The Eagle Has Landed

This past week it was my privilege to attend and present two workshops at the Gay Christian Network Conference in Houston. Justin Lee and his capable team created a marvelous space for 1500 attendees who came together to worship, pray, and gain strength for the journey. The atmosphere was warm, inviting, gracious and supportive. While at the conference I attended my first meeting as a member of the Board of Directors. With great respect, I listened as Justin talked about GCN’s challenges and opportunities. I hope I can be a meaningful part of their growth.

On the opening evening I was introducing the speaker, so I was sitting in the front of the auditorium, which is rare for me. As the worship band backed off their microphones and the audience rose together in harmony to sing, “It Is Well With My Soul,” I turned toward the audience and cried the tears of someone painfully but surely finding peace attending my way. The speaker, Broderick Greer, spoke with the confidence and insight of an old soul, though he is only 24. He talked about his experience as a Black, gay Episcopal pastor from a Church of Christ background. He has survived a battle or two in his young life. Nothing I have faced even comes close to what he has survived.

In my first workshop I spoke about the lessons I am learning as a woman in American culture. There were tears from women in the audience who understand what it is like to be unseen and unheard just because you are a woman. There were mothers with gay children, ostracized from their families for the sin of embracing the gay or transgender child born to them. There were trans women and trans men who had lost family, church and job, but still remain committed to Christ and his church. I was honored these precious saints chose to share their stories, the fellowship of surviving saints.

I shared dinner with a former co-worker who, like me, chose to come out on his own, with no pressure to do so other than his desire to live honestly, authentically, and publicly. Later I spent time with the lead pastor of City Church in San Francisco, a church willing to pay the price to welcome all into the body of Christ. We talked about Lesslie Newbigin, Richard Rohr, John Polkinghorne, and other teachers we have known on the journey.

One of the more interesting observations about this audience was how ordinary we all seemed, hardly the people you would have expected to have been ostracized and vilified in their home country. Our vulnerability was never far from my mind, however. We were meeting in Houston, where I could have been arrested just for using a public women’s restroom. I bring my white male entitlement with me, and forget how vulnerable I am in today’s world.

In my second workshop we talked about my conviction it will not be long before we see large numbers of Evangelical churches become open to full membership. The church has never allowed itself to get too far behind the culture at large. Just look at the church’s capitulation on an earth-centered solar system, slavery, divorce and remarriage, and interracial marriage. Things once seen as scripturally prohibited are finally, and correctly, understood to be human-imposed cultural limitations to the Gospel. The church’s objection to LGBTQ inclusion will fall just as surely.

I left Houston hopeful. I am confident it will not be long before we see Evangelical churches of influence become progressive and inclusive on LGBTQ issues, on racial justice, poverty, and saving our planet. I am a realist, not a dreamer, and I believe in the power of Christ to transform culture. I saw it in evidence in Houston this past weekend.

And so it goes.

 

Gift or Talent?

Over the years I have been told I am a good non-profit board member. I have also been affirmed in my ability to counsel and serve as a CEO. All of those abilities are talents. None are gifts. The difference between the two is simple. Gifts bring joy. Talents are, well, talents. Discerning the difference is important.

I met a new friend not long ago who, after a divorce, found herself heading back to work outside the home. Career counselors told her she would be good at sales, so my friend became a real estate agent. It’s afforded her a decent career, but she knows it is not a gift. It is a talent. She is still searching for a career that matches her giftedness.

Scott Peck said the last big job of parents is to discern their children’s vocations, where they might excel. I understand Peck’s suggestion. It will likely assure your adult child will not be living in the basement at 40. But is it enough?

We are all on earth to serve. What kind of service brings joy to your soul? You might get tired or even a little bored on occasion, but when you are working within your giftedness, you know you are in your sweet spot.

I have never had work more satisfying than my 13 years as a television host. Even on the worst days, and there were more than a few, I was happy to get up in the morning and head to the set. Unfortunately television is a fickle business and our show was eventually cancelled, but I still tend to measure other jobs by the joy I found in that one.

My preaching has been more affirmed than my television work. Same with my teaching. I receive both as gifts, and I am grateful every time I am asked to preach or teach. In a seminary preaching course in which I was the professor, a student asked, “How do you get to preach to a crowd of 10,000?” I answered, “For starters, you won’t preach for thousands unless you can find joy preaching to a crowd of 20.” It is not the size of the audience that brings the deep satisfaction. It is the “Aha” moment on a single face in the second row. It is the discipline to take your gift and demand more of it. It is realizing that in an audience of 1,000, a cumulative 366 hours are being taken up by your 22-minute sermon. Do you really want to waste 15 1/4 days?

I once heard a speaker say the frequency of your soul is in your giftedness. It formed a certain picture in my mind’s eye. Back when I was in radio, when you played a Steppenwolf tune you wanted the gain to move into the red, but you did not want it peg the meter. Slamming the needle kicked the transmitter off the air for a split second or two. Finding the sweet spot was an art. After a while you didn’t need to look at the gain. You knew by the sound whether the volume was right or not.

Another friend does improvisational comedy in New York City. We were doing an exercise together in a workshop in which the instructor asked us to imagine our happy place, you know, Brer Rabbit’s Briar Patch. He said his happy place was on stage. That is where he feels the frequency of his soul.

I know the frequency of the radio station where I worked. The AM frequency was 1370, and the FM was 102.3. As for the frequency of my soul, I’m not sure exactly what it is. But I do know the needle finds the sweet spot when I am preaching.

And so it goes.

 

 

The Gift of Memories

It’s borrowed from a pagan holiday, a chance to find some merriment during the darkest nights of the year. It is Christmas, the season of uprisings against Starbucks, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and every other entrapment of a capitalist society. Crassly commercial, hopelessly tied to conspicuous consumption, it is our most over-hyped holiday. Yet try as we might, we just can’t quite ruin Christmas. Somehow, the wonder remains.

Earlier this month I watched the 50th anniversary of the first Charlie Brown Christmas special. One segment showed Charles Schultz explaining his decision to do something unheard of in 1960s primetime television. He decided to have Linus read from the Gospel of Matthew. It made me cry when I first heard it 50 years ago. It makes me cry today. No matter how we muck it up, no matter the day is nowhere near the season of Jesus’ actual birth, Christmas celebrates the God who came to live among us, suffer with us, and show us what it means to be fully human.

For most of us, Christmas brings memories both painful and precious. When our son was in kindergarten, the grade school grandparents sponsored a Christmas fair where the children could buy gifts. Our son chose a beautiful plant for his mom. The Grandmas wrapped it and sent it home, neglecting to tell him it needed to be opened right away. Weeks later, on Christmas morning, when Cathy opened her gift in front of her wide-eyed son, the plant had died. He burst into tears and ran to his room. Cathy went to comfort him and they came down a few minutes later, tears dried, hopefulness restored. The festivities continued, but to this day that is the only memory I have of that particular Christmas.

About 20 years ago, early on a Christmas morning, Lilly, our golden retriever, ate an entire rum cake, pushing the empty plate under the refrigerator, her feeble canine attempt to hide the evidence. When I saw my cherished cake reduced to crumbs, I banished Lilly to the backyard. The children ran downstairs and saw their beloved dog, shivering against the sliding glass door. They looked at me quizzically.   I said, “Lilly is shivering because every bit of blood she has, blood that could be warming her extremities, is instead digesting our rum cake.”

All forms of celebration ceased. The children brought Lilly inside and took her upstairs, where they jumped in bed and pulled the covers up to her neck. I walked into the room and there lay my three teenage children with their contented dog sandwiched between, wearing the biggest doggie grin you have ever seen.

The memories of this season are many and rich. All warm my heart and leave a lump in my throat, grateful that in this season of long nights, I have been given so much light, and life, and love.

I hope this season brings you treasured memories, deep peace, and much happiness. Joy to the world. The Lord is come.

In A Word, Human

I have found transgender people to be pretty common in a number of respects.  It is not always a pretty picture.  There are some who are self-referential, if not narcissistic.  Others do not have a very high EQ.  Some march into transition without considering the cost to families, friends, and colleagues.  They demand their rights without a willingness to let a stunned world catch up with their newfound freedoms.  They are, in a word, human.

I was on a conference call that included a number of trans women.  I had to chuckle.  We were all pretty male-like on the call.  I don’t mean our voices were male (though my voice is still a work in progress.)  I mean we were confident, entitled, and talked over the top of each other more than a little.  It reinforced what I have been saying for a long time.  Transgender women are somewhere between male and female.  We are that truck stop between Phoenix and Tucson, neither here nor there.

I love baseball, but I am thrilled I no longer have to pretend to like football.  I love Broadway shows and women’s fashion, but I also love airplanes and mountain biking.  I prefer the conversations of women.  They are more collaborative and less competitive, at least most of the time.  But I miss the decisiveness of a group of guys.  There’s no sitting in the car deciding where to go to lunch.  Somebody just decides.  I know these are all stereotypes, but I’m leaving this paragraph in the post anyway.

There is a test on the Internet that purports to tell where you are on the gender spectrum.  I think every transgender person has taken it, though its accuracy is suspect.  It does, however, speak a great truth.  Gender can be measured on a wide spectrum, with people populating every inch.  We all land some place between what our culture sees as extremely macho and very feminine.  Hawkeye Pierce was somewhere in the middle.  (I know, that analogy dates me.)  So was Golda Meir (also dates me.)   At the extremes you’ve got Dolly Parton and Bill Belichick.  Yeah, those are pretty extreme.  In the pretend world there’s Barbie and G.I. Joe.  (Ken does not appear anywhere on the spectrum.  Ken is a little weird.)

But here’s the thing, people who appear to be at one extreme or the other can surprise you.  Kristin Beck, a trans woman, was once a Navy SEAL.  She played a very masculine role, though she knew it was not who she was.  Trans women often take on macho roles in an attempt to rid themselves of gender dysphoria.  It never works.

But back to the gender spectrum.  Whether we like it or not, we live in a binary society that does not want us on any spectrum.  It wants us to be either male or female, period.  But a brief venture into the animal world shows there are gender variables in countless species.  In the evolutionary scheme of things, being transgender is not all that unusual.

I believe the majority of gender is prenatally determined, though I do understand we are all subject to the drip, drip of gender reinforcement.  Most are far enough on one side or the other to be comfortable in the gender assigned at birth.  But for about .3 percent of us, that is not the case.  And unless we want to identify as queer (I’ll write about that some other day), in a binary society we must choose one gender or the other.  Often, our lives depend on it.

So, I live as Paula.  The LifeTree Cafe division of Group Publishing has produced a group lesson on transgender issues.  A good bit of the lesson is me, answering questions about what it means to be transgender.  When I saw the video for the first time, I cried.  (I also wished I had not worn that particular top – but, oh well.)  I cried because the person I saw was known to me.  I’ve known her for a long time.  And she seemed more comfortable than the male version of the same person on the hundreds of PAX-TV shows I taped.  The woman was at peace.  I am at peace.

I am far less secure in American culture than Paul was.  With his white entitlement, education, and success, Paul was pretty comfortable.  Paula is a female and a member of a minority, not stations associated with power or status.  But it is who I am, and I’ll take it.  With great gratitude for those who have suffered through my transition with me, I will take it.

So, yes, I am a transgender woman, self-referential over the past couple of years, impatient to allow others the time truly needed to adjust.  But trying hard to live authentically, one day at a time.

And so it goes.

Perhaps I’d Like to be Known

A theme that frequently emerges in my pastoral counseling is that people do not feel heard. It is a refrain more common to women than men, though neither gender is immune to feeling unheard and misunderstood. The least listened to segment of the population is children.

I am grieved when I see a child repeatedly ask his or her parent a question, only to be ignored or patronized. It stirs up memories. I grew up thinking barns were old houses converted to residences for livestock. I had asked a trusted adult. She didn’t reply with a dismissive, “Yes.” She replied with an enthusiastic, “Yes, you are right!” feigning attentiveness to the detriment of a six year old. The amount of misinformation I had to unlearn in my adolescence was a source of continuing embarrassment.

One of the earliest needs of an infant is a benevolent face upon which to gaze. Given the opportunity, infants will stare at a human face longer than any other object. It is how we come to see ourselves as human. Infants deprived of that stimulus are profoundly affected. Attachment to others becomes almost impossible. Our need to be in relationship is as basic as our need for air and water. I once heard a member of the team that discovered quantum physics boldly state that the only ultimate reality is relationships. No wonder we feel insignificant when we are not heard.

The need to be heard and known does not end with childhood. It is life long. In her excellent novel The Nightingale, Kristin Hannah writes, “I always thought it was what I wanted: to be loved and admired. Now I think perhaps I’d like to be known.” But being known does not mean just the easy parts. To be fully known means opening up about the parts we keep hidden.

The protagonist in The Nightingale had survived World War II in occupied France. But she had compartmentalized and jettisoned that most painful chapter of her life. At least she thought she had. As she grew older she realized her story was not complete without the darkness. It too needed to be known.

One of my best friends is a family physician. He told me as the Greatest Generation reached their 80s, many came into his office without an illness, but with a great need. They needed to talk about their experiences in World War II. My friend found it a privilege to be the recipient of long hidden stories.

Of course, as much as we want to be known, there is great risk involved in revealing what was once hidden. The greatest, of course, is the risk of rejection. “What if I tell others my story and they find it weird, upsetting, or disturbing?” Well, I might know a little something about that. It is painful, sometimes devastatingly so. Is it worth the risk? The answer to that centers on whether or not you agree with Socrates, that the unexamined life is not worth living. I believe life is to be examined, and made known. Closets are for clothes, not people.

Since becoming open about my gender and my theology and other subjects likely to stir up trouble, I have come to understand a few things. I have learned many Christians get angrier about doctrine than about life. I learned the people you think will be there are not, except for the ones who are. I learned time does heal wounds and forgiveness does redeem scars. And the biggest lesson I’ve learned? The truth does set you free.

And so it goes.

I Wonder

Since my transition it has been my privilege to lecture to a number of psychology and sociology classes at the University of Colorado. A few weeks ago a friend invited me to speak to her psychology students on transgender issues. When I arrived there were 400 students in the lecture hall. They were incredibly respectful as I spoke and answered questions for an hour. You could have heard the proverbial pin drop. A few weeks later my friend sent me the student evaluations from the lecture.

I read 16 pages of very supportive comments from thoughtful, articulate undergraduates. Before I finished I was in tears. I thought of the contrast fourteen months earlier when I received hundreds of mean-spirited messages and calls to repent from people in the church. Some showed great concern, but many were just mean. They included those who projected or transferred their own issues onto me, and those terrified of what they do not understand.

I’ve been Paula long enough to no longer have to think about which bathroom door to enter. I am Paula, and I am moving on. A lot of the hurt over the way my transition was received has faded, and I am settling into my new life. But occasionally I still receive a letter or email from people disappointed with me, and their words still hurt. Over the months I have realized these letters do share something in common. They are devoid of curiosity.

On the other hand, one student’s words at CU reflected the thoughts of many, “Before this talk I knew absolutely nothing about transgender issues, but listening to Paula gave me a whole new perspective and I left with great compassion for those struggling with gender identity.” These students were exposed to a real live transgender person, and they were changed by the experience. Unfortunately I can be fairly certain I will not be invited to speak to the students at any Christian college I know. They will not have a chance to interact with a transgender person and hear her story. As a result, the great divide only gets wider and wider.

This is nothing new in the history of man. Apparently we are the only species that needs an enemy to survive, and where none exists we will create one. Having lived on both sides of this great divide and watching it increase in breadth and depth, I am not optimistic. If we cannot hear one another’s stories, we have little hope.

I have great respect for Justin Lee and the Gay Christian Network. They manage to keep the conversation going on both sides of the religious fence. Yet for their generosity they are continuously attacked from both sides of this heated debate. Still, with integrity they stand there, refusing to stop the conversation.

In the marital counseling Cathy and I do, we often realize the biggest problem is when conversations end too early, often before they’ve even begun. When you are able to keep a conversation going through the conflict, you have a good chance of healing a relationship. But most of us do not want to feel our feelings. We do not want to experience discomfort. We want to offload our pain instead of experience it. But as the psychologist and researcher Brene Brown says, “It is the willingness to be uncomfortable and walk our way through our emotions that leads to wholeness.”

Whether the subject is a single marriage, the LGBT community, or larger issues like racial injustice, poverty, and our growing global religious intolerance, we must learn to keep the conversation alive. A willingness to work our way through our own discomfort and pain, accompanied by a generous dose of grace and mercy toward those we do not understand, may be as important as anything else we do. It is not an understatement to say the future of our species and our planet may depend on it.

And so it goes.

 

Unquestioned Obedience or Faithful Questioning

According to the Pew Research Center, 70.6 percent of Americans claim a religious affiliation, a drop of eight percentage points in just seven years. Among Millennials (those born between 1980 and the early 2000s) the drop is even more precipitous, down to 64 percent.

Humans need to belong. While we might think the nuclear family is the key to a culture’s health, it is actually a larger entity. It is the tribe that defines the strength of a culture. Being part of a meaningful tribe has always been a basic element of healthy living. We are wired to belong. That is one of the reasons I am intrigued by the decline in church attendance. If we need community to survive, why do Americans choose to build their community around a sports team instead of a church? (This would especially be true for Mets fans.)

When I talk with young Evangelicals about why they no longer attend church, one answer emerges time and again. They feel their churches have taken legalistic views of scripture at odds with their conscience. There was a time when the unquestioned obedience that results from a legalistic view of scripture led people to rape women, kill children, and enslave enemies in the name of God. Today’s young people reject such blind obedience. Their approach is actually very compatible with the teaching of Jesus.

In Disarming Scripture, Derek Flood describes two different types of people in the pages of the Bible. There were those who believed following God meant unquestioned obedience, and others who believed following God called for faithful questioning. Was it really necessary to kill the children of enemies? Was it necessary to view life from a perspective of scarcity, something common to all three desert religions, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity?

Unquestioned obedience and faithful questioning have always existed in tension among the people of God. If we follow the example of Jesus, we will be faithful questioners. As my pastor Jenny Morgan said in her sermon last Sunday, “Jesus rejected violence by re-orienting, even correcting certain passages. Jesus did this from a place of deep truth. We disarm these passages based on historical, archeological evidence and by following Jesus. There is no revenge in Jesus, so there can be no revenge in God.” She went on to say, “Unquestioning obedience is often motivated by fear, but faithful questioning is motivated by love and trust.”

Someone might object, “But that was Jesus. He was allowed to reframe whatever he wanted to reframe.” Yet the truth is the church has been following Jesus’ example for 2000 years. It is how the church came to accept that the earth revolves around the sun, though they accepted it too late to stop Galileo from suffering. It is how the church slowly and agonizingly came to see slavery as incompatible with Christianity. More recently it is how the church came to see women as equal to men, though that one is still a work in progress. In each case, the hard work of faithful questioning brought about important change.

Since the church has always made painful adjustments in light of new scientific and religious understanding, why would we be so arrogant as to think that kind of work is behind us? How can we think we have arrived at the pinnacle of understanding? There will always be new information, and humans will always adapt to our growing body of knowledge.

I do understand the current religious environment of fear. We live in a world changing more rapidly than ever before. When you add the reality that ethics has had a hard time keeping up with scientific discovery, it is understandable when people react negatively in the face of change. But we are remiss if we avoid the lesson of history. Choosing our battles poorly diminishes the character of the church and causes us to be a poor reflection of the Christ we serve. And throughout history, it is hard to deny the reality that the church, time and again, has chosen its battles poorly.

There must be room within the church for faithful questioners or the church will end up in a silo of its own making, what Richard Niebuhr in Christ and Culture called, “Christ against Culture.” Others refer to it as the “embattled church.” If we really believe the truth will set us free, we need not fear faithful questioners in our midst. In fact, we should be grateful for them. For it is only by wrestling with the words of scripture that we collectively reach conclusions compatible with the example of Christ. These young Millennials are reminding us what many generations have had to remind those who came before – It is Jesus we serve, not a book.

And so it goes.

 

 

 

 

A Complex and Perplexing Problem

This week brings the Transgender Day of Remembrance, so I return to the subject I have written about often. Last summer an op-ed piece in the New York Times addressed the issue of malleability in gender. Richard Friedman, a psychiatrist at Weil Cornell Medical College, spoke of two studies that have shed light on the transgender experience.

The first was conducted by Dr. Georg Kranz at the Medical University of Vienna and published in the Journal of Neuroscience. A specialized MRI was utilized to study the functioning brains of four different groups, natal males and females, male to female transsexuals, and female to male transsexuals. All of the trans participants had not yet begun hormone therapy, since it is known that brain structure changes with cross-sex hormones.

The findings supported the hypothesis that gender dysphoria is neural in its origins. The MRIs of both groups were about halfway between the natal males and females. What accounts for the findings? It is known that biological sex develops in the first trimester of gestation, while the brain’s sexual wiring does not develop until the second half of pregnancy. The study makes the educated assumption some kind of glitch occurs when the brain is wired with its gender identity, leaving a brain not in sync with its corresponding body.

The second study was completed by the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. They followed 324 transgender individuals for 10 years post-transition and found the incidence of suicide 19 times higher than the population at large. Friedman did not mention that the study was of people who transitioned before 1989, a time when virtually no society was welcoming toward transgender individuals.

Dr. Friedman does not believe the Karolinska study shows that transitioning is unwarranted. To the contrary, he acknowledges that transitioning resolves gender dysphoria. His question, which remained unanswered in the article, is why does transitioning not make for a better life? Fortunately there are more recent studies that answer that question.

A study of 1229 transgender individuals published in August of this year showed 35 percent of the participants had seriously considered suicide. But the additional findings of the study shed considerable light on the reasons for that suicidal ideation.

First, transgender people who had the support of their families had an 82 percent lower rate of suicide than those who did not have family support. The study also showed that transgender people who were not a part of a racial/ethnic minority and had a higher level of education had far lower rates of suicide. Additionally, transgender people who “passed” in public reported a quality of life not statistically different from the population at large. In other words, if you are like me, white and educated with a supportive family, and you can live in your new gender without people on the street staring at you, your chances for having a satisfying life are pretty good. If you don’t have all of those things, it is a different story.

The study showed those who had been discriminated against in employment and housing had a higher rate of suicide, as did those who were subject to physical violence and those who did not have the means to complete the legal name and gender change process. Alarmingly, another study showed that transgender youth whose parents were not supportive had a 13 times greater chance of suicide than those whose parents were.

The biggest indicators of difficulty in transition are alienation from family, friends, and co-workers, and the accompanying deep sense of shame. If the trans person internalizes transphobia, their adjustment to their new life becomes monumentally difficult.

Some have used the suicide rate to attack the transgender community, suggesting these suicides occur because of multiple mental disorders, when the reality is the suicide rate is not high because of psychiatric comorbidities. It is high because of societal issues. When trans people have the kind of support received by the population at large, they report a quality of life in line with the population at large. The problem is that a lot of trans people are not supported at all, but face rejection everywhere they turn. That is the main reason they internalize transphobia.

The debacle in Houston is a prime example. Millions of dollars were spent to create a threat where none exists. There is not a single record anywhere of a trans person attacking anyone in a restroom. But that did not stop the misguided zealots from their shame-inducing smear campaign. The tragedy is that this vilification of the trans community does not happen in a vacuum. Real live struggling trans people in Houston were subjected to a barrage of attacks that for those who do not have the support they need, result in the internalization of shame and transphobia. The hate pedaled in the name of decency will lead, with great certainty, to the suicides of vulnerable trans people. It also perpetuates the global hate that leads to one transgender person being murdered every 29 hours.

We live in a world in which hate abounds, minorities are vilified, and innocent people are slaughtered, often in the name of religion. The solution to all of the hatred is not complicated.

On his last day of public ministry, in answer to the last question he was ever asked by the population at large, Jesus said the greatest laws were to love God and love your neighbor. Everything else was based on those two. Matthew tells us his audience didn’t like the answer and Jesus was greeted with dead silence. Matthew goes on to say from that day on no one dared to ask Jesus any more questions. He made clear what he wanted people to do. They just decided not to do it. And 2000 years later, not much has changed.

And so it goes.

Minneapolis in October

Three weeks ago I attended the OPEN conference in Minneapolis.   A fascinating crowd of dreamers, intellectuals and assorted pilgrims gathered to discuss what it means to be a progressive, inclusive leader in today’s Evangelical-ish church. Speakers included Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Frank Schaeffer, Kent Dobson, and a variety of other better and lesser-known folk.

As with most conferences, the unscheduled conversations were the most enjoyable part of the event. I listened to the heartfelt stories of a few megachurch senior pastors who lost half their members because they became LGBTQ inclusive, but who can now sleep at night. I had dinner with Teresa Pasquale, the author of an excellent book on spiritual abuse called Sacred Wounds. I enjoyed lunch with a seminary administrator who has bravely moved beyond her southern fundamentalist roots. I listened to a brilliant young therapist who helps families work through their children’s sexual and gender identities.

I especially enjoyed the hours spent in our rental house with many of the dear leaders from Highlands Church, grateful that God has led me to such a transparent, devoted community. With the Highlands folk we welcomed the staff from a church in New York and talked late into the night about the bold steps of faith to which God is calling us all.

I’m guessing no one in attendance was a person who believed in unquestioned obedience to the Scriptures. This was not a group that sees the Bible as an inerrant rulebook. This was a group of faithful questioners who see the Bible as the inspired record of God’s people on earth, a guide to understanding what it means to live as Jesus might live today. In the spirit of the Old Testament prophets, they call into question the typical way of seeing things and humbly, yet boldly proclaim the news that the gospel really is good news for all.

Many of those in attendance have been on a spiritual journey similar to my own (well, without the part about transitioning genders.) They grew up in Evangelical or Fundamentalist homes and through a thousand questions processed by curious minds, they all arrived at the station platform surprised and delighted to meet others waiting for the same train. Echoing the words of Carl Sandburg, they all know the travelers on the Sunset Limited are going somewhere beyond Omaha.

We are wired for community, so I should not be surprised these people managed to find one another. No one wants to blaze a trail alone. There were common names that played a part in all of us buying tickets to the same destination – Mary Oliver, Phyllis Tickle, Wendell Berry, Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, Richard Rohr. All are people on similar journeys, though Phyllis Tickle’s journey has moved to another plane.

There was a ten-foot wild goose hanging from the ceiling at the church building in which the conference was held!  Yep, a little odd.  Yet it sent our thoughts to a poem treasured by many, Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese, a poem I memorized years ago. On the final morning the poem was quoted, acknowledging what many were feeling, “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.  You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”  The poem ends with these life affirming words:  “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination.  It calls to you, like the wild geese, harsh and exciting, over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”

 And so it goes.

Rooted in Love

How my family and I deal with my transition is not a subject for public discourse. But my post from several weeks ago (All is Calm, All is Bright) has had a lot of page views and comments that go far beyond Cathy’s character and our relationship.

The responses invite me to consider a question. What can we expect from marriage? When we marry, virtually all of us hope our marriage will be fulfilling, but most of us are unaware how much baggage we bring from childhood, including deeply held desires for our partner to heal the wounds of childhood. But that is a tall order to fill and far beyond the capacity of even the most loving spouse. The only one who can heal a childhood wound is the adult child herself. And as many of us know, that process is arduous. All a spouse can do is stand by and offer support.

When I wrote that Cathy would come to me still, I was not referring to a childhood need to be rescued form that dark church hallway. Dealing with that memory is my job. With the post I was talking about the nature of the person I married. Cathy is deeply loving and fully devoted to her family. Though Cathy and I don’t exactly know what to call our relationship any longer, our love for one another remains. Many people never know deep love. They only experience relationships that are profoundly conditional, leaving them with little stability.

Cathy and I both struggle to understand how Christianity, a religion rooted in love, has become so completely a religion rooted in judgment and conditional acceptance. When it comes to our family’s life together, we have chosen to be rooted in the unconditional love Jesus modeled for us.

That kind of love does not have expectations the lover will take on our own struggles. The healthiest marriages are those in which each person attends to his or her own unresolved issues, but the couple works together on the one thing they can control, their relationship.

Cathy and I always encourage couples to see their relationships as an additional entity residing in their home. There is mom and dad and the kids, but there is also the relationship. Give it a name if you like, Hope or Joy or Grace. But give it the attention you give your children. It is the one thing remaining when the children leave home.

From our marriage Cathy and I expected to provide a stable home for our children, a base camp from which we could each climb our own mountains, and a secure environment in which we could grow through the decades. Of course we also expected to do it as husband and wife. When it comes to our current circumstance, there are no rules and little guidance. But wherever our relationship takes us, there is one thing we know. Our love remains.

In his book, Why I am an Atheist Who Believes in God, Frank Schaeffer writes, “My hope is that a trillionth of a second before the Big Bang, the energy animating the mystery of matter being created out of nothing was love.” I hold the same hope, that from the beginning and all the way to the very end, it is love that makes the world go round.

And so it goes.