A pastor’s disappointments

Of all the eponymous terrible things in Amy Butler’s memoir, the one that left the strongest impression on me was not the tragic death of a teenager in the streets of New Orleans, the nonviable pregnancy and late-term abortion, the childhood sexual abuse, the divorce, or the author’s tortuous departure from Riverside Church in New York City. It was the last words Butler, then an ordained Baptist pastor for ten years, ever heard from her staunchly conservative evangelical grandfather. “When I approached his chair and kissed him hello, he grabbed my hand and pulled me close, looked me straight in the eyes, and said: ‘You are the biggest disappointment of my life.’”

That dreadful imprecation, and the early life of relentless striving it discounted with such harsh finality, rang in my ears for the rest of the book. Beautiful and Terrible Things touches on several recurring themes in its episodic recounting of an upbringing in the evangelical world and an adult career in the Protestant mainline, especially the redemptive role of relationships and dialogue in a season of cultural polarization and institutional breakdown. But in the end, I think, it is a book about disappointment: in family, in churches, sometimes even in God.

After a childhood marked by fundamentalist perfectionism, Butler pursues ministry education in a Southern Baptist setting that won’t accept women’s gifts for ordained ministry. (She recalls her male fellow interns at a big church being brought onstage and licensed to preach on the spot, while she is merely thanked.) Moving into Baptist circles that welcome women’s leadership, at least in principle, she discovers that even these congregations house sexism and ordinary cruel, petty behavior. When Butler and her husband divorce, she is surprised by how little unwelcome commentary follows. (That was its own terrible moment for me, to see someone surprised by a supportive response from a church.)