This body-shape was then blown away and became an iceskating rink - at first with no discernible edges, just a sheet of ice. And I flew around the rink with perfect ease, like I did as a child. Backwards, forwards, crossovers, a few little waltz jumps, running over the ice on my toe picks like I always did right before close. It was just me on the rink, and the ice was almost perfect. It was gorgeous, and I was alive.
Again, I was fully aware of my body, though I didn't concentrate on it this time. Since September, it has, with eerie consistency, been exactly the same body (that, by the way, feels much more mine than my body as it currently is. Look how trans I am, guys, Spirit gave me a body during meeting). It's become less ambiguously androgynous to the point where I can say what it does and doesn't look like, though, so I have the satisfaction of being able to include pictures. First off, it's always pretty clearly FTM, chest scars and smaller shoulder-hip ratio than cis male bodies and everything (though I don't notice unless I concentrate with the intent to figure it out) -
- and otherwise I basically look exactly like Jared Leto. (For those not a regular part of my life, I recently saw a picture of this guy and everything suddenly made sense. Didn't know about his existence before he apparently exploded all over the web the last couple days, so I'm not saying anything in or against his favor, but you see the similarity, don't you? Well, pretend, because one day it's going to be a thing.)
Anyways - I was in a black T-shirt, soft, kind of stretchy black pants, and black skates on the skating rink. It was so quiet, but the quiet was comforting somehow - the echoes of my skates on the ice made everything seem grander, royal, pretty, somehow. The rink grew sides, until it looked fairly similar to a conventional ring. Worn plastic sides up to the waistline, with glass extending further up from there. I did a few laps, feeling the wind in my hair and on my arms, everything free and full of energy, when I approached the center of the rink and, right in the middle, did this wonderful tight spin. The scratch I made coming out of it sent a burst of magical energy through the ground, like Elsa's magic when she's building her ice palace. (No, I don't even remotely want to be her, what do you mean?)
This burst of magic transformed the rink into a ballroom with an ice floor, and low, soft, golden-lighted chandeliers grew out of the ceiling. Where the plastic sides had been were golden marble pillars -
actually, let's be honest, more like -
- complete with these gorgeous dark navy velvet curtains on windows looking out on blank whiteness behind the pillars. As I continued to skate around the rink, little glass lights like the liquid rain branches in - yep - Frozen fell out of the ceiling as well, and lit up amongst the chandeliers. There was no other lighting, so everything was illuminated by these tiny little lights all over. The ceiling itself was dark, only peppered by tiny, sparkling lights, as if it were the sky itself.
I could skate around the pillars and run my hand through the droplet-like little lights so that they klinked like windchimes, and the warmth and strength of my body against the crisp of the air was bliss.
After what seemed like a couple hours of skating, I made my way to the center and sat down crosslegged under the largest and lowest of the chandeliers and closed my eyes, mirroring my position back in the meeting room. The rink merged with the room and the room with the rink and everything suddenly seemed preternaturally beautiful and I felt so pretty and masculine and it was so comfortable and freeing and exciting. But soon this gave way for the totally un-sensory longer half of the meeting.
Yesterday, I went downstairs to play the piano in the prayer room and, as I sometimes do, looked through the worship binder they use for small group meetings. Surprisingly enough, I don't attend these meetings, and I don't go to dorm worship, and I haven't heard most of these songs in a really long time. I've been away long enough now that it's begun to get nostalgic to hear them, even if some of them still fill me with a kind of vague, deep, gut-wrenching nausea. That effect has been diminished quite substantially by my year and a half of distance, though, for which I'm very thankful. This song in particular caught my attention, because it was one of those songs I loved without understanding why and sang like it was new I'd heard it every time.
Obviously, like many other songs I used to be up to my neck in, these lyrics pose a bit of a theological difficulty for me when understood literally. I mean, "Your blood was spilled for my ransom" doesn't seem to have the same kick without substitutionary atonement. But I never thought about the lyrics in the first place, so somehow it was equally powerful even now, so many months after my wonderful apostasy.
It kept washing over me as I sat there - me on the ice rink and me in the meeting - wearing at my consciousness like waves wear on sand. Savior, I come, quiet my soul, remember. This in itself was always beautiful to me - entering into the quiet, meditative space in which I still find that which I might call God. In fact, I thought to myself, if I'm going to understand the story of Jesus's life and death and resurrection as a metaphor for the human condition, it makes sense that introspecting would grant connection to God. It's by looking in and centering that the song starts; it's by looking in and centering that my own worship begins.
Redemption's hill - Redemption. Look, if something's being redeemed, it must mean that something magical his happening, because the process of redemption means that human beings have come to understand something in a new light. Redemption, I have realized over the last couple years, is an entirely subjective process, as is revelation. These concepts have no weight unless it means that we see the objects of redemption or revelation in different ways, as different things, serving different purposes. What does it mean for us to be redeemed?
- where your blood was spilled for my ransom. What does this even mean to people given that Jesus' blood is our blood? Everything I once held dear, I count it all as loss. It's that Jesus' story - or the implications of his story - and its transformation of the way people see their lives, their natures, their own existences and purposes, has brought something once painful into hope.
Lead me to the cross, where your love poured out. What is it about the experience of torturous execution that appeals to the human condition? Bring me to my knees, Lord, I lay me down. Submission to oneself? One's own spirit? Rid me of myself, I belong to you. No. It's certainly not that - there is something valuable about God being apart from, or at least distinct from, us. That's what makes this song powerful. Belonging to something larger and better and more beautiful. But submission and lowness only means something empowering if it means being part of that redemption - but to what does that redemption actually refer? Lead me, lead me to the cross.
You were, as I, tempted and tried - human. I remember it being that word - human - that always caused me to breath a sigh of relief, as though it meant God simply couldn't be that far removed from me, because God was simply human. Nothing more than that, either, I now add - God is human. God is human. Human is God. We have God in us, and we are in God. God is that which is holy within us - that which is beautiful about the holy condition might be called God. But God is more than that, too - God is the personification of these traits, symbolizing the unification of all those things and people that have something of God in them. As though there were some single being we were all part of, a unity binding us all together in nature. The word became flesh, bore my sin and death - now you're risen. There's nothing abstract about this story. It's incarnational, it's real, because it's our own story. We're not alone, because Jesus binds us together in that experience of exile from his own body, exile from his own land, exile from all dear to him - God experiences this exile. We're not alone, because God experiences exile. God is the exile.
Everything I once held dear, I count it all as loss. Lead me to the cross, where your love poured out. Bring me to my knees, Lord, I lay me down. Rid me of myself, I belong to you. Lead me - lead me to the cross.
The human condition means awareness of exile. We feel estranged - being estranged from God means being estranged from any other people, any hope for the future or past, separated from possibility for healing or hope. Exile means destruction, and exile is fundamentally godless. Exile is when God turns on you, abandoning you to the beasts and to poverty and your enemies tear down the temple.
I've been reading a book about pain in which the author, a sufferer of chronic pain, describes her disgust with the story of the crucifixion - or, at least, her disgust in the way Christianity enamors itself with that symbol and story. Pain is real, she says, and I refuse to take up my cross and follow someone. I want my cross taken away. I will not celebrate it in some delusion that community with a God imposing pain on its creation makes pain better or something. Remembering this story, I thought to myself that she had missed the point entirely.
The Judeo-Christian tradition is structured around pain, exile, despair, and death because those are our experiences. That's the status-quo. That's what we've got. That's the canvas we're given, it's what happens. It's not about accepting our pain or being okay with it, because we have no choice about that part. We've long accepted pain, and it's become part of every bitter step through life. And what's more, pain is isolating. As the author of this text says, pain makes the sufferer retreat into their own world, incapable of escape and incapable of any higher thought, anything complex, anything other than a plea for the pain to go away. There is no hope, possibility, love, peace, or redemption in pain. Where there is pain, there is no God.
The word became flesh, bore my sin and death - now you're risen.
God - this personification of all those constructive human and natural qualities - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gratefulness, gentleness, self-control, hope, possibility, redemption - is there in every moment, even in the pain. Pain is no longer isolating, because pain in and of itself has been transformed.
Pain is not a vast chasm of spiraling despair. Pain does not mean that you have committed an irrevocable sin or that there's necessarily anything wrong with you. Pain doesn't mean that you've been cut off from the land of the living or that all justice has been forsaken for evil and a dark apocalypse. Sometimes these things feel real, and it's a dark place to be. Many of us really do feel this way when we're in pain - as though we're unreachable. But we do not remain in darkness forever, because we have risen, and there is always resurrection. Our pain is a sign of resurrection, and it is out of pain that resurrection emerges.
The Gospel does not eliminate the problem of evil as a lowercase P - E problem of evil. God is not analgesic. But that we feel pain prompts us to remember God - others, those less fortunate even than ourselves - and to make pain an opportunity to diminish others'. As the story goes, Jesus died an unjust death in an attempt to make the world easier for those who feel the brunt of injustice - the Israelites received from their LORD's hand double for all their sins despite anything they tried to do right. It's not about escaping our own pain, because it's already been accepted as an a-priori condition to applying oneself to this story that we can do nothing about it. But GIVEN that we've tried everything we know how to cure the pain and nothing is left to try - we need to make this world the kind of place where we diminish the pain of others.
This needs to be the kind of place where the sufferers of grief, those lonely or desperate find a place to stay. It means being a decent human being because we are the hands of God and also serve others as though serving God. God is no more than we are - God has become human and died with us, so that we might see light.
The Gospel means that we can approach our own pain without fear and let ourselves heal without being overcome by despair. It means we're not alone for too long, and that even in our pain, we find community - healing community, hopefully, if the community's living as "God intends" - with each other and the world. That means something, doesn't it?
God is not scary. Humanity is not scary. Life is not scary. We approach each of these things as though approaching the warm arms of a parent, confident and committed to the love we've found in each other. It's a very simple, self-perpetuating drive: pain inspires its own obliteration.
I want to live life the way I skate around that rink. There is something more beautiful about having an existence that sees the sparkling lights and the bouncing curls and magic and gold, a life that breathes fresh air.
- complete with these gorgeous dark navy velvet curtains on windows looking out on blank whiteness behind the pillars. As I continued to skate around the rink, little glass lights like the liquid rain branches in - yep - Frozen fell out of the ceiling as well, and lit up amongst the chandeliers. There was no other lighting, so everything was illuminated by these tiny little lights all over. The ceiling itself was dark, only peppered by tiny, sparkling lights, as if it were the sky itself.
I could skate around the pillars and run my hand through the droplet-like little lights so that they klinked like windchimes, and the warmth and strength of my body against the crisp of the air was bliss.
After what seemed like a couple hours of skating, I made my way to the center and sat down crosslegged under the largest and lowest of the chandeliers and closed my eyes, mirroring my position back in the meeting room. The rink merged with the room and the room with the rink and everything suddenly seemed preternaturally beautiful and I felt so pretty and masculine and it was so comfortable and freeing and exciting. But soon this gave way for the totally un-sensory longer half of the meeting.
Yesterday, I went downstairs to play the piano in the prayer room and, as I sometimes do, looked through the worship binder they use for small group meetings. Surprisingly enough, I don't attend these meetings, and I don't go to dorm worship, and I haven't heard most of these songs in a really long time. I've been away long enough now that it's begun to get nostalgic to hear them, even if some of them still fill me with a kind of vague, deep, gut-wrenching nausea. That effect has been diminished quite substantially by my year and a half of distance, though, for which I'm very thankful. This song in particular caught my attention, because it was one of those songs I loved without understanding why and sang like it was new I'd heard it every time.
Obviously, like many other songs I used to be up to my neck in, these lyrics pose a bit of a theological difficulty for me when understood literally. I mean, "Your blood was spilled for my ransom" doesn't seem to have the same kick without substitutionary atonement. But I never thought about the lyrics in the first place, so somehow it was equally powerful even now, so many months after my wonderful apostasy.
It kept washing over me as I sat there - me on the ice rink and me in the meeting - wearing at my consciousness like waves wear on sand. Savior, I come, quiet my soul, remember. This in itself was always beautiful to me - entering into the quiet, meditative space in which I still find that which I might call God. In fact, I thought to myself, if I'm going to understand the story of Jesus's life and death and resurrection as a metaphor for the human condition, it makes sense that introspecting would grant connection to God. It's by looking in and centering that the song starts; it's by looking in and centering that my own worship begins.
Redemption's hill - Redemption. Look, if something's being redeemed, it must mean that something magical his happening, because the process of redemption means that human beings have come to understand something in a new light. Redemption, I have realized over the last couple years, is an entirely subjective process, as is revelation. These concepts have no weight unless it means that we see the objects of redemption or revelation in different ways, as different things, serving different purposes. What does it mean for us to be redeemed?
- where your blood was spilled for my ransom. What does this even mean to people given that Jesus' blood is our blood? Everything I once held dear, I count it all as loss. It's that Jesus' story - or the implications of his story - and its transformation of the way people see their lives, their natures, their own existences and purposes, has brought something once painful into hope.
Lead me to the cross, where your love poured out. What is it about the experience of torturous execution that appeals to the human condition? Bring me to my knees, Lord, I lay me down. Submission to oneself? One's own spirit? Rid me of myself, I belong to you. No. It's certainly not that - there is something valuable about God being apart from, or at least distinct from, us. That's what makes this song powerful. Belonging to something larger and better and more beautiful. But submission and lowness only means something empowering if it means being part of that redemption - but to what does that redemption actually refer? Lead me, lead me to the cross.
You were, as I, tempted and tried - human. I remember it being that word - human - that always caused me to breath a sigh of relief, as though it meant God simply couldn't be that far removed from me, because God was simply human. Nothing more than that, either, I now add - God is human. God is human. Human is God. We have God in us, and we are in God. God is that which is holy within us - that which is beautiful about the holy condition might be called God. But God is more than that, too - God is the personification of these traits, symbolizing the unification of all those things and people that have something of God in them. As though there were some single being we were all part of, a unity binding us all together in nature. The word became flesh, bore my sin and death - now you're risen. There's nothing abstract about this story. It's incarnational, it's real, because it's our own story. We're not alone, because Jesus binds us together in that experience of exile from his own body, exile from his own land, exile from all dear to him - God experiences this exile. We're not alone, because God experiences exile. God is the exile.
Everything I once held dear, I count it all as loss. Lead me to the cross, where your love poured out. Bring me to my knees, Lord, I lay me down. Rid me of myself, I belong to you. Lead me - lead me to the cross.
The human condition means awareness of exile. We feel estranged - being estranged from God means being estranged from any other people, any hope for the future or past, separated from possibility for healing or hope. Exile means destruction, and exile is fundamentally godless. Exile is when God turns on you, abandoning you to the beasts and to poverty and your enemies tear down the temple.
I've been reading a book about pain in which the author, a sufferer of chronic pain, describes her disgust with the story of the crucifixion - or, at least, her disgust in the way Christianity enamors itself with that symbol and story. Pain is real, she says, and I refuse to take up my cross and follow someone. I want my cross taken away. I will not celebrate it in some delusion that community with a God imposing pain on its creation makes pain better or something. Remembering this story, I thought to myself that she had missed the point entirely.
The Judeo-Christian tradition is structured around pain, exile, despair, and death because those are our experiences. That's the status-quo. That's what we've got. That's the canvas we're given, it's what happens. It's not about accepting our pain or being okay with it, because we have no choice about that part. We've long accepted pain, and it's become part of every bitter step through life. And what's more, pain is isolating. As the author of this text says, pain makes the sufferer retreat into their own world, incapable of escape and incapable of any higher thought, anything complex, anything other than a plea for the pain to go away. There is no hope, possibility, love, peace, or redemption in pain. Where there is pain, there is no God.
The word became flesh, bore my sin and death - now you're risen.
God - this personification of all those constructive human and natural qualities - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gratefulness, gentleness, self-control, hope, possibility, redemption - is there in every moment, even in the pain. Pain is no longer isolating, because pain in and of itself has been transformed.
Pain is not a vast chasm of spiraling despair. Pain does not mean that you have committed an irrevocable sin or that there's necessarily anything wrong with you. Pain doesn't mean that you've been cut off from the land of the living or that all justice has been forsaken for evil and a dark apocalypse. Sometimes these things feel real, and it's a dark place to be. Many of us really do feel this way when we're in pain - as though we're unreachable. But we do not remain in darkness forever, because we have risen, and there is always resurrection. Our pain is a sign of resurrection, and it is out of pain that resurrection emerges.
The Gospel does not eliminate the problem of evil as a lowercase P - E problem of evil. God is not analgesic. But that we feel pain prompts us to remember God - others, those less fortunate even than ourselves - and to make pain an opportunity to diminish others'. As the story goes, Jesus died an unjust death in an attempt to make the world easier for those who feel the brunt of injustice - the Israelites received from their LORD's hand double for all their sins despite anything they tried to do right. It's not about escaping our own pain, because it's already been accepted as an a-priori condition to applying oneself to this story that we can do nothing about it. But GIVEN that we've tried everything we know how to cure the pain and nothing is left to try - we need to make this world the kind of place where we diminish the pain of others.
This needs to be the kind of place where the sufferers of grief, those lonely or desperate find a place to stay. It means being a decent human being because we are the hands of God and also serve others as though serving God. God is no more than we are - God has become human and died with us, so that we might see light.
The Gospel means that we can approach our own pain without fear and let ourselves heal without being overcome by despair. It means we're not alone for too long, and that even in our pain, we find community - healing community, hopefully, if the community's living as "God intends" - with each other and the world. That means something, doesn't it?
God is not scary. Humanity is not scary. Life is not scary. We approach each of these things as though approaching the warm arms of a parent, confident and committed to the love we've found in each other. It's a very simple, self-perpetuating drive: pain inspires its own obliteration.
I want to live life the way I skate around that rink. There is something more beautiful about having an existence that sees the sparkling lights and the bouncing curls and magic and gold, a life that breathes fresh air.
