ms. Taylor was a pleasant diversion from my usual books. I probably won't read another one of hers, however. My own religious attitude may not be the right fit.