Onward to Galilee: The Mission Field Within Us

My biggest struggle with the Episcopal Church’s newfound focus on evangelism is that is starts from an assumption that we have the answers. As we grow ever bolder in telling each other to “go forth” and “be the Jesus movement” I wonder why we assume Jesus is starting in our churches. Perhaps my unique situation has left me doing evangelism backwards, but at this moment I’m learning the Gospel in the world, and weeping as cries of Jesus in my friends go unheard in the church.

                It is in my work, listening to survivors of intimate partner violence take steps to reach safety, often fighting stigma, isolation and their faith communities along the way, that I see resurrection being lived. At the boisterous table of a local college, full of people who’ve found themselves rejected by the local churches (including the Episcopal Church); I join in a sacramental meal with others who are hungry for a life that transcends the limits of this world. Instead of a home, my community is a scattered group of friends, of many different beliefs and unbelief. It is they who hold me as I cry under the weight of discrimination. It is these people, many of whom have left organized religion years ago who tell me that God didn’t make a mistake in me. And it is in those moments that I can feel the Gospel come to life. For it is in these places of the world, the “mission fields” that church is gearing up to save, that I’m actually at home.

                It is hard to admit this, especially in a church that values the appearance of being well put together. When we speak of the challenges of going into the world, I don’t ever see conversations about people like me who are more comfortable eating at soup kitchens than the hotels we schedule our conventions.  Indeed, the more I learn about oppression and bias in the world, the less welcome I am on Sunday morning. The more comfortable I get in naming my discomfort when we blame mass shootings on “the crazies” instead of engaging in our own role in perpetuating a culture of violence, the more I’ve been told to be quiet. As I get more forceful in demanding that I be treated as the person God made me, the more I am told to tolerate erasure for the sake of relationship. When I bring up an aspect of oppression that we engage in, by active participation or silently complicity, I am asked to not be disruptive. I watch in pain as the marginalized people I keep lifting up, my dying friends, are so often reduced to a ‘controversial new issue’ that we aren’t ready to engage with.

I’ve fallen silent online because I don’t know how to blog about faith when I’m desperately hungry for a sacramental vitality that feel so distant. For example, as I sat with the pain of General Convention and my rising alienation from my home parish, I needed to change my rule of life. On those pages I had written “I will attend the Eucharist at least weekly” because I was inspired by the richness of life I experienced when daily Mass was a part of my routine.  After this summer that statement became restricting. After much painful discernment I’ve found it to be sinful to expect myself to endure dehumanizing otherness simply to participate in the rites of the church. That line has since been expanded to read in full:

The sacraments, those set rituals and spaces where heaven and earth are joined with the full communion of saints bearing witness, are for me also the epicenter of invitation and exclusion. Caught between the eternal invitation of Love and the time-bound exclusion of language, those moments of life can also thrust me back into the shadows. Thus in the this next phase of my Christian growth I commit to participation in the sacraments when doing so will not cut me off from Christ’s loving presence. In times when I am unable to worship with my siblings I will allocate time for intercessory prayer, that we all may be one as You and the Father are one.

Throughout this transition, from star Episcopal young adult on the ordination fast-track, to one fed by the presence of Jesus in the world while ministering to a church that denies him daily, I’ve never lost my love of ritual and liturgy. Each time I come to a service where I can dare to hope that it will be inclusive, tears burst forth, as I drink in the worship as a starving person might water in the desert. In the absence of those places, I’ve spent so many nights crying myself to sleep longing for a church home that sees me, and loves me for all that I am. I’m desperate for a faith community that takes my awareness of inequality along my comfort in the forbidden places as the gifts that they are, instead of as a threat to stability. Indeed, I’m dying for lack of a place where I can enter the celebration of the Eucharist without being told that my name is unimportant, and my pronouns are too complicated.  All of this is happening while I am still an active member of a church that shapes its advertisements around ‘welcome’ and constantly tells me how good I have it here.

                Because of this pain, when this prompt first came out, I was going to skip it. How could I go to Galilee, when I can barely bring myself to endure the dehumanization and separation that is so often asked of me within our Episcopal Church? How could I write about evangelism, when I’m currently learning more about the Gospel from the people who’ve left, then the ones who expect me to stay?

                It was in these questions that I began to see how it is that I can be growing into my ministry and away from the body that first sent me to it in the same moment. My Galilee is not the mission fields of the world, but the Episcopal Church. Instead of the childhood salvation plan I once forced on to others, I am called to bring the Gospel back into my own worshiping community by testifying to the places where fear and pride are keeping us from the death that could, through the power of Jesus, bring us back to life. I feel like an alien on Sunday morning, because I’ve met the living God in the faces of the oppressed and broken.

So as we speak of going forth, I offer this reflection. When we think about evangelism are we doing our own work to be sure we are ready for them. When we issue the invitation, are we asking ourselves the hard questions? When we go into the world do we expect those we meet to conform to our expectations? Or do we dare to offer the unthinkable Gospel of mutual transformation in the name of Jesus Christ?

Do You Love Yourself?

                This is the question that leapt into my mind this morning as I laid aside my reading. It startled me, though it was simple enough to see where it had stemmed from. I had just finished reading From Sin to Amazing Grace (Cheng, 2012) and the chapter I had skimmed the fastest was “The Self-Loving Christ”. It was a difficult to read about how Christ’s self-love provided a way to persist in his ministry, even in the face of adversity at a time when my own reserves of self-affection feel depleted after my work at General Convention.

                I woke up this morning to a nightmare. I was running frantically though the Salt Palace convention center, trying to figure out if “255C” was up or down stairs, terrified that I would miss my chance to speak. I don’t usually place a lot of weight on dreams, but the connection between that nightmare, the challenges I’ve faced in the early stages of healing, and the resounding question of this morning made me feel this was worth exploring.

                I think the root of that dream is a fear of not being heard. I went to General Convention with the realization that my ministry would likely be centered on demonstrating that people like me exist. It was work I thought I’d prepared for, but it turns out no amount of preparation can make you ready to feel as though your very existence is a lot of work, or at the very least an inconvenience. Most conversations about transgender people, and nearly all of the ones that cover non-binary gender identities often start with a disclaimer “we know this is hard, but it’s worth it”, or more often “this is too hard you need to accept that we can’t get it”. Even simple things like correcting people’s misuse of my pronouns often leads to me being told that “there’s not need to be nasty” or “short”*.

                This sense of existence as imposition is compounded by the lack of restful places to escape being gendered or hearing that people like me aren’t real. I picked up three books at Convention, one (“Salvation on the Small Screen”) was meant to be a silly way to decompress, another (“Where God Hides Holiness”) was a favorite that kept me in the church even as I initiated a Title IV process for discrimination based on my gender, and the third was From “Sin to Amazing Grace”. On Monday, I turned to this trove and found binary language within the first chapter of each of them. Setting each of them aside, and growing more and more hurt I began to wonder if I had lost reading as a way to relax.

                 I’ve often felt that each new thing I develop language around to describe myself often pushes me further and further into exile. As soon as I reach a place where I can articulate where I am, I am challenged to explore a new part of my experience. With each new injustice I discover, the less able I am to participate in the restful activities I once loved as I grow keenly aware of how in them I am told not to be.

                This transition of places of life becoming places of fear and burden cannot be better demonstrated by the manner in which I once approached the Eucharist, and the preparation I now must undergo. In the podcast the Collect Call I spoke of my initial experiences realizing the limitations of binary language in the liturgy. After more than a week of attending daily worship at General Convention, and hearing people like me aren’t a part of the church in every single service, that sense of alienation has been accentuated. I left convention with a sense that I must first prove my realness before I can partake and truly enter into the body.  Yet even when I do take action to draw attention to the gaps in our liturgy, there are always things I miss.

                Take this past Sunday for instance. Exhausted from convention, worn thin by repeated explanations and spiritually ready to hide from the world for an extended period, I chose to push myself to still attend the service mostly due to the face that I had volunteered to set up for coffee hour. Concerned about the language of the service as I knew we would have a supply priest, when I went over on Saturday night to prepare the treats, I also glanced over the bulletin. Seeing the words “Eucharistic Prayer B” I immediately went into damage control mode, debating options, gauging my emotional spoons, and trying to decide which course of action was simultaneously both Christian and healthy.

                This apparent conflict between my baptismal duty to “continue in the apostle’s teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers” and my obligation to love this life I’ve been given, and to honor God’s work in creating me as I am has continued to escalate as I encounter more and more spaces in the Episcopal church that ask me to choose one over the other. That Sunday I decided to arrive early and to speak with the priest about my concerns. He listened attentively and said he would try to remember. During the Eucharist he did use “the everlasting heritage of your descendants” as I’d requested. This was a change that I almost missed because I’d forgotten that we’d be using the preface for baptism and “received us as your sons and daughters” was still echoing through me. The added burden of coming early, starting a nerve-wrecking conversation, and explaining its importance led to one change, providing hope, but the service still left me feeling hollow due to what I’d missed.

                Do you love yourself? On the surface it seems like a simple question with an obvious “right” answer (yes). But as it tumbles through me I couldn’t help but ask a question in return, how? How can I love myself when everything around me tells me I’m a burden, an oddity, an exception or simply not there? How can I find this “inner core” that people tell me to rely on when I have yet to find a space where I’m not expected to defend as real those parts of myself I haven’t yet come to accept, let alone love.

                Sitting with this question I finally found an answer I can live with. I can’t say “yes” or “no” for at this moment both would be untruthful. What I can say is this, I commit myself to the work of self-love. I can acknowledge that I have been corrupted by the sin of a world that doesn’t want me alive and by the grace of God I can and I will resist that message. I give myself permission to read what I can, when I can without judgment for the knowledge I can’t obtain in my infirmity. I promise to celebrate the victories I’ve already achieved in simply living to see this day. Above all, whether in church or outside it, I offer myself to Love, not only love for my neighbor but also for the God who made this body, this spirit so determined to keep going long past the point it made rational sense.

*Both of these phrases were used when I gave blood yesterday. The technician who was handing me off to her supervisor said “he…umm she” and then got very upset when I stepped in and said “they”. I was told by them that I should feel guilty for not just “going along” with the needed questions, which are actually needlessly invasive as I was only changing my name and not my gender marker on my Red Cross records. 

**This post is also shared on the Episcopal Peace Fellowships Young Adult Delegation blog as it wraps up some of the lessons I've carried home from General Convention. If you'd like to see more about what it was like to do this work while there I'd recommend checking them out.

Finding Resurrection in Despair (Acts 8 Moment BLOGFORCE)

Alleluia Christ is Risen!

The world has changed, the power of the tomb defeated. This the season of celebration and transformation. All that is old is being made new, our chains our broken and life reigns triumphant. These strains of joy and hope have been difficult for me to hear this year. For at the beginning of the Easter feast I was confronted with a reminder of worldly death, at the heart of the Eucharist.

I watched delighted as the new fire was kindled, joined the hymns as we processed into the darkened nave. At first it was business as usual, as the now familiar words fell easily from my lips. Then as the Paschal homily of St. Chrysostom was read the service was transformed from a routine affirmation of faith, to an intense encounter of hope. As he spoke through the through the centuries of people being called in at the 6th, 9th and even 11th hour I found myself on the brink of tears. This year has been a particularly painful one for me, as I've wrestled with the way the Episcopal Church often ignores those of us who don't fit into the gender binary. Within our church I’ve been told so many times that my pronouns are an inconvenience, that my presence is a burden. As I listened to Chrysostom's words I could hear myself being called back, invited in to the feast that I have so often been turned away from due to a truth that I cannot deny. With those words falling through the centuries I was ready, yet again, to turn away from the pain and hurt. I was excited and eager to trust that love is working in even the darkest moments of my life.

Then we reached the Eucharist, that precious gateway to Mystery. Opened by the lessons I had heard I was eager for this celebration, this Thanksgiving. So lost was I, wrapped tightly in the love that held me close, that I didn’t notice which Eucharistic prayer we were using. Then out of the warmth and light a single phrase cut me to the quick, from Eucharist prayer B the words "everlasting heritage of your sons and daughters" echoed through the room. In that moment it felt as though the invitation I had been issued just moments before was stripped away. In an instant I cast from the joy of being a beloved person invited to the greatest feast of all time, into the role of an outsider, a freak, a mistake. With the life I have lived I no longer feel as though I am a son or a daughter, gendered words that have repeatedly asked me to lie about myself. On my most daring days I believe that I could be a child of God, yet there are times such daring feels more like self-delusion than the whisper of truth.

Yet I believe that it is from the seed of that delusion that the truth of resurrection can be spoken. For even though I remain plagued by doubt, the fact that I can even consider believing that I am a child of God is nothing less than miraculous.

I was never meant to survive. Every time I turn on the news and hear about another trans youth committing suicide I am reminded that was supposed to me. A psychiatric survivor who was drugged in adolescence to enforce conformity, I was never supposed to speak. Isolated from my people, cut off from the history of gender-benders from across time, I was never supposed to learn.  Condemned as demon possessed, and cast out of the church of my youth, I was never supposed to believe.

And yet, I do. For I have tasted of the resurrection. I’ve felt the resurrection in the arms of those who have held me as I’ve cried. I’ve seen the living Christ in the communities who’ve claimed me, even when I wouldn’t claim myself. I lived a resurrected life, in the triumphant act of getting up each and every morning.

This year I don’t have the strength to try and take in the enormity of the resurrection. I have no energy for debates about the nature of the resurrected body, nor a desire to tease out the complicated traditions that have formed this season. At this moment, for me, entering the resurrection simply means living under the incredible belief that even my broken body, my battered soul, is in the process of being made holy and whole. 

Striped Naked: Called to Vulnerability

The following pieces of writing both stemmed from a prompt at a writing workshop. I've left them sit untended for a while, uncertain about how I felt going public with the immense vulnerability that they are rooted in. After an extremely painful conversation today where I was reminded that many people see my gender as a curiosity, a lack of self-understanding or something to be frightened of I decided I did not want to hold back any longer. 

To live into the gift God gave me in my gender I have been asked to accept the responsibilities of a marked life. I am invisible in much of mass media, and often struggle to find representations of others who share my gender experiences. At the same time I am highly visible, and a simple request to be addressed by the correct pronouns is often derailed into detailed questions about my hair and voice, my history, or even if I have had surgery. The worst part is no matter how well I explain, how open I am, I am still rejected, objectified and erased on a daily basis.

There are no easy solutions, no instant answers. For tonight I'm not even going to try. All I can offer is a peak into the window, a glimpse of what that burden feels like, as once again I've been cast out into the night. 

When I am naked I feel…

            This question is wrong because it focuses on the end. Naked is a state, a destination, the end. But the journey is what is important, where the feeling begins. The end means nothing if it never begins

            Naked in a crowd, stripped down to my deepest parts, no secrets left, you’ve torn all from me. Every shred of privacy is gone, no clothing remains, no tattered fabric to shield my dignity. I consented to this torture, this daily routine. The erasure of self-worth, to reclaim what might have been. I let you do this day by day. Taking away my freedom, in the hope that I might be someday.

            I answer your questions, comment on your forms. I repeat again and again the secrets I’ve born. My scars are a story, as is my life. Told so often, that I no longer can claim them. The feelings are gone, worn down by the stares. Yes I repeat, I was really there. I lived in hospitals, the streets and alone. I’ve been chased out of bathrooms, churches and home.

            These stories were clothing, that wrapped me tight. Now you have taken them, along with the light. Darkness closes in, wrapping my frame. I’m naked again, and again and again. Will I ever be like you? Free to stay dressed? My story my own and not your quest? I’m not an activist, a hero or a saint. I’m a person whose shivering from giving all I have left.

            I held nothing back, sold all as demanded. So I stand before you naked and spent.

But this isn’t the journey I’ve wanted to take. To become a display, a model, a saint. I just wanted a chance to explore this gift.

To lay down the lies.

 Shedding the fabric of illusion that we might embrace what it written. 

I want to take off my clothes myself for a change. I want to see you as naked as me, not as a punishment, but a gift. I want us to embrace, to come together. To let the boundary fall. To see ourselves as ourselves and to delight in being naked together.

            But I stand at the door, my clothing rent.

You stand in front of me, clothed and aware. Can’t you see what it’s like at the mercy of the air?

Don’t you feel awkward, secure in yourself, stripping me again and again to satisfy your curiosity, yourself?

Clothed in Love

            Standing naked in the cold, the door blown open wide,

            I have nowhere left to run, nowhere to hide.

           

Shivering & shaking as hope grows dim

            I dare to ask myself what might have been.

            I chose this path, this stripping routine

            To invent the self that I hoped could be seen.

           

            Fatigue settles over me, one final try.

            Is it almost over? Can I be set free to die?

            No, a voice whispers, close and aware

            Don’t fall victim to Babel’s despair.

           

            Be clothed in my love, I’ll hold you tight

            Shielding you, my dear, from the dangers of the night.

            A thin fabric winds its way around

            The force of eons held in its bonds.

            Invisible and sheer, I’m still exposed

            But Love is the answer that blunts all your blows.

            All the trips and careless words.

            The countless times my pronouns go unheard.

            I feel them crash in,

            Their power strangling the might have been.

            Yet I cling to this love,

            To this skin that binds

            Myself to myself

            Freed from prying eyes.

            I can share without fear

            Answer any question

            For wrapped in your love

            There is no hesitation

            I’m clothed and I’m nude.

            The boundary is broken.

           

            Stripped naked again

            But never forsaken.