“That I Was Blessed, and Could Bless”

I once had a coworker who never seemed to feel pain, offloading it instead of dealing with it. He passed his pain along to others. His father was an alcoholic and his mother an enabler and he was not willing to walk his way through his emotions. Instead he passed his anger along, almost without thought. When I no longer had to work with him I vowed to never again hire a person unwilling to experience pain. I wanted to work with people who believed the truth would set them free, though they also knew it was likely to make them uncomfortable first.

Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck once wrote about the need to entice a client into therapy. Many come to counseling eagerly, but leave prematurely, as soon as they realize the amount of work necessary to truly deal with their issues.

Most people do not want to actually grow. They just want the pain to stop. They will trade a more fulfilling future for a quick fix today. As soon as an emergency tourniquet stops the flow of acute pain, they leave therapy. Only the brave remain, the ones willing to feel their pain instead of offloading it. And what do these brave souls discover?

They discover becoming more fully human has little to do with happiness. Happiness comes and goes throughout life. Becoming more fully human is all about power, not power expressed as lording it over others, but power restrained, what the Bible calls meekness. It is the power of refusing to be defined by other people’s opinions of you. It is the power of knowing you can dialog with anyone, because you are comfortable with where you stand. It is the power of knowing what you know.

This is not the power of the desperate, but the power of those who believe in abundant life, those who influence others not through argument, but through generosity of spirit. It is the power to do what you are called to do and let go of the consequences. It is accepting the weaknesses you are never going to get ahold of, and learning to be okay with that.

People with this kind of power discover there are not many kindred spirits on the journey. They often feel alone, though some are grateful for the solitude.

Do I consider myself to be in this company of the humbly powerful? Sometimes yes, more often no. I am too aware of my need to be accepted, not a particularly helpful trait for a transgender woman. I also remain impatient, addicted to speed. (Show me any great master addicted to speed – not one out there.) Plus, with all of the humility forced upon me through my transition, you’d think I would be the picture of generous tolerance. Alas, I still do not suffer fools well. I suppose those might be some of the traits with which I need to make peace. They are so very unbecoming.

The poet William Butler Yeats had similar feelings. He expressed them in verses four and five of his 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 tabletop

As on the shop and street I gazed

My body of a sudden blazed

And 20 minutes more or less it seemed

So great my happiness

That I was blessed and could bless.

Yeah, I feel like that. But listen to what he writes in the next stanza:

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 say or do but thought that I might say or do

Weigh me down, and not a single day but something is recalled

My conscience or my vanity appalled.

Yeah, I feel like that too. Ah, the marvelous inconsistencies of being human.

Long ago I chose to take the road less traveled by. It is a rocky path, strewn with all kinds of debris. But it is my journey, not the journey someone else imagined for me. On my better days I do not offload the pain my journey brings, but reap the wisdom contained therein. On those days, if I can offer that wisdom to others, I will do so.

And so it goes.

It’s Up To You, New York, New York

I was in Brooklyn watching my two granddaughters during last week’s monster snowstorm.  Between late Friday and Saturday evening the neighborhood was inundated with 30 inches of sideways snow.  When the storm finally ended the city was blessedly silent, like when the refrigerator kicks off and you hear nothing, absolutely nothing.  On Sunday morning there was still no sound but Frost’s, “easy wind and downy flake.”

Twenty-four hours later the city had pretty much recovered and returned to its noisy energetic self.  My son and his wife flew home Sunday evening, LaGuardia being already open.  My granddaughters headed to school on Monday morning, streets being clear and clean.  Shortly thereafter I left for LaGuardia and an on-time flight to Denver. Meanwhile, Washington, D.C. and Baltimore were still shut down, quieter than a cornfield. Not so long ago it would have been the same in New York.

In the 80s I was preaching in Brooklyn.  On our Sunday morning drive from Long Island the kids would count the number of burned out cars on the Belt Parkway, vehicles that had been at someone’s home 12 hours earlier.  On average there were about 20 stripped down and burned out vehicles on a 21-mile stretch of highway.

In 1983 I approved a single mother for adoption.  She had purchased a brownstone in Brooklyn for $92,000, a dump really.  I wasn’t even sure I could approve it for the placement of a child.  The whole city looked like that house – a wreck.  I wouldn’t take the subways after dark and wouldn’t park overnight in the city, ever.  But that was then.

Nowadays there are no burned out cars on the Belt Parkway.  The litter has been cleared and the marshlands turned into a national park.  And that brownstone in Brooklyn, the one I was convinced was a money pit?  Yeah, it’s worth a few million dollars now!  What a difference a couple of decades can make!

In 1969 a smaller snowstorm shut down New York City so badly it was a contributing factor in Mayor John Lindsay losing his job.  This weekend’s snowstorm made even a mediocre mayor look good.  What changed?

In his book, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell suggests one of the reasons New York began to change was Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s campaign to end petty crimes like subway graffiti and turnstile hopping.  The leadership of Mike Bloomberg took the city to an even greater level of efficiency.  So this past weekend, a snowstorm that still has Washington and Baltimore shut down was handled in stride by the Big Apple.

I am currently reading City on Fire, a novel about New York in the 1970s.  It reminds me how much has changed in such a short time.  Years ago I heard a lecture in which M. Scott Peck enumerated his reasons for believing in God.  Among them he said, “Even though the second law of thermodynamics says the universe is wearing out, I see a world reinventing itself time and again.”  Many called Peck a deluded optimist, but I believe he was right.  Everything does not have to move from order to disorder.  If you can change the culture of America’s largest city in less than a quarter century, why stop there?

With passion, hard work and cooperation, New York became America’s crown jewel.  Michael Bloomberg was hardly the darling of the African-American community when he first took office, but over his tenure he won many over.  The “can do” attitude that triumphed in New York came together when warring factions finally learned to work together.  What happened that made such a cooperative spirit appear in New York City and disappear from our national political arena?  How did we get so fragmented?  I mean, not to frighten anyone, but Donald Trump will not be winning over the African-American community, or any other community to whom Jesus might have taken a liking.  Is Trump really the best we can do?  Come on people, it’s almost February.

Our nation changed quickly on marriage equality, but it did not happen because of the legislative branch of our national government.  They cannot agree on how to change a light bulb.  It was a judicial decision.  But the Supreme Court cannot bring massive change to an entire nation.  Only the people can.

Is it possible to have a nation turn around as quickly as New York?  I believe it is.  I believe it is possible to focus on people, the planet, peace, and poverty, and arrive at solutions that are financially viable and socially sensible.  I believe it is possible to create a more resilient nation in which snow actually gets plowed because we finally realize we are all in this together.

New York was at work Monday because New Yorkers learned to work together.  Washington was not at work.  We all know the reason.  I’ve not been much involved in the political process.  Maybe it is time to reconsider.

 

Wisdom is Her Name

Earlier in life I was an inveterate thinker. My logical, rational mind occupied most of the active space in my being. I wanted to know things. Of paramount importance was the attainment of knowledge. In that way I was not unlike my contemporaries. The Evangelical world was captivated by the trappings of the Modern age. From Descartes to Locke, we were taught to focus on what the mind could unearth. At its best this led to amazing scientific discoveries. At its worst it led to a religion in which believing the right doctrine was more important than living a virtuous life.

In such an environment only the mind could be trusted. It became such a hallmark of the Evangelical church that the charismatic movement, a reactive community, emerged as an attempt to restore balance. Among the gatekeepers, however, that movement was seen as incompatible with “Biblical Christianity” and dismissed as frivolous and irrelevant.

In a world in which only the mind was to be trusted, feelings and emotions were seen as secondary, or even extraneous to the human experience. This was true in the scientific world, in which “hard” sciences like math and biology looked down on “soft” sciences like psychology and sociology.

In a world dominated by such factually oriented intellectual thought, not only were feelings and emotions lost. Wonder became suspect. Wisdom was secondary. And trust became nonexistent. Think about it. The mind does not trust. It is always skeptical, demanding a never-ending stream of information. Only the heart and soul trust.

The natural inclination of a child is to freely express emotion, embrace wonder, and trust life. As long as we have the basic building blocks of childhood we remain beings of wonder. If we sense the safety of our existence, have feelings of self-worth, and role models able to delay gratification, we remain trusting of our feelings, students of the heart, experts in intuition.

At some point, however, the education system of the Western world kicks in, and trust is replaced with skepticism. Pascal’s heart with its reasons that reason does not know becomes the antiquated musing you might expect from a man who walked around with the words of a religious experience sewn into the lining of his coat. Trust becomes a casualty, feeling and intuition an afterthought.

In my pastoral counseling I often ask, “And how did you feel about that?” Pundits make fun of that therapeutic question, but we ask it because we must. Clients often cannot identify their feelings. “I don’t know what to think,” they cry. I suggest thinking might not be what is called for. “What does your gut tell you?” I ask. The answer lies beneath the rational mind.

It will not surprise you that men have more difficulty identifying their emotions than women. Their hard wiring gives preference to the rational left side of the brain. Neurons do not fire as freely across hemispheres as they do for women. A woman’s neural connections resemble a ball of twine, with countless pathways from the rational side of the brain to the more feeling, intuitive right side. Men’s neural connections tend to happen within hemispheres. A man’s brain is able fire from one hemisphere to the other, but it’s like driving across town in rush hour. It’ll take some time. (For the curious, it appears the brains of transgender women function about halfway between males and females.)

Since men have determined the path of our civilization, we should not be surprised we have been in a 500-year reign of fact before feeling, knowledge before wisdom, skepticism before trust. We lose the truth that on his last day of public ministry Jesus did not say love God with your mind. He said love God with your heart, mind, and soul. In a civilization that questions the very existence of the soul, those words remain as radical now as they were then.

Intellectual understanding does not necessarily lead to wisdom. A well-lived life leads to wisdom. Wisdom is personified as female in the Hebrew scriptures. That would come as no surprise to a child. Children intuitively know wisdom is a she. But of course, there are also countless wise men, like Dag Hammarskjold, the Secretary General of the United Nations during the height of the Cold War. His book, Markings, is a journal of great wisdom. And then there’s Blaise Pascal and the Péensees, his unfinished masterpiece of knowledge and wisdom. I would have loved to sit at the feet of either man.

As for me, I still have a voracious appetite for knowledge. But it’s my heart and intuition I have learned to trust, and wisdom I seek.

And so it goes.

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.