My review
rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is a must read book for anyone involved in church ministry, whether lay or clergy. Taylor discusses the joys and sorrows of ministry as a parish priest in the Episcopal Church, and her astute observations of congregational life are a joy to read. A few quotes from the book readily illustrate this.
“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do,” she once said, ”because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”
“I know people who come to this church,” he said, “and I finally had to come see for myself how they got through a Sunday morning without assaulting each other.”
“Most of us do not live especially holy lives, after all. We spend most of our time sitting in traffic, paying bills, and being irritated with one another. Yet every week we are invited to stop all of that for one hour at least. We are invited to participate in a great drama that has been going on without us for thousands of years, and one that will go on as long as there is a single player left standing.”
“I looked around at all of those shining people with makeup running down their cheeks, with hair plastered to their heads, and I was so happy to be one of them. If being ordained meant being set apart from them, then I did not want to be ordained anymore. I simply wanted to be human. . . .I wanted to spit food and let snot run down my chin. I wanted to confess being as lost and found as anyone else without caring that my underwear showed through my wet clothes. Bobbing in that healing pool with all those other flawed beings of light, I looked around and saw them as I had never seen them before, while some of them looked at me the same way. Why had it taken me so long to get into the pool?”
I guess part of the appeal of this book to me is that I live with many of the same tensions and questions that Taylor has/had.
A Far Country 