Light is paradoxically both a particle and a wave. Come to think of it, much of life is paradox. Our time on earth is both wonderful and disagreeable.  As this holiday season unfolds, I am feeling peace and anger, determination and resignation, hope and acedia. Let me explain.

According to an article in the New York Times, Donald Trump won the white evangelical vote by 65 points (85 percent for Trump and 15 percent for Harris) and lost the rest of the American vote by 18 points (59 percent for Harris and 41 percent for Trump.) To put it simply, white evangelical Christians elected Donald Trump.

They elected a man found liable for sexual abuse into the highest office in the land. I suppose I should not be surprised. This is the same group that fired me after 35 years of good work with nary a single negative evaluation, the group that took away my pension, all because I came out as transgender, something never mentioned in the Bible.

I regret working so hard to establish new evangelical churches all over the nation, most of which would not allow me through their doors today, let alone into their pulpits. There are a handful of churches and people who are exceptions, and I do want to acknowledge them. Those churches and leaders have also paid a price, most of them booted from the denomination that birthed them.

Interestingly, the one time I have been publicly cancelled by the left, it was a church that cancelled me for daring to question the appropriateness of giving adolescents irreversible medical treatment for their gender dysphoria. That particular church disavowed me without even informing me there was a problem. But let me be clear, only one mainline congregation has treated me unfairly. The entire evangelical world has rejected me.

What conclusions are my grandchildren to draw about the church and Christianity? I know the conclusions my non-spiritually-affiliated friends have drawn. They are not theologians, but they know enough to see that the church has abandoned the teachings of Jesus, because it has.

Jesus taught in metaphor. Evangelicalism wants literal meaning. Jesus taught awe. Evangelicalism wants scientific explanation. Jesus taught mystery. Evangelicalism wants certainty. Evangelicalism has abandoned Jesus in favor of bibliolatry, governed by the interpretation of its supremely confident but poorly educated leaders. They have abandoned the teachings of Jesus in favor of a return to a federated understanding of the old and new covenants, placing us back under the teachings of the law, or at least the specific ones they have decided serve their purposes, like the Ten Commandments. Evangelicals prefer the didactic teaching of Paul over the narrative teaching of Jesus.

All of this is an abandonment of the primary half of the brain, the right hemisphere, in favor of its emissary, the supremely confident but non-contextualized left hemisphere. It is a church more connected to Rene Descartes than it is to Jesus of Nazareth.

I sound angry, you say? I am. But I also understand that sin in the Bible is a not locked up inside the skin of an individual. It is a cosmic collective malevolent force. It is what we do when we come under the influence of a group that behaves in ways the individuals within that group would never behave on their own. My problem is not with individual evangelicals. It is with what they have done as a group. They have behaved in ways the sociobiologist EO Wilson said we’d better get ahold of before we lose the species and the planet as we know it. They have created enemies that do not exist.

The church will pay a price for its arrogant grasp for power. It has abandoned its root cause – to love God, neighbor, and self. What is left is nothing but the collective ego’s need for safety and power. Their narcissism has been made known and it will be justly rewarded.

I know most of my readers are not Christians, so I shall answer your anticipated question. Why am I still a Christian? It is because I do believe in the Jesus who taught in metaphor, not literal meaning, the Jesus who encouraged awe instead of offering scientific explanation, the Jesus who gave us blessed mystery instead of sophomoric certainty. I still believe the teaching of Jesus to love God, neighbor, and self.

I still love many people who have left me behind. I would welcome a visit from them. I would not allow myself to be badgered or belittled by them, but I would welcome the chance to rest in the beauty of our shared, flawed and vulnerable humanity. We would walk down to the river and watch its ageless flow as it twists and turns on its way to the sea. The words of Wendell Berry come to mind, from The Peace of Wild Things:

When despair for the world grows in me

And I wake in the night at the least sound

In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be 

I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water

And the great heron feeds 

I come into the peace of wild things

Who do not tax their life with forethought

Of grief, I come into the presence of still water

And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light

For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

I spoke Sunday at a delightful Presbyterian church in San Jose, California. I preached and then spoke for an hour about how America has gotten where it is regarding transgender people.

I spoke of E. O. Wilson, the sociobiologist, who said we are the only one of nine tribal species that has come to believe an enemy is necessary for the tribe to survive, and where no natural enemy exists, we create one.

I talked of the three moral standards, and the fact that while secular America works from the standard that says there is no greater moral good than to protect the freedom of the individual, the fundamentalist forms of the desert religions work from the second moral standard, that there is no greater good than to obey the teachings of the gods, as determined by their religious leaders. And in the Middle East, many work from the first moral standard, that there is no greater moral good than to protect the integrity of the tribe.

I then spoke for the first time at any length about study I have been doing recently on the work of Iain McGilchrist, the Scottish psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and philosopher who taught at Oxford. McGilchrist’s groundbreaking work on the hemispheres of the brain has fascinated me since I first read about it in Donald Kalsched’s Trauma and the Soul.

I noted how the last five hundred years have been a time of left-brain domination in the western world which has a created a narrow focus on analysis and categorization, the realm of the left hemisphere of the brain, and very little focus on placing that information in the greater context of life, a right hemisphere function.

In the world we have created, instead of metaphor, we want literal meaning. Instead of awe, we want scientific explanation. Instead of mystery we want certainty. All are left-brain. I explained how fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity have sold their soul to left brain thinking, which is tragic, because Jesus did not teach to the left brain. All of his instruction was to the right brain. He taught in metaphor, not literal meaning. He spoke in awe, not scientific explanation. He spoke of mystery, not certainty.

As a result, conservative Christianity has come to ignore the teachings of Jesus while it turns the Bible into a left brain textbook, to be interpreted literally, as a book of scientific explanation, and through the doctrine of inerrancy, certainty. Additionally, they pay more attention to the writings of Paul, more a left brain writer, than they do to the teachings of Jesus.

That shift is how you arrive at 87 percent of evangelicals believing gender is immutably determined at birth, 67 percent believing we already give too many civil rights to transgender people, and yet only 34 percent knowing someone who is out as a transgender person. Instead of following the teaching of Jesus to love God, neighbor, and self, they have created left brain rules and regulations to reject an issue that is nowhere mentioned in scripture.

I believe the only way to counteract this course of events is through right brain influence, primarily achieved through proximity and narrative. If we are bodily in the presence of another, unless we have a right brain deficiency, we stand a better chance of seeing that person in the context of our shared humanity rather than analyzing and categorizing them as “other.” If we hear one another’s stories, we stay in the right brain, the realm of narrative, subtlety, nuance, mystery and awe. While proximity demands bodily connection, narrative can be done on a mass scale.

Comedic television brought America around on marriage equality, progressively moving through All in the Family, where gay issues were first introduced, to the scripted Ellen show, where a gay character was the protagonist, to Will and Grace, in which gay characters interacting with straight characters was the focus of the show, to Modern Family, in which one of three major storylines was about a gay couple, to today, when people in sitcoms are incidentally gay.

Humans do change our minds, but not unless information comes to us in a non-threatening way. What could be less threatening than comedic narrative coming into our living rooms? That is one of the reasons I signed a life rights deal with a Hollywood production company to do a three season story of my life. In today’s environment, getting that funded will be next to impossible, but if they can get it funded, maybe it can help change the narrative.

When I was speaking in San Jose, as is always the case, I opened the talk up to Q&A. It did not take long for the biggest question to come forth, “What about teens receiving non-reversible medical care.” This was not a conservative group, unlike the group to which I had spoken a few weeks ago in which an attendee asked about trans people grooming children. When a question like that comes up I go straight to the facts. There is no incidence, ever, not once, of a trans person grooming children. It is a complete and utter myth. I challenged the questioner to give me a single example. He said nothing because, of course, there are no examples.

In San Jose the vast majority of the congregants were very supportive of trans people. The question about medical care was genuine. I gave an honest and researched answer. When I have given that answer before, I have satisfied neither the right nor the left. I have been attacked from both sides. Until we stop listening to conspiracy theories on the right and engaging in cancel culture, standpoint theory, and essentiality on the left, we will never be able to follow the science. I am committed to following the science.

Today, the studies extant do not support irreversible medical treatment for the majority of transgender adolescents. There is one group that is an exception, but instead of getting the care they need, that small group is caught in the crossfire between the two extremes.

The audience was warmly supportive, with many thoughtful questions  and comments after the session was over. I left grateful for the Builders and Baby Boomers who have been fighting the good fight for equal rights since the 1960s.

I eagerly accept invitations to speak at thoughtful and open churches. I do not request the fees I receive from corporations, conferences, or universities. I am just happy to get the word out that transgender people have a right to basic civil rights. I am quite sure the facts matter, and our stories must be told.

And so it goes

Many times in my life I have experienced a sustained longing for something more. Some television show, movie, or speech calls to my soul and says it is time to reach for the stars.

As Jungian analyst James Hollis says, the ego is a tyrant that desires only power and safety, which is tragic because both will eventually fail us. In The Heart Aroused, David Whyte says the ultimate safest place is a cemetery. Power and safety have their limits.

While the ego is interested in power and safety, the soul is interested in the ride. The soul is most connected to the right hemisphere of the brain, the primary hemisphere, the one that places everything in context and communicates with us in longings that struggle for words. These longings show up in well-told stories, paintings, photographs, and songs. They create awe, a decidedly right brain experience.

It is instructive to me to reflect on the specific elements that conspire to create this longing in me. The writing of Aaron Sorkin does it, whether in the West Wing or Newsroom. The novels of Wendell Berry (his essays being left-brain in their focus.) David Lean films, the film work of Roger Deakins, or television shows created by Carlton Cuse (Lost) can bring it forth. Musically it might be a great performance in a Broadway show, music of the vocal group Voctave, or 19th century hymns.

We grow complacent and allow the ego to have its way, lying on the couch, numbing itself on MSNBC, nothing but a viewer powerless to bring about change. Smart phones have not been good for the species. They invite endless scrolling, mindless time with the irrelevant. Too often the same is true with social media, feigning human connection when we are in reality incarnate beings with the need to physically connect, not via an electronic screen. Social media avoids genuine human contact, with its body language, subtle shifts in intonation, eyes telling their own stories, and a plethora of other subtle clues inaccessible on a screen.

I am not a Luddite, I just wish those who created these tools had thought about whether or not they were good for the souls of those for whom they were created. We live in a left-brain-centric, right-brain-deficient civilization, where the important questions are rarely asked. That is why we are lonelier than ever.

When I am jolted out of my acedia by one of these gifts of creative magic I realize I have been settling, and it is again time to unsettle and look to the stars. As David Whyte says in Sweet Darkness, the night has a horizon further than you can see. The possibilities are endless, a constantly expanding universe.

To what am I being called? I’m not sure. Discerning a call is rarely easy. The easy ones turn out to be somebody else’s call, not ours. True calls combine fear with excitement, the paradoxical alchemy of being inexorably pulled upward and ahead, into the unknown, expectant and frightened.

I currently serve as Mayor Pro Tem, an interesting position. I’ll leave it at that. Am I being called to another position in politics? Heaven knows the political world needs those who answer to soul, not ego, those with nothing left to prove. Or maybe it is to find that new TED Talk that can expand my speaking platform. My agent already has my next book proposal, so I’m just waiting to see what publisher picks it up. But I think it may be something that has not risen to the surface just yet, some way in which I need to stretch myself within my gifts.

I was asked to audition for the lead role in a feature film that began shooting in Toronto last month. I gave it a thought for a minute, but I knew it wasn’t for me. Speaking of acting, there is a character in a Sorkin television show that resonates with me. I’m still puzzling through the reason. Interestingly, the actor is also represented by my speaker’s agency. I’d like to meet sometime, or better yet, speak on the same platform.

Mary Oliver’s The Journey begins, “One day you knew what you had to do and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice…” I do not yet know what I have to do. I am waiting for it to come. This is life, discerning the next call onto what Joseph Campbell called the Hero’s Journey. Discerning and answering the call gets no easier with the passing of time. That much I know. Most calls require you to let go of something to which your ego is clinging before you can take hold of something new.

The older you get the less comfortable you are letting go and reaching out. The resistance is about time and its passing. You wonder if you are too old. But if you succumb to that temptation, you already have one foot in the vicinity of the grave. It’s a shame to die of sheer boredom.

I’ll let you know once I have a little more clarity about my current restlessness. Until then I’ll listen for the still small voice that arrives in the thin places.

And so it goes.