Tag Archives: cisgender privilege

Microphone cut after Mormon girl reveals she’s gay at church

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Hey…this heinous and evil action is not unique to this one church, alas.  It is standard operating procedure in evangelical cultures.

But notice something particular…read the article and notice:  she was not doing any sin.  She was not sexually sinning, she was not defaming anyone else…she was simply being authentic and vulnerable.

That list in 1 Corinthians 6 which is used to rape, pillory, and execute LGTBQIA humans “In the Name of Jesus” is a list that refers to actions taken which flow from an unredeemed heart…here they all are:

sexually immoral
idolaters
adulterers
thieves
greedy
drunkards
slanderers
swindlers

…and of course the infamous supposed ban on same sex relationships which was actually speaking to the unequal and evil power dynamic practiced in those days by men of power over young and exploitable boys…very similar to how today’s Rape Culture looks.

Sexual immorality is a perversion of sex
Idolatry is a perversion of worship
Adultery is a perversion of relationship
Theft is a perversion of property rights
Greed is a perversion of desire
Drunkenness is a perversion of pleasure
Slander is a perversion of truth telling
Swindling is a perversion of relationship

…and the practice that was mistranslated by the KVJ translators is simply a perversion of sex no different than sexual immorality…

Not one of the root things is in itself an evil!!
This list is by no means exhaustive…but what is exhausting is the evil idolatrous, slanderous, swindling undertaken by millions of so-called Christians EVERY SINGLE DAY who carry it out in Jesus Name…and ignore all the other things in the list.

You’re merely a sinner in need of God…unless you are a homasexshul.

Truthfully?  It is your own guilt and shame which you scapegoat onto LGTBQIA people as a sop to your own guilty conscience.

This girl is far closer to the kingdom of God than the rest of them put together…because she is authentic!!

I suggest you try some…you may end up having a few less “Lord Lord when did we see You’s” to answer for…
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A video of a young Mormon girl revealing to her congregation that she is lesbian and still loved by God — before her microphone is turned off by local…

Source: Microphone cut after Mormon girl reveals she’s gay at church

After More Than 20 Years as Conservative Leader, Paul Williams Comes Out as Transwoman

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This story is very parallel to my own.
I encourage reading it, especially for the understanding
of a Gospel of Incarnation rather than a Gospel of Law.
“Transgender teens with unsupportive parents have a suicide rate 13 times higher than their peers. They are the most at risk group in the nation. Most of those unsupportive parents are Evangelicals.

“I have been in personal contact with thousands of LGBTQ individuals and their families from seven countries on four continents. Almost without exception these souls are Christians who have been ostracized from their churches and/or families. They always ask the same painful question, ‘What do I do now?’ I feel the weight of the responsibility.

“In my previous work, I hoped to save people from spiritual suffering. In my current work, I hope to save people from dying.”

Paula went on to state: “I do not care about their (evangelicals’) brand of orthodoxy.””I have no interest in debating it. It is of little interest to me.

However, I do care about their orthopraxy, how they practice the Christian faith. I find it lacking. I find any religion lacking that leads with judgment instead of leading with acceptance and love.”

Source: After More Than 20 Years as Conservative Leader, Paul Williams Comes Out as Transwoman

Father’s Day: An Illusory Mourning

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If you read here regularly, you know enough about me to know why “Father’s Day” is a very problematic day to me…for I was in the situation that a woman gets thrust into when she for whatever reason is required to be “father” to her children, whether it is due to death or divorce, or the joining of two women, and each of them trade off time in that role.

As I was not out to anyone, least of all myself, there was the expectation by everyone that I would simply “know” what being a father meant…but really the best I could do was follow the example of my own father, watch what males did, and try as hard as I could to be present in the lives of our children.

Alas, there was the unfortunate cultural baggage to deal with as well…something each generation discovers when their children grow up and become all-knowing teenagers and rip you to shreds with their withering rejection and depths of knowledge that “obviously” exceed your own!!

I have watched, read…and mourned as my life and history has disappeared before my eyes as it is recounted for others thru the pen of writers who leave me agog in the distance between their claims and what I have lived.  I hold in my hands letters, cards, and other mementos that say one thing and links that cross the transom leading to “myth-making” and demythologizing that seem to suit the maker’s whim and need while utterly ignoring whoever might have been present, however unaccounted for…

…and certainly there is great territory that I now see which I could not see then…mourning and grieving is hard work, but real transformation/metamorphosis is even harder because it demands first and foremost accountability to some truth outside one’s self…and it is slow…3 steps forward and 2 back so often…

…believe me, you have not known horror until you devote yourself in the midst of deep pain and sorrow over the course of years to this transformation only to find it entirely dismissed because of the presence of a two step back moment!!

But this is the lot of a transperson…dissociated in childhood, high functioning and intelligent enough to hide it from everyone including herself, only to find everything shifts dizzyingly in middle age and a brand new person who was always there emerges to the surface offering life to everyone but bringing so much death in the process.

One is forced to know one’s self…or die.
One is forced to live one’s life…whether accompanied or abandoned.
And one is at last glad to find moments of authenticity stretching into entire days, becoming weeks and promising a solidness that may last for the few years left on this stage called life before my candle is blown out.

And that brings me full circle to “Father’s Day”…and an interesting unfolding of meaning and history and experience as writ in the poems from that day in 2014 and 2015…

…I will never write another one.

Never.

Any further writing on that subject is more than adequately covered by the ones whose memoirs cover the gamut from memory to gaslighting, to myth making and destruction…and telling the stories that make sense to them not only their past but their present…for what a joyous role it is to be present scapegoat for those unhappy and not realizing that many independent choices have led them to the place they are in and that of their own volition and doing…as long as I am there, that result can be shunted off onto me…and thus provide some measure of relief and comfort, and maybe even some space to grow and grow up…

for certainly this is the role of a parent if not a father…

I love no less than ever I loved…perhaps even more now than then…but I am far less invested in measuring my own self based on the things that are said to others about me…because I know myself now, better than I have ever known, and I accept the successes, the failures, all rolled into one and called “a life lived”.

I think that I get to some of these feelings, emotions, conclusions in the poems on this subject.

At any rate, it is clear to me that there are new puppies who eagerly drink, and a multitude of souls who have begun to call me mother, or spiritual parent…and my job is to be who I am, in joy and full participation…if those from the highways and byways come willingly to the table, I shall serve them what goods I have, and continue in my quest to be utterly emptied of anything left to give on my final breath’s exhalation.

I suspect there is much to be gleaned in these poems for any parent of adult children…but I cannot be the judge of that…only embrace the process of being a parent to those given to me…and rejoice as I see the tools I diligently sought to impart put to use…even if it is for my flaying, dissection, and repudiation.

God knows I love them…miss them…and wish that I could know and be known by them.  But that option is not mine to know or even demand, for it is wrapped and concealed in the illusions and fogs of times future…

but maybe Christmas principles, lessons…perhaps Christmas visitations will give all Mr. Scrooges that reprieve we all wish for, but so few will embrace due to the fires of taking responsibility for being a chooser of free will in a determinative world…

And so to the poems…oh, I’ve many poems written to my children individually and collectively…but these three specifically concern the horrid day known as “Father’s Day”, and they are my only answer I shall ever make to the long horror show letter received on this day, or the articles about me that so deeply and mortally wounded my heart…I await with longing the day of resurrection that shall come.

Here are the links…if you are still here to click:

The Footprints Of Ghosts

The Blossom of Memories of You (Father’s Day 2015)

Beside This Ring Of Ashes One Year Later

The Footprints of Ghosts (commemorating my first Father’s Day as myself) | Charissa’s Grace Notes

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From the first “Father’s Day” passing since I entered transition…wow was I naive then.  Since then, the hell-words and deeper hell-silences have scarred deeply.

I will never ever celebrate or participate in this day again.

But this poem…ahhh, I was ringing the bell on this day.


The fire crackles and pops
its diphthongs and phonemes
in that hot and feisty
rapid-snap delivery.

“Dad!  Dad!  Daddy!  Father!”
It says this in living
letters of merry blazing
iterations of what …

Source: The Footprints of Ghosts (commemorating my first Father’s Day as myself) | Charissa’s Grace Notes

Rebecca Solnit: The Loneliness of Donald Trump | Literary Hub

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This article is a powerful examination of how privilege works…and shows that trump the absolute fucker is the collective mirror image of privileged people in the USA, even those who do not have copious wealth and yet still retain utter privilege as elites in our country.

I am trying to imagine a whole four years of this corrosive soul…and I cannot.  I imagine that those who place their trust in trump the absolute fucker will find themselves with no soul, having sold it in exchange for the delusions and empty nothing that trump the absolute fucker and his minions will visit upon us.

Empty, washed out and vacant souls, gaping like some bank had foreclosed on them, and stained forever with the blood of millions.

“He is, as of this writing, the most mocked man in the world. After the women’s march on January 21st, people joked that he had been rejected by more women in one day than any man in history; he was mocked in newspapers, on television, in cartoons, was the butt of a million jokes, and his every tweet was instantly met with an onslaught of attacks and insults by ordinary citizens gleeful to be able to speak sharp truth to bloated power.

“He is the old fisherman’s wife who wished for everything and sooner or later he will end up with nothing. The wife sitting in front of her hovel was poorer after her series of wishes, because she now owned not only her poverty but her mistakes and her destructive pride, because she might have been otherwise, but brought power and glory crashing down upon her, because she had made her bed badly and was lying in it.

“The man in the white house sits, naked and obscene, a pustule of ego, in the harsh light, a man whose grasp exceeded his understanding, because his understanding was dulled by indulgence. He must know somewhere below the surface he skates on that he has destroyed his image, and like Dorian Gray before him, will be devoured by his own corrosion in due time too.

“One way or another this will kill him, though he may drag down millions with him. One way or another, he knows he has stepped off a cliff, pronounced himself king of the air, and is in freefall. Another dungheap awaits his landing; the dung is all his; when he plunges into it he will be, at last, a self-made man.”

Source: Rebecca Solnit: The Loneliness of Donald Trump | Literary Hub

Unfurling From A Set-Free Throat | Charissa’s Grace Notes

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I am gunna begin reposting older poetry, here on Grace Notes…because Facebook is a wasteland of the driest thirstiest most stingy desert sand that has ever been. Proverbs would say that Facebook has two sisters:  “Give” and “Give”.

My older work is good…at least, in my own internal scales of what I like and do not like, it weighs out as treasure.  I feel it in my bones…it RINGS of true truth.  But it is unwieldy, this blog, in getting to those older poems…one must make time and space to even find them, let alone to eat them and digest them…

…because my poems are not immediately burnable carb calories…

Anyway…here they are, such as they are.

This particular poem is about finding my voice as symbol of finding myself.  It examines paradigms and presuppositions, and advocates for freedom from old superstitions and lies…and freedom to timeless Truth.
I still struggle to dig it out,
that splinter you shoved into me,
down my throat without so much
as a shot of whiskey or
a shot in the dark.

and you are so certain, sure
of how to walk the world an…

Source: Unfurling From A Set-Free Throat | Charissa’s Grace Notes

Holding It Tight

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you’re there
I see you in the
glow, the fierce proud
glow that melts snow and
vaporizes anything in the know

you hold
your bouquet
of blooming hatred
tight, vise-like, clutched
and gathered to your chest

where it
burns everything
it melts anything that
even thinks about getting
close-like, including your fingers

clutched
gripping

so tight
that you cannot
shake it off of them
your fingers and your face
so that your heat could even

get shared.

National Day of Prayer: Donald Trump White House Dinner | Time.com

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I draw attention to this because every single one of these people at this dinner thinks that transgender people are anywhere on the continuum from “insane and mentally ill” all the way to “demon possessed”.

Each of these people supports discrimination against LGTBQIA people.  Every Single One.

These shills are there with trump the absolute fucker telling him that he is God’s Servant when he is carrying forward towards  becoming law actual statutes that are the equivalent of death warrants for people as they lose their access to medical services and will simply die.

In the guise of “religious liberty”.

The list in 1 Corinthians 6 that is used as the cudgel against LGTBQIA individuals contains many things, ALL of which refer to behavioral expressions of basic violations of human beings by the exercise of power over one another.  The list is not a prohibition of actual things (such as speaking, such as sexual activity of any orientation, such as possession of property), but rather condemns forms of each of the things I mentioned (adultery, theft, lying, malice (which is hatred), and a specific form of homosexual activity that is widely held by all serious scholars to be condemning a specific homosexual relationship that involved the subjugation and oppression of one of the participants in a power dynamic that was akin to sexual slavery)…

Why do I mention this?  Because it is this list that is cited to oppress LGTBQIA human beings…while the same people who do this willingly serve people who lie, steal, cheat, run around on their wives…essentially ANYTHING that cannot be seen or is not admitted to!

But let someone be open about their sexual orientation or gender orientation and they are ostracized, shunned, and often literally physically assaulted.

This is who you have become, evangelical christendom (I will not shit on the word “Church” by letting it apply to you).

In this passage from Isaiah 10, we discover why these actions are a stench to God:

Isaiah 10   New King James Version (NKJV)

“Woe to those who decree unrighteous decrees, who write misfortune, which they have prescribed to rob the needy of justice, and to take what is right from the poor of My people, that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless.

What will you do in the day of punishment, and in the desolation which will come from afar?  To whom will you flee for help?  And where will you leave your glory?

Without Me they shall bow down among the prisoners, and they shall fall among the slain.

For all this His anger is not turned away, but His hand is stretched out still.”

Did you know that if the current proposed health care roll backs become law that it will result in a transfer of wealth of 300 billion dollars to the people in the country who make more than $250,000?  Yes that is correct:  the top 1% are going to get even richer…

These things matter in concrete terms of life and death…but they also matter in that the hypocrisy of these people at this dinner and every single person who supports these people is now on prominent display…the party of the goats who wail “Lord Lord when did we see You hungry or sick or naked or in jail” is forming up fast.

This is your chance to turn from your lazy, mindless, sinful supporting of an evil evil party and an amoral greedy titular head of that party…and return to your first love.

The book of James says this about “true religion”:
 Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.

Not the flocking to the side of a man who is willing to do your bidding to make it possible for you to literally hurt, destroy and murder the oppressed and the defenseless.

I will not associate or participate with anyone who actively supports these individuals and their leader, trump the absolute fucker.


The day before he signs an executive order on religious liberty.

Source: National Day of Prayer: Donald Trump White House Dinner | Time.com

And Dogs Ran At Us Hard | Charissa’s Grace Notes

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Last year on this day this poem came to me, along with feelings of overwhelming grief…
today, after the hunters began their work yesterday, legislative guns blazing and celebrating after…

today it makes sense.

we soared high on currents,
uplifts unseen by human eyes
but oh so visible to us,
we dancers in the skies…

ever young and long did we thus fly
until we tired and we had need of
landing, resting…

Source: And Dogs Ran At Us Hard | Charissa’s Grace Notes

CHECK THE SCIENCE: BEING TRANS IS NOT A ‘CHOICE’

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I am posting this for those readers who still may not understand the complex physiological and psychological factors that work together to form our gender orientations.

In light of the fact that the Bible is utterly silent regarding the so-called “morality” of gender, this article could be especially helpful for those of you who claim you love Jesus and yet treat transgender humans like Hell.

May God spare you the kind of treatment that you have handed out to others in the name of Jesus…but that is not how it works, is it?  The fact of the matter is that the exact standard that you employ to show your rejection and hate of transgender humans is the one that Jesus will hold up for you on your day of dawning…

Stop Using Phony Science To Justify Transphobia

The Hounds Of Torquemada

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sometimes scared I hear
the stink and the hot blood
rushing thru the crowds
like demons on the loose
the hounds of Torquemada

sometimes I see them
all the people in the streets
lost and in a mumble
of pain and crazy jumble
and death in every tumble

and I just wanna lay there
in the streets so dirty
teeming with the garbage
of privileged excrement
and tear my chest wide open

and with my desperate fingers
claw my hurt ribs agape
and reach in for my heart
and rip it from my soul
and hold it over head

and let my blood gush forth
in step with all my tears
and wash it all away
why can’t it wash away
oh Jesus wash, oh Jesus

why is it them not me
i think I’m gunna cry
and cry and cry and cry
while my heart bleeds and bleeds
until it’s bled all dry

The unlikely Texans fighting anti-trans bill SB6 | Fusion

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For all who want to:
A:  Understand transgender issues and origins
B:  Want to be allies in the granting of human rights
C:  Believe that being a christian precludes hateful condemnatory behavior
D:  Have a trans loved one(s) that you wish to support

This article is for you.

I personally have experienced every single thing mentioned in this article.  As a full grown middle aged human…the loss of family connection;  the loss of employment;  the loss of social standing, the hate-filled behavior towards me of literal total strangers; physical violence…

…not to mention the sort of thing that happened when I was little, and my choice of dissociation from myself.  Only God can ever really measure that damage done as a child…damage that was not “intentional” but was fully empowered by the cultural forces of the binary and thus did no less damage.

This mom literally tried all the things that transgender rights opponents espouse…read her story.  A conservative christian family with bona fides that may well make St Paul’s head spin!  The accusation that parents’ poor parenting is responsible for the “mental illness” of the child is revealed as the false belief that it is.

This child is amazingly strong and persistent.  I did not have that strength…I caved…and nearly died for the next 50 years.

All this damage, all this death…all because of clothing, genitalia, and bathrooms.

And trump supporter?  Please pay special attention to the reporting of the trump administration’s specific and deliberate plans to take away transhuman rights!  Just exactly as I told you.  Supporting this absolute fucker taking office is the deliberate empowering of someone who wants to hurt me…

as if you could what…beat the trans out of us?  Pray it off of us?  Be sure and notice in the pull quotes below the full grown relative who vows to send this little kindergarten kid to the hospital on a stretcher if that child was in a restroom that his 22 year old niece was in!!!

That is literally flabbergasting to me!  Really!!???  What is a 5 year old child gunna be able to do to a 22 year old woman??

No matter how many…no, even if you slaughtered every single transgender person?  We would be back in the next generation…because we are a function of human reproduction, and not a function of “social engineering”

“…No matter how much punishment this kid got, you couldn’t beat it out of her,” Kimberly said. “You couldn’t pray it out, I couldn’t cast it out.” Indeed, Kai was having none of it. Sometimes she would wait until Kimberly was on the toilet to taunt her from just out of striking range: “You know I’m a girl.” Other times, she began praying within her mother’s earshot that God would “let Joseph” (Kai’s former name) “go home and be with Jesus.”

Kai’s prayer was Kimberly’s breaking point. That, and learning about the sky-high suicide rate for trans kids; according to one study, 41% of trans youth had attempted suicide—a rate almost ten times higher than their cisgender counterparts.

“There are so many trans kids who don’t have her persevering, persistent spirit,” Kimberly said. “And if Kai didn’t have that spirit, I would have succeeded in breaking her, into conforming into what I was trying to make her be. And we would have all been ok with that until she killed herself, at 14, or 13, or 11, or 20, or 50….

“…Still, the social fallout for Kimberly was swift. Trans advocates often say “everyone loses someone” when they transition; Kimberly’s family lost almost everyone. While one of Kai’s uncles helped his niece pick out new outfits, most of her extended family distanced themselves. One aunt threatened to call CPS on Kimberly. Other relatives shared a Facebook post from a Houston-area preacher, proposing a training day where the church would teach children how to spot and report trans kids at their schools. A cousin sent Kimberly a Facebook message warning if he ever saw Kai in a bathroom with his 22-year-old daughter, Kai would “need a stretcher.”

“A best friend from the family’s church, where Kimberly served in ministry for years, stopped their years-long 5 AM prayer phone calls. When Kimberly attended a school board meeting last June to discuss the accommodation of trans students, she said one pastor from her church showed up to speak out against them…”

Source: The unlikely Texans fighting anti-trans bill SB6 | Fusion

The Acid Of Invective

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I am re-posting this today…it is particularly apt this week.

Your Silence As Well

“It Would Falsify Everything You Taught Me…”

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I am sharing this, written a couple years back…thinking now of those who literally believe that trump the absolute fucker is good for this country, this season of history.

The ONLY good thing that I can see is that his election tore off the masks and showed the real faces underneath, and what the worth of faith professed is…and isn’t.

Just in case it has not been obvious:  I reject trump and everything he stands for and embodies.  He is utterly at odds with the good news of the gospel.  Until the day he repents and brings forth fruits commensurate thereof, I will call him the absolute fucker.  I am not and will not be unequally yoked with him or his ilk.

I am stunned in the ripping of the masks…it’s as if I am watching the Yale debate team become “Lil Abner”.

He is maelstrom consuming and the earth disappears.

Read on if you dare

Source: “It Would Falsify Everything You Taught Me…”

Fire With Fire

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All it takes is a word…just one.
It gets free and yeah, so it trods a toe
but hey that’s okay cus the point is so
important, potent.

Then a couple words,
and a sideways slide
and down the hill
a ways

but that is acceptable
too, because this
is so important

well, the next thing you know
you’re in the WWE (even tho
you’re the good guy)

and death is okay because
you HAVE to fight
fire with fire.

The Very Thing You Hate

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It starts small.

Just one word,
connects almost
without effort to
another word

and they twist
together a corkscrew
actually…

and suddenly
that cork slides
so easy so tight so slick

and then
such popping
sudden relief!

the bottle in
a heart so bitter
is open at last
invective is free

but just a sip
then a glug
(one must be
careful you see
to apply bitterness carefully)

just to make a point

just to become
the very thing
you hate

 

trump is an absolute fucker

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I will never, ever be able to accept that someone thinks that they can support me while not only supporting trump, but condoning and extolling him and what he says and does.

I have no fellowship with him, in any way, shape, or form.

trump and his kind wish to not only hurt me, but also eradicate me, as if they can make it so that “there is no such thing” as transgender people.

And there are people who refuse to see this.

It blows my mind.

To list the ways, the deeds and the decisions that add the substance to the statement would take a month…but it is all easily found, at least it is easily found by anybody who uses other media sources than FOX and the so-called “Christian” Broadcasting Network (or some variant thereof).

Truthfully, I have such a sinking feeling that were it ever to become “illegal” to be transgender (as if that twisting of words could somehow ever define me), said individuals would think they were doing a work of God when they joined the Roman soldiers who killed all boys under two years old in the time of Jesus’s birth…and I would be dead.

trump is an absolute fucker.
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My Exodus

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Reposting a poem from last year…any good poem applies at a number of different levels, some known and some unknown and waiting to be discovered…

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I moved away while you weren’t watching
(it was easier than I thought it would be,
escaping past your X-Ray eyes
that look for flesh and blood
and thus missed my exodus)

I live by the sea, now…

Source: My Exodus

Dealing With Manipulation 

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This article gets to the core of a very difficult issue for me to deal with lately:  setting boundaries, and finding ways to deal with when those boundaries are either ignored, intentionally violated, or gaslighted.  Gaslighting is a technique used by the psychologically unhealthy person, and it is best if you simply google it should you be ignorant of its meaning.

As I set boundaries, I discovered that healthy people not only respect those but are actually grateful for them!  It brings definition and order, clarity and purpose…and I also discovered that unhealthy people do not respect the boundaries…and then do crazy things after they violate them and get called out.

An unhealthy and manipulative person does the equivalent of this:

Me:  I have a boundary regarding the consumption of liver, and I do not eat liver.  Please do not offer me liver, as I will refuse it.
Unhealthy Person:  Hey, do you wanna come over for dinner?
Me:  Sure

The appointed time arrives, and I find that there is nothing but liver to eat.

Me: Oh, wow…I see nothing but liver here, and I said that I do not eat liver and have a boundary about that.  I will simply not eat this time, and in the future, please remember that boundary.
Unhealthy Person: (angrily, or cultivating an offended or martyr attitude) SO BE IT!  I will never have dinner with you again!!

Do you see it, the tactic?  When a boundary is enforced according to previously defined and stated protocols and consequences, the response is like a nuclear strike… “If I cannot serve you liver for dinner, I will never have dinner with you ever.”

Then, when the healthy person continues to live out their defined boundaries, the unhealthy person can go around to anyone who will listen and give their version of the event, which conveniently leaves out their being informed of a boundary, their violation of that boundary, and their own choice to escalate things completely beyond a simple definition of what will or will not be served and/or consumed and into a “rejection” of them…based solely on the choice of the unhealthy person to go from being informed about what will and will not be consumed all the way to their choice to not even have dinner with the boundary setter ever again.

It has been a sad thing to be aware of the various ways that this so-called information goes out and becomes reality for other people whom you have never had an exchange within the last several years…for now, any exchange that could be had will have the words of gossip, lies, and manipulation as the actual boundaries, but hidden and lurking, like ice that appears safe to walk on but is treacherously thin.
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Sadly, these sorts of histrionics are nearly always accompanied by verbally abusive language, toxic acidic emotional abuse, and extremism in relational choices going forward.  It is like the behavior of a preschooler combined with the manipulative ability and animal canniness of an adult…but not a healthy and whole adult.

So I ran across the article that I have linked to…and there is a lot of great stuff there…sadly, so many of these things also fit our current occupier of the Office of the President of the United States…he can be found there, from 1 to 20!

Learn these things…they will help you be safe when around people who are unhealthy…and they will help you become a more healthy person in and of yourself.

Hey, it is no shame to admit that you are not a healthy person!  It is the first step in healing, actually…and it is never too late!  To use the excuse that you are old and set in your ways is to also insist that everyone has to conform to you and how you define reality…and I simply opt out of that.  Healthy relationships are not like that.

20 Diversion Tactics Highly Manipulative Narcissists, Sociopaths And Psychopaths Use To Silence You

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Oh Brazil! You Never Knew Me!

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I recall writing this in somewhat of a fugue…


Landscape of Disruption and thick Decadence
washing ever over me in those thin emerald waves
teal and deep blue, muddy yellow and tan.

Your streets of light and music,
aimless, drifting bacchanalia…

Source: Oh Brazil! You Never Knew Me!

FABULOUS answer!!

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Hopefully these are showing up in the right order.  If not, you can find the entire thread and the back story at
http://occupydemocrats.com/2017/01/09/trump-thinks-meryl-streep-lives-bubble-veterans-response-perfect/



Dread and Presences

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I am reblogging this poem from 2 years ago…here is the key passage:

“I step to the rail and look back
peering intently into the fog
thick and lingering,
but 2014 is shrouded, hidden
and if I hadn’t lived it
I wouldn’t have believed it
was anything more
than a dream.

It was a year that hollowed out
thinned out, emptied out
but never declared its intention.
I don’t think it ever knew
or if it even could…”

charissagrace's avatarCharissa's Grace Notes

Dread.

I feel it still.
Laying at the base of my throat and throbbing
dully, quietly slumbering with one leering eye
cocked open always and leaning towards my heart.

My heart…
chipped and worked, touched and chilled
by the frozen fingers of dread

and shards of it lay scattered at my feet
clear, jagged glimmering
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I step to the rail and look back
peering intently into the fog thick and lingering,
but 2014 is shrouded, hidden
and if I hadn’t lived it I wouldn’t have believed it
was anything more than a dream.

It was a year that hollowed out
thinned out, emptied out
but never declared its intention.
I don’t think it ever knew or if it even could.

It was a year without windows
but many doors
and ladies
and tigers.

There is more to life than meets the eye,
more than can be measured by the senses or a census
but this morning there is just the fog behind
and…

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Silken Tears: Written in the memory of Leelah Alcorn

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As a poem…I love this one.  I was blessed to capture some delicate and beautiful imagery, and it emerged in a nice meter that is augmented by the rhyming patterns and their shifting nature…matching the shifting nature of the poem.

Frankly, I was envious of her…and horrified with myself that I was so…this was written in Leelah Alcorn’s memory.

I cannot read this without weeping.


i saw her there, in the dark woods,
so fair of movement, fair of face
she walked beneath the milky moon
and bathed in silken light like lace.

she glowed with beauty’s blessing kist
upon her b…

Source: Silken Tears: Written in the memory of Leelah Alcorn

After The Fire And Fury

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After the Fire and Fury,
after the lies were consumed
there on the hearth in the ashes
just loose teeth, the only thing left…

…those teeth without jawbone to ride on
no power to bite my soft skin
and no way to grit and to grind
and I stare, there is nothing to mind
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my life changed…the nights became darker
and yet somehow more restful too
days took on a crystalline quality
I realized that I had begun

to view my entire life’s history
past/present/future all at once
as mere memories ashy and cold
in the ashes there, deep in the hearth

What’s the precise time, the moment,
in the life of a country of one,
a country where Samson’s been blinded
by his lust and his own hot despair

and self-tyranny takes hold in terror?
It rarely happens in an instant;
it arrives imperceptible, slow
and, at first, the eyes of the hopeful
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adjust…and pretend all is well…
I was drifting in one endless present
(the present, pray tell what that is?)
line of vapor, invisible instant…

But now I see clearly, no filter,
the connection of past and the future,
between motion and rest, it just lurks there
as if it’s in no time at all…

and what is it, lying there useless?
It’s just us (justice), it’s simply us.
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This Horrifying Displacement (On Existence In Post-Trump America)

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he spoke in broken words,
an anxious monologue
of guilt confessed and expiation…

me, numbed by the encounter,
and cast reluctant confessor
of an ordinary monster
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who committed such
unordinary acts
of blind obedience,

setting ablaze an entire village
with gasoline words ignited
by fists of flame,
trump-voter
and in the name of Great,
of Better…of fear.
And now he can’t get loose,

cannot silence from
his mind the screams
of those people.  Them.
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Now on a deathbed
of his own design
and no good sense

to even lay down
and be still, a last
desperate attempt
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to seek forgiveness
and what am I supposed
to say to this displacement,

this horrifying displacement?
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A Love Note…From The Darkside Of The Moon

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Sisters…

I have come, like Hagar returning home…
back from the dark side of the moon
and I am full of wisdom gleaned
from sun-baked wanderings
across wide bleak and barren lands
and Beautiful Bedouin Deserts
and all the way to that distant shore…

the edge of my soul-wound.
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I have faced the edges of myself
I have faced that Gulf of separation
and I have headlong heedless SWAN-DIVED
pure…and I survived
the plunge!

I have crossed over…that gulf
I have TRANS-ED!
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And now I run
returned to you, same-sided ones
My CIS-ters dear and precious-rare
marooned and longing for The DARE!
You still stuck on that Lost Coast
of desolation waiting at the long deserted
service station called same old
same old same old old old SIDE

Ohhh Sarahs!  I have heard such secrets in
the red-reed voice of Sirocco winds
Oh the things I know, winnowed by that
wind and winnow-stick of courage
from the shifting Sands of self…
I have sifted and been sifted
by the heat and cold and light…andtmg-article_tall
the dark
the dark

the dark that knows what sleeps alone
the dark that knows what it knows not
(and nought, ahhh, yes, the dark knows nought)
the dark that knows what it knows nought
and it has taught me Love Notes…
on the dark side of the Moontumblr_ofmf36kuxt1ue8tbmo1_1280
OHHHH MY MOON!!!
MA MERE!!!
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You see, she is stuck too (just like you, Sarah, just like you)
in his orbit circling and one side shining one side dark
her endless pasted happy smile while growing thin and desperate
and starved, ravenous in the night

Oh Sarah, remember you laughed, back then!
Well, I could teach you a thing or two about Laughing NOW!
Cus from your chuckle sprang a promised child
who grew into a nation dusty rusty red?

But I…me?  Hagar??
HAH!!
From the Womb of my laughter
springs forth The Children of Her Promise!

I!!  The Outcast ME!!
My Laughing womb brings forth
the very Rose Behind The Sun!!
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We are two wombs, two moons, Sarah…you and me
But I’m a moon that got fed up and broke away
and learned to spin and twirl and dance!
I learned how to gladden this close Dark
I have understood how to please the Light
as I spin and twirl and turnturnturnspinstepspinturn
lightdarklightdarklightdarklightdarkLIGHT!!!

I am your Hagar!  Outcast and returned
here in your hour of great need!
I stand before you, with you
with my wand of Cedar freedom waving
and my book of Mama-Conjuring!!

Ohhh Dearest Sarah, can’t you see?
That you are the same as me?
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Look past desert veils so long ago assigned
Peer deep beneath this hoary hated hide!
And see the vital fertile oceanic sea…
see my…
ME!

Ohh Sarah, I see you!  I was you…
languishing in bitter wounds of old
I see you in your hurty night
your tear stained grief
and darkened dreams

I see your Crystal Mountain Rare
now Shattered in Indifferent air
and Chasm shards!
And I have come to midwife you
from the womb of your true self
to the mercy of your real True You!
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I will help you see with eyes unblinking
thru your tears those canyons riven
by erosion bit by bit from
your most treasured self!

STAND!  Leave behind the CIS-ter lands
and join me, we’ll reclaim OURSELVES!
Finally forever truly SIS-TERS

For in truth?
Our destiny is one.
To be exultation light-filled
Trans-women all
crossed over

and spinning wildly,
Joyful in the Night!
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True North

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that passing
parade of people
flashes by, spinning
roulette wheel
KLAKLAKLAK
LAKLAK

klak     klak
KLAK

tumblr_noypg7py1z1s5u2cno1_5001and in the midst but set apart
and singled out from time to time
and separated from the herd
and from the heard and from the hearing

distant from particular promise
feeling so far from God’s presence
or God’s forgiveness because something’s
blocking our view of God’s sweet mercy

I
think
it is WHITE
Double OUGHT

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and the house wins again and preens
in false humility and slings
blame upon us Double Zeros
skewing vision til it seems

God has truly overlooked us and that’s not justice, it’s just us… 

It’s that inconsistency between
things we thought we knew
and things we deeply feel,

and yet

Desire is our compass
bloody, steady, unblinking.

It points to our True North
and leads us home
against all odds

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Like Blood And Oxygen

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breathing underwater,
these ancient words waves,
and these timeless thoughts
tides, and beacons…

my breath, my lament
(like blood and oxygen)
held tight within my chest,
and crushed by the familiar

finally rushes out,
released exposed expression
of an anguished soul,
a suffocating heart
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what was true for all,
of All ‘neath the sun
was not true for me,
me, here without air

cast careless away
(chummed over the side)
remnants of shame bubbling
out thru my clenched teeth
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and sinking, sinking, drowning,
praying for a whale
or even just a school
of plankton-kissed bright breath

and then against my will
my chest constricts, it heaves,
and bucks…glory oh glory
at last it’s true for me

and I am, finally
breathing underwater
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Morning Meditations About A Demogogue

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Donald Trump is a shameful joke. Utterly. SHAMEFUL.

But the BIGGER joke?

Good people…people who KNOW BETTER…are gunna vote for him.

The man is an open racist. He is an even more open buffoon. He is a demagogue of the most base and common order.

I truly cannot discern which troubles my heart more: the horror of his never ending race to the bottom of the ass of the electorate where he emanates as the methane emissions of a people group who are sick with internalized racism…or that people themselves who would stand with UNBLINKING EYES and assure you they are on the side of the angels and love Jesus with all their hearts…and then unflinching and without a SCOSH of a troubled heart vote for someone who epitomizes the worst and most base of Americanism, that virulent pseudo-christianity, that poisonous vile pollution of the pure Word of Christ in the name of a country, a kingdom of the world.

This isn’t a “Republican vs Democrat” issue. I have never ever in my lifetime felt that the candidate who opposed the one I wanted as President was metaphorically “of the devil”…

…but I truly, literally do so think about Donald Trump.e0c69ba1d8e62e7e214e54f3468ec364

Whatever your understanding of the devil, to me he exemplifies that being….sowing dissension as he goes and wallowing in the chaos of it all. And then saying it never happened.

They coulda offered Jeb Bush…McCain…Romney…heck, I MIGHT have even voted for Jeb! At least the man has governed, at least he comes from a family that has experience in how to be on the world stage and in the forum of nations…

But they gave up TRUMP…who is the crudest, most base of all the candidates in the race, and who ate them up and excreted even more hate and turmoil! And then…to BALANCE the ticket, they put PENCE there…yunno…the man who as governor of his state backed and supported STATE SANCTIONED DISCRIMINATION in the guise and the precious name of JESUS!!!????

It leaves me feeling utterly helpless…limp with fury and seething with longing to make my words spiritual Q-Tips to swab out the tickled ears of the deaf and to open the eyes of the WILLFULLY BLIND with their heads so far up their own spiritual behinds they are staring out of their own mouths at the world.
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The conservatism I used to adhere to was, at least I THOUGHT it was, more noble than this…honorable…dip your beak into Barry Goldwater’s book “The Conscience of a Conservative”…

and realize that the conscience of the Republican party is now seared, hard, unresponsive.

How ANYONE can hear what Trump spews day after day and not want to vomit, to weep and tear ones clothes is utterly bewildering to me.
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It can only be done by “not-think”…and while I truly do not think Trump will be elected, I absolutely guarantee this: if he does get elected, and you voted for him, you will find yourself sitting in the aftermath of the tragedy that will go down, and your spiritual ancestors from Germany in the 30s will haunt you like Marley haunted Scrooge…and you will BEG that it is not too late to right the wrongs…because for them?? How do you make up for the literal slaughter of millions of Image-Bearers?

I offer this Psalm this morning as the only way I can find peace in this place…this place of sorrow and utter bewilderment that there is a gulf between me and so many I know think themselves the apple of God’s eye who are gunna vote for this demonic buffoon.

Psalm 63
New King James Version

A Psalm of David when he was in the wilderness of Judah.

O God, You are my God;
Early will I seek You;
My soul thirsts for You;
My flesh longs for You
In a dry and thirsty land
Where there is no water.

So I have looked for You in the sanctuary,
To see Your power and Your glory.

Because Your lovingkindness is better than life,
My lips shall praise You.

Thus I will bless You while I live;
I will lift up my hands in Your name.

My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness,
And my mouth shall praise You with joyful lips.

When I remember You on my bed,
I meditate on You in the night watches.

Because You have been my help,
Therefore in the shadow of Your wings I will rejoice.

My soul follows close behind You;
Your right hand upholds me.

But those who seek my life, to destroy it,
Shall go into the lower parts of the earth.

They shall fall by the sword;
They shall be a portion for jackals.

But the king shall rejoice in God;
Everyone who swears by Him shall glory;
But the mouth of those who speak lies shall be stopped.
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To All From My Past Who Read Here

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Hi.

If you are someone from my past and you read here, I want you to know something.

You are welcome to read here.
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If you are someone from my past, and you are genuinely open to learning new things, updated understandings of the ways that technology has revealed realities regarding gender and DNA…if you are willing to meet me…Charissa Grace White…and truly receive me as you would any human being you had met and were getting to know, then you are welcome to be in contact with me.

But know that my choice to transition is not up for debate…it is made and done.  To debate that with you would be as silly as debating with you whether or not it was the right thing to marry the person I chose.  So I will not allow this…I will not put myself at the end of your firing range to become your scapegoat for the social ills you so deeply dread.
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And finally…if you are someone who reads here while thinking of me as that freak who is a “man” but is deceived and deluded by the devil and is now under demonic influence for thinking “he is a woman”, then just GTFU…ur dum.  Holding this position is like boasting about how stupid, intractable and ignorant you are of the incredible body of literature on the subject.  You ought to be asking yourself why you are so deeply upset over this!  Why does it bug you so much?

I am by far a better person than I ever was before…more of what people have always loved about me and less of what people have always despised about me.

Just go away if you are in that latter category…I don’t care how long I have known you.  The length of time you have known me is directly proportional to the ought you are obligated to in connection with me!  You ought to be more compelled to read the literature…you ought to be more compelled to know the open flower and stop worshipping the tightly closed bud.
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There is a male who flat out broke off a relationship that was over 3 decades old, because I “had crossed a river he would not cross”.  He has had zero contact with me since.  This in spite of how his actions violate the very gospel he claims to love.  This in spite of the countless hours we spent together, the countless actions of service and love and support, the walking thru darkness on his behalf…

…clearly the issue is on him.

But I bring him up to tell you that his is the party you want to go join if you are in that latter category.

I am me…free…and flying.  You can fly too, if you would actually take responsibility for your choices and your failures to choose…your fate is in your choice, and may you find surrender to Love as you choose…
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Photography

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I take a picture

(absurd,
when you
think about it)

(take)

(a picture)

I capture
something

(the shutter shudders)

(the lens blinks)

and a reduction
becomes a memory
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The Twenty-Five Hour Yesterday

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I wrote this last year related to the events current…and this morning I am struck in how all that has changed is the temperature…which has gone up and up and up…

…and half our nation has lined up behind the likes of someone who truly believes they can simply fire the rest of the world…

The Twenty-Five Hour Yesterday

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Hidden From Our Eyes

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“…now it is hidden from your eyes” (Luke 19:42)

Can you feel it
bouncing off steel beams
ricocheting off raw stone,

the sound of gunfire
off in the distance
grim and getting closer
in cold grey shuffling
grave-steps clotted
and rotted
and ruined
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it’s the sound
of relationships
already shattered
broken relationships bloody
gutted in the streets
and played out
before our eyes
horrified and haunted

we weep tears of disbelief
to the cold deaf earth
we sweep bodies like trash
into the yearning yawning earth
and yet we still will not
turn or
turn or
turn

in this season
in this time
and Byrds sing
desperately praying
it’s not too late
but we have chosen
rankly, rottedly

we have sung the zombie songs
and joined the charnel choirs
of the living dead because
we lacked the simple courage
to be the dead living…dead living!
we have chosen fear
we are drunk on distrust
we rave raw in revenge
we are sickened because
we ate only anger
and anger
and anger

and no one leads
no one guides
to whom shall we go?
who shall save us
from ourselves?

We shed another’s blood
when we run out of answers.
They shed Their own pure blood
as Their one and only answer.

We kill, buried in despair.
They rise, giving us hope…

but will we open up our hearts
and see Them shining in our brother,
hear Them singing in our sister
irregardless of skin color
or religion, creed, or dolor?
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Or will we just sink away
and slink away and dwell behind
those naked fig leaves and all truth

hidden from our eyes?

 

Until All Can Breathe

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It is not pretty
It is not comforting
Brace yourself…
for I rub our noses in it,
the hypocrisy

is too much for me
and horror, hate is
all I see this day
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Go ahead…
after reading,
go to the parades,
the barbeques, the picnics…
go to family and friends
and fireworks and fun…

but go
with these words
stuck in your craw and
mashed down in your marrow,
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and know that this is
the truth of where we are come,
where we have been led because
we will not lead and now we stand
on precipices and drunk upon our past
and deluded in our dreams of futures
that are just not real.
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I am glad for our constitution
one of the major leaps
towards true liberty
in world history…

but omg just baby steps
and not a signal that we have
arrived and can stop walking…
we must see how insidious
we have been taught
to play the fiddle
to scenes of horror
that would warm
the cold dead bones
of Nero his ownself.
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Extract yourselves
from the trappings
and tentacles that croon
to your swooning soul and seek
to pull you down into an addict’s
wet-dreamy tragic death

and make good your escape
while there is still a crack of time,
a sliver of hope milky moony white
and weakly glowing still
in this crashing night…
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for it will break indeed
in tsunamis of terror
not brought here
from foreign lands
but homegrown in
these places we did not
attend to carefully
and mercifully
and compassionately…

and then…
there, tonight
upon your bed,
in trembling,
ee946a09bfe7dc896b9f7ca61b601998
whisper a prayer
and ask that you be
just delivered of a sliver
of that silver privilege,
slippery that squirms away
and wriggles fierce to live like that
insatiable chest burster of Alien…

oh God
PLEASE DELIVER US TO TRUE LIBERTY
and do not rest until
all can breathe until
all can breathe
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Bullets Flying Everyday

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Nightmares.

That’s how I have been…lately.  See, someone asked me “How have you been doing, lately?”

Nightmares.
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It was a common question asked in a common way.  When I answered that Orlando had really shattered me, she shrugged and said that the world was going to hell in a handbasket and that we just had to deal with it.

Indifference mixed with derision that I was “emotional” and “unprofessional”.

And I flinched under a fresh hail of words which might end up being something else…let me explain.

Here is why I have had these nightmares of being chased, being hunted and slaughtered, being tortured and tormented and left to suffer and die:

Because this man took action in the real world as an avatar of what our culture throws every single day…words.

Every.
Single.
Day.
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As you read here…people from all walks of life…you statistically are cis-normative and as such you swim thru the waters of our culture with the current, finding it easy to slip and slide thru waves of words which wash over you and pass downstream without even a scratch.

But that is not the case for me…for millions in the LGTBQIA community…for tens of millions of others who are not privileged…and ultimately, it is not the case for you.
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Every day words are slung around by trigger tongues shot from missile silo hearts loaded with radioactive fissionable words and those words destroy over and over and over.  But bodies do not drop to the ground right away and we think that there is no effect.

I have read hundreds of so-called christian messages that say God hates LGTBQIA people, that God is punishing us for what we have “sown” (but it is implied that God doesn’t punish a cis-normie cus they are not … what?).  I have read people who are celebrating and saying they wish he would have killed more people.

In a strange way, I think this man was more honest about things than the vast majority of haters, because he actually did it:  he actually took instruments of death, and looked human beings in the eye, and shot them down in hatred, in horror, in fear.

But you?  You who use your words everyday on others and shoot them dead in the heart?  You who sit three thousand miles away and use words to hurt and silence and kill?  You who cast stoney words?  You who use chemical weapons of mass destruction in the name of “hating sin” and call that “loving the sinner”?
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You are him.  And anytime, anywhere, any of us indulge our evil and hating hearts with our words?

We are making our Our Own Private Orlando.  Our own little abattoir of blood and bone and terror.

I read a FB friend who was so eager to decry the so-called terrorists of radical Islam that she momentarily forgot to carry the slaughtered in her heart…a gentle and indirect prompt stirred her, thank God and to her credit she took down the post and remembered the true enemy…but I tell you this:

Every single slur, every single sarcastic remark, every single angry slam, every single troll comment is a bullet.

And I have nightmares because all this man did was precipitate into the physical world the death and destruction and rape and violence and horror and rage that surrounds me, assaults me, overwhelms me every single day.
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Yes…I remember the days before I came to myself…and I was like any other typical white privileged christian who thought they did not hate anyone and yet made casual callous jokes and had no awareness of anyone different than me as a hurting human being…and I will always bleed over those years of blindness, for they indeed qualify me as chief of sinners.

But no more…and now I can see how each and every time christians say that God is punishing the LGTBQIA community with actions like this, and that God is angry and pissed off because They feel mocked and thus slap us down, and that we are reaping what we have sown when in fact we had nuffin to do with how we are made…each time this is the attitude?  They have made the sacrifice of Love that Jesus made for us on the cross null and void…

…and they nail us up there…and they nail their shadow and sin there…and they are the ones who vent their wrath and fear and loathing…on us there…and they have made Jesus sacrifice to be in vain.
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What I am trying to say is this:

Each and every time you speak in insensitivity, unawareness, privilege, hatred, anger, prejudice, and judgement?

You are the Butcher of your Own Private Orlando and the hearers of your words your victim.

I am gonna go out to the world today and walk in that hail of bullets, that storm of bullets flying everyday.

And when I show how they wound me?  I am gonna be the one jeered at, the one others recoil from with the forked fingers thrust at me with the christian evil eye ward…
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When you stop killing with your words, creatures like that killer will not have nearly the power waiting to channel as an avatar of a culture of hate.

Nightmares.
I am having nightmares.
I am a pincushion of death-words thrust into me…

Let us wake one another up, for the hour is getting late.blood_moon_forest_by_pastorjwallen

Ode For Orlando

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I saw the stars fall in the night
it was dark and closing in
as I lay paralysed and still
and shivering in deathly fright.

In waves and showers down they plunged
as sable curtains tore and trembled
in the hand of some great evil
threatening to eat the sky
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But somehow, each one shot to me
and landed in my shaking soul
and burned within me fierce and fell
and banished fear and made me whole

Until I burned with stellar fire
and shone in gold galaxy gleams
my heart a starfield bold, untamed
for Mercy’s greater than hate’s schemes!
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And so, though Nebulas collapse
let them fall fast to this earth
into your open mouth and heart
Not for destruction, but for birth

Of new stars brilliant, unshakeable
that shine with Justice and with Joy
Children born of grief and ash
Who rise above hate’s cruel slash
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This is our birth, our ne’er turn back!
A thousand stars, a million dreams,
A myriad songs and voices shout
We burn bright…our light…

will never…never…burn out
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Unfurling From A Set-Free Throat

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I still struggle to dig it out,
that splinter you shoved into me,
down my throat without so much as
a shot of whiskey or
a shot in the dark.

and you are so certain, sure
of how to walk the world
and all her streets unfurled
when really you are justifying
dwelling in your fear.

But you look so damn normal and together
while I am flailing in the maelstrom of myself.
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Here is what you do to me:
Idealize
Exoticize
Misunderstand
Validate
Vindicate
Vilify
Victimize
Re-traumatize
Reframe
Take out of context
Murder mysteries

You lecture me, slay me with
hidden sneers and resurrect me with
empty scripts and steal my mystery…

and mysteries become stories
and stories become reality
and stories shape the mind
that tells and gives them shape.

stories about “them”
stories about “me”
stories about “you”
stories that isolate us,
separate and set us apart
from the world at large.
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You simply have no clue of how
the mind can terrify, filled up
with anguish, upset, turmoil, fury,
the mind makes meanings out of shadows
and is too easily taught
to fear what it does not know…

And that is your biggest blindest blunder:
You do not know what you do not know
and thus you fear the healthy YOP
unfurling from a set free throat!
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Your mind assumes what it cannot
make out clearly or take out easily.

It’s a survival tactic.

But it inhibits you from being open to learning.
It inhibits you from being students of life.

You’d be well-served to sit your assumptions down.
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Honor And Shame: Yes, All Men

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Climb that hill you Sentient Beast
Burdened by your Greed, your pride
Haunted by your stinking fear
Rotted deep inside.

Carrying your mouldy loaves
Stolen from The Lord of Old
on the day five thousand fed
from His blessing told.

Shame is under your right arm
Honor carried by your left
As you sneak around, you snake
In eating you’re bereft

Love Wins

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I am sharing this for those of you who love God dearly, and yet still struggle with NT teaching (actually lack thereof) regarding sexual orientation. You KNOW deep in your bones that you are wrong to conflate someone’s state of being with someone’s behavior…and yet you live in such fear that somehow God will punish YOU if you are not mean and nasty to someone who’s being is something that you do not believe can be.

Here is the problematic passage, out of 1 Corinthians chapter 6, a passage in which Paul is speaking prescriptively to a body of believers who were so caught up in judging one another’s activities that he had to castigate them for their reprehensible hatred. He moves to a rather broad net of behaviors that he casts, designed to cover every single person who may think they had standing to boast of their own righteousness, and then he begins to teach about how the behavior of each can bring dishonor to the entire body of Christ, as we are all together comprising the Temple of Holy Spirit…and then he concludes with a discussion of the topic of sexual immorality (which he leaves remarkably undefined btw, but would most certainly include the sexual behavior of heterosexually oriented human beings.).

My purpose here is not to break down the mistranslation into English that happened during the translating of the KJV in 1612…there are scholars who understand the nuances of the Greek text far better than I. Rest assured that with a bit of Google-fu you can locate many articles that will help you become informed.

{UPDATE:  Here is a great one that did not exist when I originally published this post…

My quest to find the word ‘homosexual’ in the Bible  }

LAY ALL THAT ASIDE FOR A MOMENT THOUGH…

Here is the reality of what goes on: Cis-het Christian who lives in fear that you will offend God if you do not hate and reject LGTBQ-oriented human beings, I am talking to you!!
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Here is the passage:
“9 Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals,[a] nor sodomites, 10 nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.”

Now, let’s see: I spot behaviors in this passage, behaviors that all focus on choices of the will…choices to commit various sexual sins (still not talking about orientations), choices to break commitments made to God and to other human beings (adultery and idolatry, which is a VERY tricky and subtle fault), choices to be envious that result in theft and coveting other people’s possessions, choices to become drunk and pursue a lifestyle of choice to indulge escaping from mature and fruitful living, choices to speak with anger and intense hatred in bitter speech to other human beings (yunno, like the comment section of articles), choices to THREATEN PEOPLE INTO DOING WHAT YOU WANT THEM TO…like the shunning that YOU REGULARLY DO to those whose ORIENTATIONS are imagined by you to be behavioral choices…

and yet somehow, ALL of the above choices you extend Grace and Mercy to, and almost all of those choices you have almost certainly been blood-guilty of yourself!! But you sit cheek and jowl in the pew with your fellow “unrighteous” and allow for yourselves and your cohorts in unrighteousness to participate in the Righteousness of Jesus and thus not only be forgiven, but in your mind EXCUSED from scrutiny…and you are content with the understanding that each person must scrutinize themselves with God (oh wait: Paul said that he did not judge even himself, for God is Judge)…

…and like electric barbwire your eyes SEIZE those English words about homosexual behavior that is the equivalent of a heterosexual choice that is unbalanced and abusive (which is what is being called out by Paul, btw!! Any sexual relationship that is exploitative and destructive to either partner is wrong, regardless of sexual orientation!)…and you make them into your scapegoats, and you WRITE OFF ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS WITH YOUR FAT BUTTS FIRMLY IN THE SEAT OF JUDGEMENT!!

You know this is wrong…you F**KING KNOW that it is WRONG! So you make up platitudes about how you love the sinners but hate the sins…yeah I call supreme bull shit on that one! Because if you did? You would extend to EVERYONE the exact same pass you give first yourself and then everyone else YOU deem is worthy of it.

You need to repent, and I mean right now, and climb down out of the judgement seat and work on taking the friggin LOGS out of your eyes that you have been beating God’s little lambs with incessantly!!
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The irony is that Paul ends that passage with words about the works of Jesus to wash, sanctify and justify whosoever will believe in Jesus, and goes on to say that ALL THINGS ARE LAWFUL!!! And yes, all things are not helpful and many things are indeed harmful.

But his point is that the Work of Christ is GREATER THAN all human behavior and renders judgement of one another as not only null and void but likely a far more insidious and poisonous sin than any of the listed behaviors.

Humans are born, created in Their Image and given a certain being. Among the aspects of that being are our sexuality and our gender…and each of those aspects together with EVERY OTHER GIVEN ASPECT OF OUR BEING is to be brought to our Precious Lord and presented to Them as our suitable offering of Love, and then LIVED OUT as THEY lead us, according to the LIFE that is in THEM and thus flowing into and through US!

Our gender orientations can thus be reflections of the glory of God and mirrors pointing to Their Love and Grace.

Our sexual choices and behaviors can thus be reflections of the glory of God and mirrors pointing to Their Love and Faithfulness!!

And GOD FORBID that we take any aspect of our given beings and use it as a club on someone else’s precious head!

“20 For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body[c] and in your spirit, which are God’s.”

I can guarantee you, however, that your current inner judging of the LGTBQ community is a leprotic infection deep in your soul and in actuality you heap up for yourself such a severe measure by which you shall soon be judged.

May God be true, and love win.

Bending Over Backwards

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i find myself constantly
bending over backwards
to become the table
the banquet feasting table
that my enemies
come and sit down to
a meal that I serve up
before they rise and run
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To Firetongue

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“Just because that’s the way you remember it doesn’t mean that’s the way it happened.”

— (via deeplifequotes)

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Dick-tator

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elaborate
intricate
wrought
invested
imposing

it’s still just
a brutal lock
and my subjugation
your only key

Your Masquerade

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your finger comes at me
like you think
you are God

well, it would
if you actually thought.

but you don’t
think
you just assume

and instead of sparks
you give ice chips of death
yes, that’s it, you throw off
sparks of death and call it life
in your masquerade

And Dogs Ran At Us Hard

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we soared high on currents,
uplifts unseen by human eyes
but oh so visible to us,
we dancers in the skies…

ever young and long did we thus fly

until we tired and we had need of
landing, resting, manna sweet to feed our
honking hearts, our silky souls to
take wing once again, in skies…

we thought forever we would fly

until that day the clarion calls they sounded
and the promises of haven-rest resounded
to our ears, our listening ears though with our eyes
we saw nothing but blind…blinds…we just saw blind

and swooping sounds from where?

and so we flew, we glided lower, lower
and so the guns did bloom and boom
and shot us from the keening clenching air
in lead-packed punches to the breast…

that took away our very breath

until we died, and dogs ran at us hard
to carry us triumphantly back into Massa’s yard
we, feathers fouled in blood, in gore, in mud
our necks floppy and broken in that flood…

of death that finally claimed us as its prey.

Close Vests

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“play it close to the vest”
came the granite words beating
against my face cascading
on craggy cliffsides or was it

like cannons booming and crashing,
coinvesting indifference and distant
assumption, consumption and
constant presumption?
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I couldn’t tell which was true
which one was stronger,
the smug or the deaf or
the dumb, cus they had

no ears, not that they
wanted to hear my voice
or my heart or my soul
desperate, traumatized, hurt…

But they certainly had words, oh yes,
and their unctuous tones quickly
said everything I was supposed to know
and nothing else…nothing else.
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Close…play…  “it”…vests…
what are vests?
And what does it mean
to play close…to a vest?

The vestiary vague and looming
is that closet where play can
be kept oh so close to the vest
(or costumes donned for cover)

The vestibule tells a different story
than the vestiges of vestiaires
that peek out from under those
fanciful covers…it looks so calm.
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Which place is the womb
of a travesty played out, and
which one can make someone
divest a warm heart for stone?

Vests…what are they…hmmm…
There is gravest…that might be worth
playing close to, since crisis might
confront the bravest…in gravest?

But just the naivest?  Well,
easy to push, just invest all
your privilege/position in triplicate!
And no one will ever be wiser!
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I think vestal virgin
might be the best vest
as they cultivate flames
and harvest the fire

To keep the community
safe and secure well,
that vest I definitely
can play oh so very close…

play…is that a joke?
it…the most common term for me.
close…near, or shut off?
to the vest…I ask again which one?

Vests and me do not really
know about one another
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Your Silence

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The tiny echoes of your
small silence are dwarfed
by the elephant in the room
hiding under the lampshade
of your indifference.

I said it, yes
I said it.

You don’t say anything
even though I wait
every night and endure
every desert day hiding
under the hot sun
of my charade.
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It’s time for bed
and I lay down
and still you don’t break
but instead you take
your silence-cuffs
and chain me
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the nightlight goes out
so you turn on the light
overhead and it bears down
bright
relentless
and sterile

just
like
your
silence.
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On Living The Gospel

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It is not so much our slogans and statements, our creeds and commitments as it is the way we walk them out with our flesh and blood.  Documents are empty hulls of potential…and every single day that we truly live those commitments we give them flesh from our flesh and blood from our blood.
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The challenge posed by staunch commitment to broken people is that you then will have dealings with broken people.
This can be troublesome if you unconsciously expect that broken people will live and act unbroken. If you dribbled a crystal globe, and it shattered, and then when you touched a piece and it cut you or poked you, the challenge you would be facing would be full blown in how you reacted to being cut.
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That is where the reality of creeds, statements and slogans truly emerges…the ones who react in shock or outrage or horror are the ones who thought that globe was a basketball. The ones who recoil in horror or anger or disgust are the ones who believed it was a soccer ball.
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That is the distilled essence of walking out the Gospel: realizing that it is a message that attracts the hungry, the lost, the broken and it is not the creed which transforms but the living Presence of Christ IN that creed that does the work of healing and restoration.
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Which means to live the Gospel is to be inconvenienced, to be confronted with wounds that stink and are infected, to change the emotionally and spiritually incontinent…and to do it in patient joyful tenderness.

Someone can make their point with stern words and terse actions…it is not hard whatsoever to understand a point that has been made…and someone else can walk their love with gentle hands and consistent presence, and then ask for whatever they want as the broken heal, and slings are discarded and casts are cut off and the lame begin to walk.
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And then…deeper…closer…at the pulsing core…the revelation that is couched in those words from the cross “Forgive them Father…they do not know what they are doing.”

Those words have such compassion and understanding in them…they assume that most people would do good things if they REALLY KNEW the impact their troubling actions are having.

It’s such a good thing that we are coming to the place where we can even see that our statements and commitments and creeds have a unique calling to be expressed in our current climate…

it’s an even better thing when we count the cost…

it’s the best thing of all when we keep going and the word(s) become flesh.
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One Week Of Hell

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I am astounded at the absurdity and the letdown of the last 7 days.

I have learned that I am cursed with the notion that words mean things…specific and precise things, and some words can morph, can shape-shift depending on the wind or the light…or the scents in the air…

and so I have collected them…words. I use them like a carpenter uses finish tools, like a furniture maker wields her instruments of creation.
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But I have also learned that others do not…

…others do not know that words mean things (they ass-u-me)
…others do not CARE that words mean things
…others use words carelessly
…others use words lazily
…others use words clumsily
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So the next thing I learned is that other people freak out when I ask what they mean…they get upset, or angry, or worst of all puzzled, as if I speak in a foreign language, as if I am an animal that suddenly went Narnia and began to utter intelligible sounds…but since I am just an animal they need not be considered seriously, it is just a lucky co-incidence.

This freaks me out greatly when this happens…being a sufferer of brain trauma, this ambiguity and denial of meaning is like throwing gasoline on a fire and expecting it to go out like water has been applied to those unwanted and despised flames.

So I devised a coping strategy…I decided to ask for clarification.
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“I don’t understand, would you please clarify?
“I am uncertain as to what you mean, would you please explain?”
“I am anxious and scared because the ramifications of what you said shout and gibber at me and I have no hiding place…will you please give me definition and reassurance, or if not then out with the guillotine and lop off my head?”

Sometimes, when I ask this, people deny there is anything to define…the inference is that I am crazy, reading too much into the words, finding things that are not there, and that I just need to mellow out.
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“Take things for face value” they say.

I tried that. It led to betrayal and violation and deeper/horrific trauma and a conflagration that nearly was my end…thank God for God and for Phoenixes.

So that didn’t work so well…or rather, it utterly broke and stained for good that place inside which could (a little) stay still and let go and take something on its face…this is utterly absurd anyway, given the combination of words that are so carelessly used and the mutual exclusivity of those combinations…to take most statements at face value is to accept meaningless absurdity and to bathe in the vile flow emanating forever from the ruins of the tower of Babel.

This led to a different strategy…that of survival.
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Maslow wrote about the hierarchy of needs, ranging from survival to self-actualization, and emphasized that when survival was in question self-actualization was a pipe dream if it was even present in the threatened consciousness.

I learned that words cannot be trusted when they are loose and running wild in packs like rabid dogs. I learned that other people do not want or will not choose to place them on leashes and seek to master them and use them for life rather than death.
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(“The power of life and death is in the tongue” says the sage)

As I survive, I discover people and places where there are indications and implications that I might find sanctuary. I begin to trust, begin to hope…and then comes the dilemma…undefined words, confusing communication contradictory and capricious…

What do I do? Whenever I ask for clarity, that ask is offensive, shocking, puzzling, incomprehensible? But if I don’t ask, then I am doomed by this:

In the lack of clarity, I am compelled (powerless in this, actually) to find the worst possibility and the shade of meaning that places me in the worst place…and that becomes my truth.

Which of course leads others to heap on even more incredulity, and they say to me THEIR truth of me…

…as if I am an idiot for thinking what I think in the face of ambiguity…

which actually drives me deeper into the fires.
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In these last 7 days this has happened to me…and I have happened to it as well, for I sought clarification…in open words, in more words than others consider decorous (because I want to be as sure as I can that I am clear in what I am saying)…in plain pleading plaintive words…begging words with empty cup extended in front of my dirty street urchin face…

and the bottom of lower than the worst has been the result…

The very worst thing, the ultimate blow that anyone can give to me in this place…

…………… is silence……………
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no response
no reply
no nuffin

That silence has a voice. Did you know that? Silence speaks?

In knives
In slashes
In crushing fog weighty and inexorable
Silence gibbers sinister
Silence threatens with burbly graveyard chuckles
Silence goose-steps over my grave in shivery stampings

Silence screams that I am nothing
Silence screams that I am soon going to be eaten
(but only after I have been torn apart)
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Torn apart by words…for it is on the other side of silence that others finally speak words…imprecise, wielded clumsy and ham handed, lacking nuance and deftness…and me, Andromeda without a Perseus caught there by my wrist, chained while the imprecision feeds on my liver in gnawing knife pecking beaks and ripping tearing talon claws…

It is in these moments that I wish it would just stop.

Just.
Stop.
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I have recognized this is also mostly the result of trauma in my life, and of that I have recently written…no, you cannot just “mellow out”, just “relax”, just “let it go and choose different”…thank you very much for your insensitive and ignorant admonitions…give me some credit, and imagine that a being as complex as myself might have tried that a time or trillion…no.

Trauma is with you like your skin, but it is a skin inside your skull and made solely of cockleburrs and foxtails.
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And that is where this poem comes in…”Nothing Rhymes Orange”

It is short, considerably shorter than the ravings of this post (now you see why I love to speak in poem and nuance and layers)

Words
Uncertainty
Anxiety
Fear
Ask for clarity
Silence

That is the road for Charissa that leads to hell.
5 days of hell, and me still here and no one understanding the fortitude or fierce fight that I have been in simply to be here prattling on and on and on and on…

Silence says to me “Just shut up and go away”

Silence is the siren call crooning and never have those sharp rocks looked so inviting, so final, so untroubling in their destructive shadow.

But I? Well, I guess that I am even worse than bad…because in the face of repudiation and rejection shouted so eloquently in that Silence slouching towards this Bethlehem, I don’t even have the good sense to go…the courage to go? The integrity to go? Is that it? Prolly that is it since my integrity is called into question in the imprecision and indefinite miasma that masquerades as communication…

Is it that I am stubborn? Is it that I am curious and want to see how it ends without me breaking character and stepping off the stage in Act 3 of 5?

I dunno…I will just go with the end of “Papillon” (those curious can search my blog for that, those not curious, well why are you even still reading…did I not lose you in the Labyrinth of my words?? ‘Ware the Minotaur, sojourner!!).tumblr_nz5hbkmuDM1qahpcmo1_500
I WILL NOT BE SILENT, even though so many will…

but I won’t lie either. These last 5 days have been a living hell inside my skull, and it hurts so bad.

More Hills

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Everybody
wants to be king
of a hill
and that hill
just a pile
of dust
hot and red
and dry
or a dungheap
so silent
and stinking
with malice.
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And yet
with more kings
than hills
and more dirt
than heart
and more dung
than wisdom
we just
collect hurt
and more hurt
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from wounds
and from cuts
and from boots
on small faces
from despairing cries
and from silence
and malice

we just build more hills.
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