What might I offer that few others can? That is the question that led me to tailor my counseling practice toward executives, to focus my public speaking on gender equity, to find pleasure coaching speakers, and to lead in the post-evangelical church. I want my contributions to be value added to the lives of others.

I am a Christian. Even after all the awful ways in which I have been treated by the church, I still believe in the message of Jesus, particularly in the last public answers he ever gave, in which he spoke about loving God, neighbor, and self. At Envision Community Church, I define loving God as, “loving the God who burst on the scene 14 billion years ago in all of God’s complexity, mystery, and ever-expansiveness, rooted in relationship and grounded in love.” I define loving neighbor as, “loving every human being with whom you come in contact, particularly those who do not look like you.” Concerning loving yourself I say, “You cannot do the first two if you cannot do the third. It all starts with loving yourself.”

That final public bow in which he spoke those words is the core message of Jesus, and my starting point in matters of faith. I spent decades in the evangelical world. There is a lot I miss. I love megachurch worship services with great music, well-crafted substantive messages, and abundant awe. Excellence is assumed, and I believe that is important. I like how those churches draw people into community. I appreciate their local church polity, and boards that adopt Policy Governance.

Those are all reasons I prefer post-evangelical churches to churches affiliated with mainline Protestant denominations. There aren’t many independent post-evangelical churches, and none of us know what we’re doing really, particularly in a nation in which we have gone from 70 percent of citizens affiliated with a local religious body, to 47 percent having a local church, synagogue, or mosque. Add Covid to the mix and you have a lot of pastors scratching their heads. The churches on the far right keep the flock loyal by stoking fear with misinformation, but Millennials and GenZ are over that. Only the Baby Boomers get jazzed by the marriage of church and state.

Our species never took off until we moved from the level of blood kin to the level of tribe, and what brought us into community was not our need for safety, but man’s search for meaning. Our search for meaning has always gone better when approached in community. That is difficult to do in post-Covid America, with its strong individualism and fresh cuttings of isolationism.

People who are not in religious community get stuck in Fowler’s Stage Four of faith development, the stage of disenchantment and skepticism. I was at a dinner last month in which a woman said, “I went to church every Sunday until I got to college. I got up and went to mass the first Sunday I was at school. The second Sunday I did not, and I never have again.” She spoke triumphantly, as if she had arrived at an important insight. I’d suggest she arrived at a cul-de-sac of ennui. The expansive spirituality of Fowler’s Stage Five is out of reach for those who reject spiritual community, to say nothing of the elusive Stage Six.

I visited an old friend from my former denomination the other day. I realized just how much information I have about that denomination, its idiosyncrasies, history, leadership, theology, and all the other miscellany that comes from 40 years of work in a field. All is lost. No one in my new world is interested in that information. They consider it to be esoteric, and its lessons outdated. It is rare when anyone from that world reaches out to me. This friend suggested that someday I might be invited back to the denomination’s national conference. I told him I was very confident I would not live long enough to see that happen, and I have really good genes. My children will also not live long enough to hear my name spoken in a positive light from within that denomination. I have made peace with that reality.

Nevertheless, I am still taken by this man, Jesus, and the community that formed around his teachings. I want to bring my 40 years of religious knowledge and wisdom into this new post-evangelical world, and bring hope to turbulent times.

As for now, these are the areas on which I want to focus as I offer my unique gifts to those who might find the wisdom of those gifts helpful. I want to provide spiritual direction and therapy, to speak on issues related to gender equity, to coach speakers, to lead a spiritual community, and to always be open to new opportunities of service.

I also hold close those friends and family who take the path less traveled by, who are unafraid to look at life without a rose-colored filter, who are focused less on happiness and more on peace, less on satisfying their ego needs, and more on satisfying their souls.

I have fewer friends, but deeper friendships. Pretty much all of those friends are restless, as am I, uncomfortable that at this advanced age we are still called anew onto the Hero’s Journey, with its road of trials and dark cave. But we know you cannot stop the journey prematurely, even if you are tired, even if you are exhausted. You must answer the call not because you are indispensable, but because you are dispensable,  and you want to offer what you can for as long as you can.

One last thing about this encore. I believe it is important to find something to do that you have never done before. I ran for public office in my Front Range town nestled in the foothills of the Rockies. For the first six months in office I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know a resolution from an ordinance. A year and a half in, I’m figuring out the lay of the land, and yes, I plan to run again. Will I be elected? Who knows? There are those who think our entire board is incompetent. I think we’re actually pretty good. We certainly are all on the same page, which has made a lot of people happy, and allowed us to do much good work. Do I enjoy politics? I can’t say I do. But learning something completely new, and helping my town in the process is worth it, even if meetings stretch into all hours of the night.

I tell people nowadays that I am semi-retired. All that means is that I no longer do much of anything I do not want to do. I fill my days serving within my areas of expertise, doing work that satisfies my soul, and always looking beyond the horizon for the next thing.

It has been a challenge to prepare for an encore life. I am not sure I would have chosen to do so, but my rejection by the many forced me to begin anew. So often we do not seek the road less traveled by. It is thrust upon us. But ten years into this encore life, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

And so it goes.

This week, part two of “Time for an Encore.”

During this period of taking stock and the first letting go, I asked a second question, “What do I really want?” The limelight and I are friends. Being seen and appreciated has always been more important than being well-compensated. I grew up in a world in which it was considered a sin to be ambitious or to seek an audience. Those were signs of the sin of pride.  A favorite phrase of my family, common in Appalachia, was, “Don’t get too big for your britches.” It was all right to do well singing a solo at your elementary school concert. It was not alright to bask in the applause. My mother saw it as her job to make sure I did not get too big for my britches. She excelled at the task. But I loved an audience. I loved discovering I could hold the attention of a group of people just by singing a song or telling a story. And I always wanted to do it in such a way that someone felt better than when they started their day.

In my forties I identified a life phrase that guided my work. It was an unusual phrase I suppose – to lessen spiritual suffering. As I developed my pastoral counseling practice, the phrase continued to guide me and I chose to specialize in healing spiritual trauma. Making people happy is elusive. Lessening unnecessary suffering is more attainable, at least most of the time. It is never easy, but it is worthy.

Which brought me to the third question, “What should I do?” I needed to do the second letting go, this time not age related, but leaving the past behind to live authentically into an uncertain future. (You never attain authenticity. You can only live authentically.) I knew I had to come out as transgender and within seven days lost every one of my jobs and hundreds, if not thousands, of friends.

That experience is captured in my first two TEDTalks. It is more completely chronicled in my memoir, As a Woman, What I Learned About Power, Sex, and the Patriarchy After I Transitioned.

Life in the Liminal Space

When I came out, I was still not certain I was going to transition. After losing all of my jobs and most of my friends, I tried one more time, for three months, to live as Paul. It was not sustainable, and oh, there is so much in that sentence.

I returned to my chameleon-like life transitioning back and forth. It is a blur, remembered through a glass darkly. On one side was the elation of letting go and moving in the direction of authenticity. On the other side was the pain of discontinuity that signaled a life lost, never to return. I was a transgender woman on a desert island with no accessible past and a supremely uncertain future.

I am now ten years post-transition, and in retrospect I can see that I exited this difficult transitional space incrementally. The first phase took three years. The second, another four, and the third phase, a very difficult two years.

During those last two years I learned the importance of identifying what was and was not within my control. As a white male, I had far more control than I have as a woman. I had to accept reality and acknowledge what had happened and where it deposited me. I had to live my life as it was, in the present moment. It did not help to blame others. It did help to take inventory of the events and their causes and accept them. I had little choice but to live my life as it was, in the present moment. That was when I frequented David Wagoner’s Poem, Lost.

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost

Wherever you are is called Here, you must treat it as a powerful stranger

Must ask its permission to know it and be known

Listen, the forest breathes; it whispers “I have made this place around you

If you leave, you may return again saying, Here

No two trees are the same to Raven; no two branches are the same to Wren

If what a tree or a branch does is lost on you, then you are surely lost

What do you do when you’re lost in the forest? Stand still

The forest knows where you are; you must let it find you

Those last two years may have been the two hardest years of my life. I had to take stock yet again. I discovered taking stock and letting go are essential skills to develop on the road less traveled by.

During that time I had to come to grips with what Jungian analyst James Hollis calls existential guilt. It is the recognition that some personality traits have been with me for as long as I can remember and are likely to remain with me for as long as I live. They are not positive traits. I call them my abiding shadows. And the best I can hope for is to be able to identify them, all of them, and lock them in the basement, knowing damn well that they will find their way out. When that happens, my task is to catch them before they’ve done much damage and lock them in the basement again. There is no joy in this, only the abiding desire to unleash a bit less suffering into the world.

Toward the end of that two year period, I kept returning to two stanzas from William Butler Yeats’s poem, Vacillation.

My fiftieth year had come and gone,

I sat, a solitary man,

In a crowded London shop,

An open book and empty cup

On the marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed

My body of a sudden blazed;

And twenty minutes more or less

It seemed, so great my happiness,

That I was blessed and could bless.

Although the summer Sunlight gild

Cloudy leafage of the sky,

Or wintry moonlight sink the field

In storm-scattered intricacy,

I cannot look thereon,

Responsibility so weighs me down.

Things said or done long years ago,

Or things I did not do or say

But thought that I might say or do,

Weigh me down, and not a day

But something is recalled,

My conscience or my vanity appalled. 

Next week, Part 3.

Carl Jung said, “You cannot live in the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning.”

I was the CEO of a tiny non-profit that grew from a budget of 200k to 4m. I was CEO or Chair for 25 of the 35 years I worked there. When I began I wanted what the young want – affirmation, status, and income that would give my family a comfortable life.

The organization expanded from Long Island to working across the nation, as well as beginning a few ventures overseas. But in my industry, it was rare for someone to stay in the CEO position beyond their mid-60s. In my mid-50s, I knew it was time to prepare for a new chapter. I went back to seminary and ten days after I turned 61, received my Doctor of Ministry degree in Pastor Care. Six months earlier I had stepped down as CEO and became non-executive chair. That was my first letting go.

I have always been a Renaissance person, and in addition to my leadership of the non-profit, I also worked as the editor-at-large of a magazine, and on the teaching team of a couple of megachurches. I was a national leader and knew well over a thousand people by name.

My second letting go was radical, the kind of letting go that happens after you’ve come to the stark realization that your ladder to the heavens has been leaning against the wrong wall.

I announced to the world that I was transgender. A year later I transitioned genders. I lost all of my jobs within 24 hours, and my pension. I even had to fight to get back hundreds of thousands of dollars that had been designated for my own salary. Those thousands of people I knew? In the ten years since my transition, I’ve had substantive conversations with exactly six of them.

One life ended – completely, which is unusual. Most of us go through multiple transitions during our lives, but there is a certain continuity on which we can depend. Friendships remain. Family is still intact. We may stay in the same industry. There is an unbroken line to our lives.

 In my case, there was almost no continuity, no unbroken line. I lost every one of my jobs. My marriage ended (though we remain close) and pretty much my entire work world abandoned me. If there was to be an encore life, it would have to begin from scratch. What do you do when you are 62 and have to start a new life from scratch?

I had known for some time that my theology was moving left of what was acceptable in my denomination. I thought I could bring about change from within. Whatever change did occur was incremental, and dictated by the whims of financial expediency. It was not enough. A non-profit cannot survive without donations. After transitioning, going back into the evangelical world was impossible, and I did not want to move into any area that might satisfy my ego but not my soul.

The Jungian analyst James Hollis said the soul is interested in two things – power and safety. After you’ve lost everything, the last thing you are concerned about is power and safety. They are out of reach, and you painfully know it. Your ego has been defeated, which is a good thing, and you no longer focus on power and safety. The desires of the ego seem remote.

When forced into a major defeat that brings disruption and discontinuity, one’s ego finally fades and one’s soul emerges. It is not because your better angels take over. It is because it takes defeat of the ego to free the soul. Your ego has always wanted the retirement benefits. Your soul has always been here for the ride.

As I said, as a young person I wanted pretty much what everyone else wants, affirmation, status, and to provide for my family. My background and culture established the goals. The main question was, “How do I achieve those goals?”

As I approached my sixties, the question was no longer how. The question was why? Why did I arrive here and more importantly, for what purpose? I asked three questions:

1. Who am I?
2. What do I really want?
3. What should I do?

The first was powerfully difficult to accept and even more difficult to act upon. I knew from the time I was three or four I was transgender, but it was not until I was watching LOST, my favorite television show of all time, that I thought of the three questions related to my identity. Who am I at my core? Who is the visible me? Who is the best me?

My core self is incorporated in a line in my first TEDTalk. It is also the dedication line of my memoir, As a Woman. The line is,  “The call toward authenticity is sacred, and holy, and for the greater good.” My core self was Paula. Which meant my visible self needed to be Paula. Which meant my best self could only be born out of Paula. My life, as I knew it, was over.

And as for this week’s post, I’ll leave you there. I’ll pick this up next week.

And so it goes…