Charissa’s Grace Notes: One Year In

Posted on October 5, 2014 by charissagrace

Welp…it seems that the obligatory post has thrust itself forward, or rather time has thrust it forward as it rolls on. Today is the date of my first blog post here, one year ago.

Grace Notes is One Year Old.

It’s funny…way back then, I hardly knew what to write about, I hardly knew anything, really (now, I don’t know much more, but I much more know what I don’t yet know).

I knew that my life had been shattering inside…
I knew that I had admitted, out-loud with words, the deepest secret of my life, one that I had kept even from myself…
I knew that I wanted to die, but could not bear the thought of my darling finding me, or worse yet, not finding me…
I knew that I did not know who I was, and yet I knew very well who I wasn’t…
I knew that I had to get some help, and had searched the internet for counselours in my area…

…and that was it. I sat down, a year ago, and asked Mama (Who at that time was still Lady Grace to me…I had not yet given up deep enough to discover the surface of the depths of Her Great Love Personally for me…for me.)…

It was early, at the usual times I have been haunted since I can remember, and I was up…coping…just coping, using all the ways I had developed over years to push the pain down, to put up some sort of layer between my insides which thrum to even the slightest breeze and jangle with the unfathomable ways of others who say and do things that literally flummox me.

I said out loud, “Lady Grace, here I sit in the night, awake again (naturally)…what in the world shall I call my blog?

You know that feeling when you undress for bed, and the room is cold and you know that under the blankets will be cold too but will warm quickly, and so the moment you are undressed you just snik straight into bed quick as can be lickity-brindle? And then the first rush of cold covers, followed by that delicious bloom of warmth and you have never felt so snuggly-cozy?

Well, that was what it was like when the title, in whole cloth, snikked into my mind and was bracingly clear and then started to glow warm…as I saw it, and then began to love it…Charissa’s Grace Notes: Transitioning from works to Grace and death to Life.

And in that year…

I survived a family member not speaking to me for 4 months (4 months!!! I freaking thought I would die!! How do you go 4 months and not talk to someone you love? Heck, I would talk to my bff every 4 minutes if we lived in paradise lol!!)…

I survived major betrayal and blame shifting at work…from multiple sources (and I was not even close to being out then)…

I survived suicidal feelings that got so strong and scary that I made an attempt, until She snatched me up (thank you Mama)…and Constance, I think about that day, that horrible day of weeping until I was dry and still couldn’t stop crying, and how words lost their power and I was reduced to literal babbling in the woods as I thought to myself I am insane, I am truly having a mental breakdown, and how close, how awfully close I was… tumblr_ncjrcmD9gI1qczwklo1_1280 and if I had, none of the poetry that I wrote would be now…I would not know my bff, or my Sissa Kat…my darling would still be unsparkly and shriveled inside and utterly shattered…

I walked into a wonder-ful moment when Mama showed up…and that I will keep to myself… tumblr_naayt7L3AA1qc91i1o1_500

Somehow someway I began to grasp that I am worth something, not a monster or pervert of freak (yeah, those words will likely echo in klaxon intrusion til I am resurrected and set free)…

I discovered that I am a real person, always have been, and have been fighting for the life of the “man” that I portrayed for all those years and I developed a “resilience” (thanks for that word bff) that simply would not give in…I found me… tumblr_nc8zw1O12y1rr74i9o1_1280

I found out that I am sort of a cool person at times, and have something to offer thru my poems…

I found the courage to start transition!! The courage to tell Dr. Jessie (who laughed and rejoiced and said “Oh thank God you finally figured this out, we here knew 6 months ago!)… tumblr_ncriliyBsU1t96d7to1_500

I started going to a spoken word poetry group in Portland, one that I didn’t know a soul there, and no one knew me either…and I went there as me…me…Charissa Grace, and in faith I spoke my self to them, my name to them…and they received me, and once in a while they think my poems are good…

I wrote 2 very significant (to me…it didn’t create much of a furor to anyone else) poems…they marked some sort of a turning for me somehow…I think it was after my HRT had had a chance to extinguish the testosterone poisoning I had suffered from for 54 years…

My Heart Dares

Carapace

Those were written at the end of the first quarter of the year, and in hindsight I see that quarter was a detox time…detoxing from the awful assaults death made on me the year before, and the year before, and the year before…the declarations there in those 2 poems are still ringing…

I began to dress as me, out of town and openly, and how can I ever ever ever find the words to tell what that is like, because as you read if you are cis-gender you literally lack the ground of (non)-being to feel this. If you dressed up as the gender you are not, and went about, seriously, for a day or two…then you would know just a poor facsimile of what dysphoria is…well I began to experience time lived in a non-dysphoric experience… tumblr_me80pisMV81qgk2yao1_500

I further integrated, and regained a ton of childhood memories…and Mama showed me the true reality of “that event”…the one that tore me in two for the next 5 decades…and though I cannot unhear that woman shrieking in fearful angry horror and I will never not hear the epithets she hurled into my fabric, I at last can hear Mama, and Her whispered words tenderly telling me who I am…and She knows cus She is the One who made me…

I began to spontaneously sing worship and praise songs again…and I was shocked when one day I heard myself, and knew I had been singing over an hour and not even knowing that I had… tumblr_nbooffw6JI1sl0gcwo1_500

I began to pray again…oh I had always “prayed” cus that is what a good christian does, right? Pays the Lord their bribes? (Yes, I went there…and if you are honest you will admit that you have done this, bribed God with your deeds and prayers…)…but I began to pray for real again, pouring out my momentary heart (and ddh you think I talk a lot to you…giggle! Mama knows…)…

I rode bike with my darling…together…and those times are better than all of my years of riding alone…

…and thru all of that…I wrote here, most everyday, but not always…and I began to discover I have a voice, and a name…

…and 4 days ago, that name became legal…all things are made new, the old has passed away behind me.

Along the way people connected to this blog, and it tickles me that there are actually people who follow these mewlings and musings…and tickles me even more when I see blogs that have thousands of followers!! LOLOL!!! How the freak does that even happen, since I really don’t get it how I have any followers at all??? But really? The only followers that matter are the ones who read each post, and invest it with life, dress them up and let them live far beyond the page…to you is my blood grateful thank you!

And I am still Charissa Grace…God’s Grateful Gleam of Grace displayed…if She and They love me, I know They love you as well and more so.

Six Months Later

Posted on October 3, 2014 by charissagrace

OMG…Constance, I am hunting back thru the archives at Gracenotes, and I just found something I wrote back in May that would have been PERFECT for last Friday when I had that 4 hour ordeal…I am excerpting it here for you…

Hi Constance…

…a quick note this morning to comment on some thing on my heart.

I know a lot of people over the years who are very drawn to me because I am open about the relationship Father, Jesus and Lady Grace have forged with me. They get all the credit, for this is true: there is none righteous, not one who has even sought after God! That means that if you are in relationship with Them, it is Their doing, and none of your own, save the assent of your will.

And in the openness of our relationship, these individuals find a self-affirmation of their own faith, relationship, etc.

But here is the kicker: I am also open about my struggles, my failures and flaws. I put on no religious airs, and when They expose any that have crept in quietly when pride was crooning its deadly lullaby, I renounce those pretentions as quick as I can. I try to boast in my weakness, and not in my strength, as Father promises that the Strength of Jesus is made perfect in my weakness.

So…it is just a matter of time before the people who are drawn to me are repelled by my lack of performance, my lack of keeping up the appearance and doing the things that signal that I am “orthodox”, saying the things that signal I am “safe”, and practicing the things that signal I am “one of us”. Soon, there are judgements, accusations, demands that I toe the line and not use my freedom to “make them stumble”.

Huh? I thought Paul was talking about someone who was weak in conscience and in their relationship, who might fall away completely from the life of someone strong in the faith, so the strong one should bear with the weak one patiently. These people twist that word, are strong in their conscience and faith, and boast that nothing could pull them away.

No…they are simply using faith words to try to keep me in the christian gulag that they run. And, as I know in my deepest knower that my Hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ Blood and Righteousness, and that all other ground is sinking sand, I regretfully, but purposefully ignore them, and thus end up branded a heretic.

You know the old maxim: if you don’t tick like I tick, you’re a heretic!

So…that wouldn’t be so bad in itself…in many ways we are known by our enemies as much as our friends.

…

Dearest Christendom dweller…you who sits back and reflexively filters every word thru your fruit detector lenses and doctrinal code breakers, and then marks red lines in your mind all over everything that doesn’t match up with your current understanding of the magisterial magnificent word of God…you will not like me when I tell you that you are in greater deception than the ones you judge!

You are in greater judgement than the ones you have consigned to your “love” (the affectations of behaviour that you manifest towards those you dislike or disapprove of or judge but know that they “need to know Jesus” so you will essentially brown-nose them into the kingdom)!!

Oh, oh how my heart longs for the day when we would take our eyes off each other, quit inspecting each other’s fruit as if we are Jesus, and simply open our hearts in joy and allow Perfect Love to fill us…to overflowing…and eventually to flooding the lives of those around us.

Constance…it is so simple and pure, really…just be kind…just do justice…just love mercy…just show compassion always…just let the abundant exceedingly great and abounding Grace make a “Grace-mess” everywhere.

…

Sorry Constance…that has been brewing in me for a good while. Some email comments, and some other things I had to write out of my heart so they wouldn’t fester.

Your regularly scheduled mewlings will commence after She feeds me this morning! 🙂

Love always, with the Magnificent Love of Father shown in Jesus and revealed by Lady Grace…

Charissa Grace, the glad, golden and grateful (and sometimes defiant) daughter of Them

Whooaa…can you believe that I am sometimes defiant?? Moi??? giggles

well…it is not uncommon for me to be ahead of myself a half a year or more!!

Do justice
Love mercy
Walk humbly

Charissa

To Forgive, or not to forgive? THAT is the Question!

Posted on October 2, 2014 by charissagrace

Dear Constance…

I was made aware of a fairly profound article today on the subject of forgiveness. What make this article scintillating is it is taking a very “outlaw” position that runs directly counter to our cultural assumptions surrounding the topic of forgiveness: what it is, who should give it, who deserves it.

Her take is that there is a coercion of forgiveness present in our culture that is in a sense just worthless cheap grace. She examines the rise of those cultural assumptions and exposes the underlying flaws in them. Then, she talks about some of the ways that people respond when she shares her ideas, and in the process gives a lot to think about.

Constance, I am posting this because in many ways it mirrors my own thinking on this topic. I think I differ just a bit, but that is due to axiomatic beginnings underlying my position, rather than any disagreement with the substance of what she writes. But I would like to take the occasion of her thoughtful and provoking article to codify some of my own thinking on the subject.

First of all, the concept of forgiveness and what it is has been trashed thoroughly over the years and passing styles and fashions of thought and belief. It has also been forced down our throat in such a way that it literally devalues the person being asked to forgive…all in the name of setting them free. When a person can do the most heinous act, commit egregious violation and abuse, and then turn around and demand to be forgiven by the one they have wounded it is akin to giving them a free pass to another form of rape!

No…forgiveness is nothing that can ever be demanded! No one has the right to be forgiven. Get that! No one has the right to be forgiven!

Anything you have a right to is in the field of Justice. Anything you have no rights to but deeply desire is in the field of Mercy. Any attempt to grasp which is which and when to give either or both is in the field of Humility.

Look familiar? I thought so.

So…forgiveness. Basically this is the decision and declaration by a person who has been violated in any way shape or form that they willingly choose to relinquish their right for justice and their right to be repaid what was taken from them and restored to a place of integration and wholeness. There are any number of violations and any number of redresses for them…and there are some that literally cannot ever be repaid. In our reality you always…and I mean that…you always have a right to be repaid when you are wronged.

You need to understand that if you choose to forgive (which means simply saying “you don’t owe me anything, now or ever”), you are intentioning to forgo any claim to redress and restitution. You need to know in your heart why you are choosing this option. You need to know that you will likely hurt and ache for a long long time, even if you forgive and usually especially if you forgive. Forgiveness is a sacrifice, and sacrifice always…always involves suffering.

Do you see how this is something that cannot (literally) be coerced from you? Because if you are guilted into it, or coerced into it then no matter what you have mouthed, you have not forgiven (and I am not assuming that as a value here, just stating what is and isn’t). You have granted another the opportunity to “get away with something”, and this is horrible for them!! Oh yeah. You think it is bad if you confront someone, that it might cause hard feelings? Think about the condition that results in letting someone get away with something, which further emboldens them, lets them sink deeper into their places of being violators…

What is crucial here is to understand the core, the absolute essence of what you do and why you do it when you forgive. That is a journey only you can make. There are sources to consult that will help guide you…there are powers that will assist you should you decide that the sacrifice of forgiveness is one that you choose to make…but it is only genuine if you walk that lonesome valley every last inch yourself, right there in the shadow of death, and then emerge on your own terms.

I want to share with you my own position on this topic. Of course you can expect that as best as I have been able to figure out, I have sought to base my thinking on the life and example of Jesus, Who is God Incarnate to me, and thus as an example is an easily seen picture of the Creator’s desire for the ways in which we “do relationship”…and also on the further writings in the New Testament which I believe to have been inspired in the heart of the author by Lady Grace, and then written out and set in counter-balance with other writings so that there is a dynamic tension which would always drive us to the Person of God and keep us from the horror of a behavioural code which would doom us all.

I think there are 2 very important sub-categories to the general act called “forgiveness”

The first one I call “Universal Forgiveness”.

What this refers to is the state of being that all humans are currently in due to the Crucifixion that hangs in the very center of the Universe and
penetrates/intersects/pierces every reality and every time and every culture and every experience.

In this Highly Exalted and Ultimate Act, all things have been set up for the opportunity to find wholeness once again…the chance to be made brand new! Not just a “re-run” or a do-over”, but the chance to actually become something you never were before!

This state of forgiveness has nothing to do with any decision that anyone makes but The One who was crucified. Makes sense, it is consistent with what I had said earlier about the essence of forgiveness. If you never know about it, it is still done, and you are still poised for the full freedom that its embrace entails. If you know all about it, but reject it as unnecessary, it changes nothing about it. And, if you fully embrace it and receive, it still changes nothing!

It simply changed the climate once for all in the entire Universe! His words “Forgive them Father, they know not what they do”…they echo into all of our dark and ignorant, benighted nooks and crannies! But those words themselves have nothing to do with the fate of a violator in and of themselves! They are not a free pass, a get out of jail free card.

There remains the question: if indeed this Action IS, then there are results assumed, demands implied, or consequences ready to unfold depending on anyone’s choice of what to do about this deed, if anything…and that is where we get to the second sub-category, and it is in this category that I think the author of this article has a powerful and cogent offering to us.

The second category is what I call “Personal Forgiveness”.

Think of Scrooge McDuck’s treasure vault, okay? All the gold, the jewels, the dollar bills, the wealth just spewing out everywhere. Now think of the key to that door being available…all you have to do is go ask the authority who watches over the vault if they would give you the key. Whether or not you do that is your choice…but here is what happens…ask not and you need to go round up your own treasure. Ask…and it is yours for the taking, as much as you need!

But you have to ask.

Similarly, if you desire personal forgiveness in the broad sense of the word for all the wrongs and bent of your being, you must ask the One who has the treasure and the key.

If you do ask, it comes to you with a couple of rules:

first is that you are receiving freely, there is no price you can pay that is enough to cover the cost…it is free…and as a free gift you are then bound to give freely as well.

And the second is that from that day forward, however and in what manner you choose to forgive others you are setting the measure for your own forgiveness process. Again know that I am asserting that based on my understanding of the words of Jesus. You will have to decide if it has any merit on your own.

Now, and this is crucial to get: as you choose to grant forgiveness, your forgiveness will function in both the “Universal” arena and the “Personal” area. That point is the absolute key to a clear heart in your decisions about forgiveness.

Now it is time to explore the process on our end personally…let me take you through my own decision matrix, okay?

There was a situation that I am thinking of in which I was deeply violated, actually spiritually ganged up on by a group of men in the “Name of Jesus” (of course, isn’t it always?)…I left that meeting torn up inside, literally mauled and torn apart, and each one of them had taken their turn at me. I was absolutely completely totally innocent of the charges. But how does one prove a negative? Right? If it did not diminish the horror and evil of actual physical rape, I would call it a spiritual rape.

As I drove home, barely able to see from the tears and sorrow and hurt of violation, I was talking to Them, for They knew of my innocence! And I was running thru the matrix, and ultimately was able to choose to forgive, and by that I meant in the Universal sense…they did not know what they thought they knew. I chose that they did not owe me anything before God for what had occurred.

I never ever told them of this…nothing is quite so smarmy and sickening as the so called saint who comes back and boasts odiously “I forgive you”, when in fact you haven’t asked for forgiveness and maybe you don’t need forgiveness! Maybe they are just offended right?

No, I never said a word, but inside my own heart, still hurt and torn (and was for months after) I declared that they did not owe me. I did so because I felt that to be the authentic loving thing to do, and because I know…I know what a generous measure I need for forgiveness in my own life! I want to over-forgive rather than under-forgive!

But I never ever brought it up with those men. And there is not one of them that I ever tried to be close to or spend time with or give access to my heart to. Why would I? They were violators…but worse…they were unrepentant!

After several weeks, one of them finally pulled his head and came to me. Stupid me, I thought he had come to repent, and my heart leapt in joy at the chance to truly forgive a truly repentant heart.

See, repentance is not “just being sorry”. It is not mere remorse, not mere apology. No, repentance is when you know…you know what you have done, and there has been a deep and fundamental sorrow over that act accompanied by a total determination to do whatever is necessary to repair and restore the person hurt. Repentance is when you have the revelation that what you did was wrong, period. Full stop. End of story. There is no justification, no excuse, no explanation…there is only:

“I hurt you terribly, and I was sooo deeply wrong! I grieve over what I have done and will do my best to learn from this and ask for help in becoming a different and better person. Should you ever decide to give me the opportunity to repair and restore our friendship it will be far greater than I deserve. In the meantime, I withdraw to give you space to make the best decision for you, and just know I will be refining everyday, seeking to become better.”

Or words to that effect.

Sigh…as I look back I see how this was a difficult thing for me to learn…the presence of an apology does not indicate a truly repentant heart. It is one of the ways that we empower abusive people in our relationships, this notion that an apology is the purchase medium and forgiveness is the commodity, and if you don’t “sell a forgiveness to them” then you are the one with the problem, you are the one with the issue. That is a lie.

The only condition under which you are obligated to even take a LOOK at the possibility to give forgiveness in this category of “Personal Forgiveness” is a repentant heart making no demands whatsoever and determined to do whatever is already possible to do to repair and restore.

But no…he had gotten wind that I was hurt, and so he came and demanded I forgive him…said that he had a right to be forgiven!! OMFG!! (and I almost said that outloud on the spot!!) He violated me, and then demanded his right for forgiveness.

I tried to explain to him the need for repentance, for recognition and understanding of the essential wrong and violation…his reply? “Just tell me the magic words and I will say them, okay?”

Well, needless to say, I didn’t say to him “I forgive you”. The mere saying of those words would have been meaningless! There was nothing to forgive and no way to forgive because the required cognizance on his part was absent.

I had already forgiven in the Universal sense of declaring they owed me nothing…but in the personal sense, there was no platform for the forgiveness to take place, because the repentance aspect was missing.

Chew on these things for awhile…and in the mean time I will confess that I have been steeped in the Coerced Forgiveness culture, and I think that I experienced some of the wounds I did to help develop these current understandings. Before I conclude, I will refer you to a beautiful post on forgiveness, which I think contains the elements that I refer to above…it is over at Dani’s blog “Blooming Spiders” (yaaay Dani!)…

…and then I will confess here my recent guilt of “demanding forgiveness”. It happened last year, around this time. I very foolishly shared some incredibly explosive news with someone I love deeper than life itself, and my timing was atrocious! Totally self centered, completely shared out of desperation and insecurity and a deep need for this person’s love and approval. She has always secretly been my hero, and it has at times been hard for us because we are a lot alike. Well, she was hurt, scared, upset, angry, felt I had taken from her the aspect of choice, stripped her of any power to listen with strength and offer me the benefits of who she is. I demanded…

…and she was not wanting to interact with me. Understandably so, I see that now. But at the time I was soo wracked with the guilt and horror at my poor choices and clumsy stomping around…and I was also terrified during this time that I would lose my family like what happens to the vast majority of transgender people. I wanted some reassurance, I wanted restoration myself…but no. Instead of waiting, patiently and penitently enduring, I demanded!

Dearest Lil Red Songbird…I was wrong. I am so sorry for my demands…my insistences…the ways I unwittingly sought to coerce you…and while we have long resolved the original issue I want you to know that I carry that hurt everyday, as a reminder to be careful and wise, and openhanded with power.

Okay, without further ado, head over to Stir Journal and check out a very powerful and provoking piece of writing.

In a life commitment to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly…
Charissa Grace

PS: I have a poem on this stuff: Gifts You Give Yourself . Perhaps it is helpful? perhaps not…

Heartwalks and Higher Places

Posted on October 2, 2014 by charissagrace

when i woke up this morning, it was gone…
that dull ache of nothing
being where something should be,
that dull blade mechanically, relentlessly
sawing back and forth and
twisting in time to every ticktock.

gone.

my soul ran frantically inside my belly
like a tongue darting to the missing tooth,
but now it found words spoken where
there was only a hole before:

“…heart of my heart, marrow of my marrow”

(yes, those words were said to me, and a
4 hour conversation became a grain of sand)

i felt something different…happy?
present? I dunno…because
I had always looked askance at happiness,
mistrusted its promise of meaning
in the hearts of other hearts.

but there is no mistaking the words
of that heart…your heart…
there inside me broken jagged and worn smooth
by the blows of grief and the waves of mourning
and flooded with raw, pulsing, vital and golden
sticky absolute resolute present!

you ask…no, that is not right…
you demand burdens from me
whether your limbs are
green and supple
or dry and brittle…
and you have looked, and
it was scary to be seen!

don’t get me wrong:
i wanted, i want to be seen,
to belong in our heartwalks and higher places…
(you speak my braille so well!)
i want us, and am joyful in your knowing
that you are safe to me
and glad.

but that is a dare I have never dared,
a deed before that always was so full of death
(to want)
for I was earthbound, Sis…
i am born in the dirt, Heart,
and not living breathing flesh (you)
and grace gathered (you)
into body and soul (you)…

but you shared your wings with me
(wings, oh wings oh wings ablur!)
and yeah, I can fly abit already
dodo, become duck, and becoming swan!
and i have looked…
to see that you prefer
the company of John the Beloved
and Mary the Mother and Mary the Magdalene over
the company of James and John and mighty thunder!
and i see that in your electric broken wholeness
i have been given priceless sparkling wonder…
i am unfolding, i am blooming and becoming
in those showers silver and shimmery glad.

when i woke up this morning …me there…
and you there too, speaking shalom
and I exaltation and us saying
life life life again and again
from this day forth until That.

Today is the first day of the rest of my life!

Posted on October 2, 2014 by charissagrace

Dear Constance…it is official! At 1:15:15 PM yesterday, the judge said the words…and I legally became me.

Charissa Grace White

I guess I am out there now…still have yet to do the entire company sit down and talk, which will be about 15 minutes…but things are moving along.

And yes…I did wake up this morning and feel totally different. Not some massive quantitative change, but rather a deep and profound qualitative change. I have often jokingly sang to myself “I Got a Name” by Jim Croce…well, now for real I do.

I went out to my car to leave work around noontime, to go home and get ready. I see a yellow legal pad with writing on the seat…and there is a vase with 6 beautiful lavender coloured roses!. They were from my darling darling DARLING!!

I dressed nice, in a style that gets me lotsa compliments (Scorpio-Patrol I think you have seen the outfits??), and arrived walking straight and tall and in the right sort of way proud. I looked everyone straight in the eye and smiled. I was treated with deference by this old man there…I honestly do not think he realized I was transgender! He was kind and interactive.

The clerk office opened, and within 5 minutes I had my papers and was on my way to a teeny courtroom. It had 5 rows of benches, and felt like a mortuary funeral service chapel.

In the back, there was an advocate for battered women talking to a woman about a very very scary sounding man that she had been involved with. I thought about how I had been treated by the old man. I prayed that I would not have to sit through that case.

When the judge arrived, she walked forward…slim, serious, no nonsense, and appeared highly competent. I was equal parts afraid and excited.

She called for me, and I stood, and then…

…she did this thing with her eyes and face that told me non-verbally “you are so brave for being here!” I just know that is what she was saying. I turned in my papers, and she read them over, the ghost of a smile playing at her eyes and hovering at the corners of her mouth…and then she took her pen, and brandished it!! And then she signed…announced that I was now Charissa Grace White, and openly congratulated me.

I walked out and down the stairs, and then in a rush I began to weep, overcome in the moment with the monumental implications of one loooonnngggg journey at last drawn to a close, and a new one well and truly begun.

The clerk was moved by my tears and much nicer…mayhap she figured out that this was a big deal?

I was alone.

Oh, I know you were there, but Mama had distanced everything, everyone…it was just me…and Her. I went home and stood in our house, raised my hands in the air and upturned my face, and I prayed out loud to Her, thankful, grateful, supplicating…

…aware that I had started the first life ignorant of Her…and was beginning the second in relationship with Her, the most amazing indescribable being ever.

Later in the day, I was able to have a short conversation with my bff, and her words of life just laid down right beside the prayers I prayed, and then later in the evening, my darling and I opened a bottle of pink champagne and toasted many things.

I am out.

I am free.

I am Charissa Grace, my Mama’s daughter of grace and sister to the Great Precious One.

I am at last glad to be alive.

Mama You Told Me

Posted on October 1, 2014 by charissagrace

You told me there would be silences,
differences between
mountain streams and valley brooks,
You told me Your flow was warm,
liquid collecting of the gifts
and graces of valleys.
You said my bracing quick lightning was
“clear and quenched thirst, but good lord girl,
to bathe in that electric chill??
I might never sleep again!”

You said.
You told.

And Your Face
so still and mobile
and wreathed in grace,
always grace…
and determined healing.
You wear tears naked
like jewels, like crystal
chips of Your Clear Heart,
intimate on Your face.

and me…spit up and emptied
and waiting for You
to fill the silent spaces
that ate grace and jeered
while feasting on my food.
me emptied, waiting …
and my heart,
ego-stained and washed clean,
captured
by Your face,
Your gift,
Your grace…

waiting…for that one grain of sand
to start an avalanche within me
of hope, nay!
of Hope,
sure and certain of its end,
like a leaf on a stream floating easily
on its way to the sea is certain
that it shall the voyage endure
and enjoy rejoicing!

You told me there would be…
You told me warm…
You told me…
You

Never Again

Posted on September 27, 2014 by charissagrace

Constance, I want to write here my commitment to myself and to you, and also state ahead of time that I recognize the result of this commitment will be quite a bit of ostracization from many people who call themselves Christians, but want to use that name to police me and my life decisions.

First of all, let me state that I am not removing myself from the scope and majesty of the wonderful word of God. When read and understood properly, it is a document of collected writings that show a God of love and advocate a relational ethic, not a legal ethic or a behavioral ethic. Right standing with God is found in right relationship! Not right deeds or right thinking (though each will likely result when you focus on maintaining a whole relationship first).

Given the pre-eminence of my commitment to this relational ethic, I am fair game for being called into account for anything that violates this ethic…things like committing adultery, committing murder, stealing, cheating, assaulting another physically or verbally, harboring hatred in my heart, and other things such as that. See the thing in common? All of them involve a relational breech with either myself, my neighbor, or God.

But:

BUT:

I am no longer going to subject myself to the inquisitions that I previously felt I owed anyone who wanted to “correct me” or “express their concerns” to me about who and what I am. For the record: there is nothing in the Bible that is prescriptive on the subject of being transgender, and there is less than that on the subject of whether or not a transgender person should pursue transition.

Therefore, anything beyond genuine questions seeking to ascertain what I face in order to stand with me and help my life to glorify God is off limits. I am not going there again.

Here is why:

In my recent encounter with a man that I have known for about 25 years, I spent 4 hours of my life in the attempt to reach this individual’s heart. Truth is? I never had a chance. He listened to me about an hour and a half, with a few questions, and then began to interject with a list of “concerns” which he had written before he even heard my story! He began by saying that he might (might!) modify what he had written if he had heard my story first…but since he was soo upset, he felt justified in going ahead.

He then proceeded to list for me several concerns that ranged from things that simply were not true factually about what being transgender is, all the way to accusations that I was under the influence of a demonic spirit!

He thinks that transgender people are victims of the fall (we all are victims of the fall…whether or not being transgender is a direct result of the fall or not is moot, as the Bible simply is silent on the topic). He also thinks that transgender people are bound by the words of Jesus that we “take up our cross and follow Him”…meaning that verse prohibits us from pursuing technological help and remedy which is readily available and so swiftly brings about such immediate change emotionally and spiritually, and is documented in so many places and in so many ways.

(Constance, I am very capable of nuking this proof-texting rape of these words, if you are interested, please let’s pursue that in the comments or via email, but trust me, it is not about transition specifically!).

Clearly, this man had seized upon this verse and wrenched it to fit his preconceived judgement that transition should not be undertaken…an opinion of his, not a biblically given command. He did not think it was wrong for someone born with a hole in their heart to seek surgical repair, or someone born with a cleft palate to seek surgical repair, or any other number of examples…just transition! he was intractable in this opinion, and I was considered by him to be indulging the flesh.

Next, he told me that I was under the influence of a spirit of deception that he called “the impostor”, and that this spirit opposed my becoming who God wanted me to be (which was code for him saying I was not becoming who he wants me to be). When I asked him if he thought I was bearing more fruit in my life in the last year than he had seen before, he affirmed that this was noticeably so, and so I then pointed out that it seemed to me the impostor was doing a pretty counter-productive job, as I was becoming more, and not less like Jesus…reminded me of the Pharisees who accused Jesus of casting out demons by demonic power!!

Then he told me that I was going to lose out on the blessing of being a patriarch of my family (nope, didn’t touch this…it would have been like telling a fish that it is in the water).

Next I was informed that he had never been so devastated since he was divorced from his first wife and that marriage totally fell apart…that he was just barely more devastated by that than he was by my decision to transition! When I asked him how many times we have had dinner together in 25 years, he answered none. When I asked him if we had ever done anything…anything socially together, he said no, never. When I asked him if he had ever come to my house, reached out to me when my father died, or when my children experienced growing pains, when I was injured and couldn’t do chores, he said no. When I asked if he agreed that we had not truly been a part of each others’ lives with the exception of the occasional church activity and our seeing each other at work where we casually interacted, he said yes, he agreed…

…so when I pointed out that this seemed to indicate a judgement of me made from the outside with no real knowledge of me what so ever, and thus would point to his devastation being far more his own issue rather than my “violation”, he denied it! He said that the Holy Spirit was laying it on his heart! That my claims that Mama had been gently leading me, confirmed by my wife, by my therapist whom I have opened my entire life to, by my naturopath who knew I was transgender at least a year before I did, and by a few close friends who lived everyday with me…that all of that was purely subjective and his own subjective “feeling of conviction” had just as much weight and legitimacy!

I kid you not.

When I asked him to show the biblical passages upon which he rested his “concerns”, he confessed this: “the bible is silent on this subject so I can’t actually say this is sin“. Shocked by his terminology, I asked him “Do you want to be able to say this is sin?” He got offended with me, and said that I was being harsh to him (!!! Yes, he went there). I said “no, not at all. I am so struck by your word choices. They reveal so much to me, for I would have phrased it something like this ‘Since the bible is silent, I would never say that someone was sinning in their pursuit of transition, absent knowledge of the relational parameters between the person and God, and friends and family.'”

He sought many times to other me and police me, and I gently and firmly rebuffed every attempt.

And then at the conclusion, he said that I had shocked him, because he thought I would blow up at him (“blow a gasket” is what he said)…Constance, when I was dissociated from myself experiences like this were very threatening to me, and I did tend to react very strongly and vehemently when accused unfairly. But I was calm, peaceful, and sorrowful far more for him than for myself…this bothered him, because it didn’t jibe with the picture of a demonized deceived person who was in rebellion to God.

But it wasn’t enough…he told me that he (and this is a quote) “had to obey his conscience above all else, and that when people asked him about me it was his duty to tell them his opinion and concerns regarding me”.

Yes, Constance…he has elevated his own conscience even above God, for when I inquired what he would do if God told him to remain silent, he said that God would never ask him to deny his conscience! I think you can see the problem with this…essentially there is a conflation of his conscience with what God wants! If he feels something strong enough, and labels it his conscience, then it is the same as God talking!

I did not have the heart to point out to him that even a cursory examination of biblical teaching regarding the conscience commands us to put the conscience and behaviour of our brothers/sisters as preeminent to our own…besides, it would not do any good. He considered it his right to out me, to anyone, in the name of conscience.

(Charissa before she decided to refuse to let others savage her)

(Now here is a little secret, Constance…part of the reason I agreed to meet with this person is that I suspected this might be the endpoint of things…and the truth is that I am ready to come out…I want to move on, get it over with and get on with an effective and fruitful life lived free and without a mask. So I sort of planned to use him as a stalking horse. If I wasn’t ready, I would have not met with him. Nevertheless, it was staggering to me…the arrogance that he so blindly bathed in, wallowed in…oh, and by the way, he has no “official ecclesiastical authority” in any denomination, or for that matter in my own life! He is simply a fellow follower of Jesus…and make no mistake, he does indeed love God and love people…just within the boundaries he has chosen to call legitimate.)

He specifically said his conscience demanded it of him. I didn’t even bother to ask him what he thought would be the consequence if he decided to not speak, to be silent and urge people to come to me if they had questions…I already knew his reply would be this: if I am not true to my conscience, then your blood is on my head…a phrase that indicates he considers me blood guilty of something or other, and also believes he is both qualified and called to be the bringer of correction to me, never mind by what credential or authority…there is an old testament comment in Proverbs that uses this phraseology…people who have adopted this as a moral code use it to justify all kinds of things including bombing abortion clinics and other heinous acts like that. The people at that crazy church who are so virulently anti-gay use this idea to justify their own evil deeds.

So his conscience is more important to him than I am, than the lives of the people who he talks to that may have been open to actually getting to know for themselves where I am at and what I am going thru but after he gets done will almost certainly avoid me…and the lives of the people who may have been touched by newly open-hearted lovers of God who would reach out to transgender people in love because of knowing me, and who I am, and my being transgender makes it not as weird as they thought it was…

And lastly, he said he would never ever call me “Sister”, or a woman…that this would be him empowering my lie and participating in it by proxy! What does one do with that…besides just shake off the dust and move on?

Constance: I had no chance of persuading him that this was a good thing, a fruitful thing, a blessing. None.

Everything I said to counter him was evidence of my deception and was a regurgitation of the evil that the deceptive spirit had spoken to me…and everything I was silent to I was silent to because I was incapable of refuting his great convicting words (he is wrong…I was silent because I didn’t want to destroy him by stripping him of every vestige of intelligent discourse and exposing his xenophobic foundations…when someone says they read about transgender issues for a few minutes the night before, and really don’t need to do any more research because God is speaking to them…well, there is nothing to be said there, is there?).

So here is my resolution: I will never again submit to such so called “expression of concern”. I will seek to find out ahead of time why someone wants to discuss my transition, and if it is for right reasons I will go ahead after giving the caveat that if they begin to “correct me” I will shut them down and leave the situation.

This is not evidence of my not being correctable…it is evidence that I am finally going to not be a dormat and put myself in harms way…which I have always done before (ask my wife, she can tell you of years and years…)

This man right this moment thinks me in error…nothing I said made a difference…and the others who will be coming, and many far worse than he, for he is at least merely passive aggressive, so his demeanor and voice are calm and pleasant…well, they will be even less persuadable!

They will do this (and it is a fact…ask any of your church friends, they can tell you): they will conclude that I am deeply deceived and in sin…because I won’t let them befoul me with accusations…so why should I even try to persuade them?

My therapist said something very powerful…she asked me what would be the result of my refusing to allow them to savage me so…and I said if I don’t, they will think me a heretic and not a true christian…and she then asked me “and what will happen then? Will you become a heretic? Do you care what those people think right now? Does their thinking anything change you or effect you in any real way?”

and I laffed!! Cus the answer is “no”.

This I resolve:

To do justly

to love mercy

to walk humbly…and love Them with all my heart

to be kind and gentle and full of Grace…upon Grace.

Love, love always,

Charissa Grace, beloved of her Mama the Holy Spirit, joint heir with Jesus the first fruits of the resurrection, and a daughter of the Father of lights, from Whom comes every good and perfect gift.

Trans* Women Are Not Drag Queens — Everyday Feminism

Posted on September 26, 2014 by charissagrace

Trans* Women Are Not Drag Queens — Everyday Feminism.

Constance…yes, it is very early. I cannot sleep. Usually I am good until the dread 3 AM. But tonight sleep is shy and skert of the potential I face for conflict today…

I am meeting with a person who has indicated that he has “great difficulty” with my choice to transition.

Think about that: this is a person I see less than a half hour a day…a person that I run into infrequently in everyday life…and yet somehow knowing that I am transgender is a burden unbearable to him, and the choice to transition is anathema and repulsive to the point that he wants to meet with me, so he can…what?

Tell me I am a freak? Tell me that I should not transition? Tell me to just suck it up and tough it out?

What…does he really think he is more creative, more insistent than my own heart for the last 48 years??? That I have not said these things to me already…and worse?

How does his life change if I transition…and how does it change if I do not (which is too late, by the way…I am never going back. It is Charissa Grace full and free or the grave)?

No…I think what he doesn’t like is that someone whom he knows and assumed many good things about is now acting in ways that are unexpected and unusual…and this is stretching him. It is challenging his lil boxes and tightly drawn lines…it is forcing him to confront things without the luxury of being able to write off the source of the conflict as a monster or immoral pervert…for he knows I am not that.

I ran across this link again today…and I may have posted it once already. No matter…it is a pretty good piece defining things well. I ask that you please read the piece…

…and then give us the chance to be. Please??

Charissa

I Choose…

Posted on September 14, 2014 by charissagrace

I Choose…
To live by choice, not by chance;
To make changes, not excuses;
To be motivated, not manipulated;
To be useful, not used;
To excel, not compete.
I Choose self~esteem, not self~pity.
I Choose to listen to my inner voice,
not the random opinion of others.

Lassos and Lanky Lines

Posted on September 13, 2014 by charissagrace

For too long
lassos and lanky lines
have spun round my neck
and held me to this dirt in time.
I listened, a few words here like grime,
a big fat echo there like slime,
up in the sandstone and
limp mountains like bars
around my world.

I believed them,
I let them choke me
tame and chain me
to plantations of shame
and fields of blame

Well, I am rearing now…
I smell water in the air!
My Mama tells me I am
Her work and She is
Filthy with loving me!
____5894820_orig

Streaked and smeared
with my red clay,
with my white heart,
Her hair standing
glowing, flying as
She works the treadle
and spins me loose
and into my shape yet born
but always known.

The dry skies crackle, and victory rumbles
in my throat like thunder,
in my heart like lightening
and the cowpoke slides sideways
and decides it’s time to go have lunch
and forget to ever come back here

and I will run on winds
my passion-fires will ever burn
in freedom so fine, so full.

The Only Thing Unusual About Ray And Janay Rice Is That Anyone Noticed

Posted on September 13, 2014 by charissagrace

The Only Thing Unusual About Ray And Janay Rice Is That Anyone Noticed.

Good Morning Constance…if you would, please check out this link and read the article it goes to. It is the smartest and most context-giving thing I have read in the latest uproar-media-storm about a high profile case…on something that has been going on so long and so much that probably most of you are not even aware that things like this and worse are happening right under your noses in your very own communities.

It is important to attempt to get a grasp of the scope of this issue…so that you, Constance, can begin to consider and weigh how you yourself think! It is mindblowing, really, when you consider how language and the way you think affect your position on issues, your understanding of them…at least, that is what happens with me, so I assume that it is the same for others.

When you are done reading the article, take it a step further…the rate of the abuse and attack of transgender women as a subset of women happens at a rate so much higher per thousand, that in order to maintain the same ratio of attacks on women compared to attacks on trans-women there would need to be over 2 million assaults on biological women annually that ended up in serious hospitalization and/or death!

Trans-women of color are even at greater risk.

Constance, everyday I am out further and further. I am having wonderful experiences and meeting so many great people…but I actually consider the wisdom of places and events before I go…and avoid places that I am likely to be assaulted!! ME!!! Charissa, the one that is dedicated to Grace and kindness! Why? Because there will be men there, intoxicated, and they will resent me for becoming myself and shunning male roles and all the privileges accorded them for the subservient place and role that women are consigned to…or, they may find themselves attracted to me in some way (though I dress very modest and am quite unassuming in the presence of strangers), and they attraction is likely to be accompanied by feelings of self-loathing, as they will assume that it implies they are gay

(which is foolish on so many levels and indicative of how our binary has stigmatized all orientations but male/female/hetero, and sadly the church has given its seal of approval on this approach and empowered this hate by not realizing the bible’s most basic teaching regarding sexuality is character teaching in areas of fidelity and faithfulness and the true loving and serving of one another).

For instance…my baby and I want to go to our city and attend the Octoberfest celebration…drink a few beers together, share a sausage or two, wallow in bad oompa music, and then walk along the waterfront holding hands and laughing…and if we do? And if there is a drunken belligerent there? And if he decides to “grace me” with his attentions, and then decides to force me into his world view…or worse? No thanks.

Or, Constance…what if you and I were out one night as friends, having dinner, say at a sports pub or someplace where there was nightlife…and we had a grand time and were walking happily back to our car, when 4 or 5 drunks appear who had noticed us…and started to verbally batter us, insult us, sully us…and then worse…

No.

In the same way that I exhort you cis-gender readers to make a way, Abraham Lincoln style for we trans-gender human beings, I am exhorting you men to do the same for women. Flat out fact: until you men cease from viewing we women as “the weaker vessel” and that meaning anything other than finer, more intricate, delicately formed and less robust in the same way that a computer is more delicate than a sawhorse, you will yourself remain an oppressor of women and not even realize it!

Gentleman Reader: when you first read of me being transgender…and leaving the shipwreck of manhood (for me it is just that) for the homeland of womanhood, did you recoil inside? Think it odd? Strange? Feel a sense of derision or something similar? And casting the net broader…have you ever teased or ribbed a male friend or associate by telling him he is “acting like a girl”? Or “you are such a chick!” (use of the word chick, and then even deeper why is that insulting to a man).

These things dehumanize women! They undercut the very love and commitment you profess to wives and daughters! They reveal that at the core, you see us as less than, and thus will without thought manifest ownership and objectify us…your own wives and daughters!

There is a bible verse that says that a good wife is a crown to her husband, and a crown is something that confers royalty, authority, regalness. A crown separates royalty from commonness and is worn on the head…higher than the head!

Well…I once had a dream (when I was still forcing myself to adhere to the role I was consigned to and blind to my own soul) and in the dream I saw a bunch of men from my church dressed in overcoats…they looked like flashers…and they were furtive and surreptitious…in a group like a bunch of adolescents gathered round a porn mag…and then, when I got close enough I could hear the conversation “…Hey, check out the crown I own!” and “Hey, ya wanna see my crown? It’s amazing…” and they would pull open their overcoats and “flash” one another with this crown they had attached to their body and dangling off like a careless canteen half full of water. It was sickening, actually, because they imagined that this was honoring to their crown!

Of course, the symbolism here is men who subjugate women and then call it protection, or covering, or shielding…instead of having the confidence and faith to actually place women in that place that a crown belongs!

I woke up, and that verse was ringing in my ears, and I could see it against the darkened ceiling in flaming letters…and I began to cry…and my baby woke up and asked what was wrong, and I told her…and lamented all the times I had unwittingly done that…she graciously assured me this was not one of my flaws (thank god!), but that she experienced this sort of treatment so regularly it was shocking to her to have this view of the phenomenon!

We have a long way to go, Constance…

I have friends who have loving spouses who are so blind to this that they see my friends as extensions of themself, and thus will not allow them to do or be anything that is threatening to them! Oh, they are blind to it, and that is all the more tragic, it is that deep.

Anyway…read the article…and then, think about it…your language (what you say if you are male, and how you just take it if you are female), your assumptions…the next time you want to compliment a woman and she is “a wonderful little lady” (instead of an intelligent human being) “…such a sweet thing” (rather than committed to servant-living).

This is Charissa…and I want to actually be!

Kind
Generous
Committed
Courageous
Strong
Vulnerable
Visible
Articulate
Tender
Full of grace and mercy
Devoted

May Mama grant it be so, to Their glory forever and the benefit of Their world, Amen.

“Not the Dogmatic Kind”

Posted on September 10, 2014 by charissagrace

Constance, I just read this lil comment elsewhere…and the writer exhorted the reader to have faith, and then added parenthetically “not the dogmatic kind”.

Full Stop.

I knew what the writer meant…they were trying to distinguish between the kind of attitude that presses forward with courage and hope stronger than wistful wishing, and that sort of blind jaw clenching bull headed obdurateness that has come to be called faith in our times.

It is tragic that the word “faith” has come to feel like a dirty word in the modern mouth to the point that the need to make such a distinction is felt…and even the more so, because it is an inaccurate understanding of what faith truly is!

Listen…if there are dogmatic claws and paws on your faith, then you do not have faith…you have belief, and belief all by itself is just like gasoline, an accelerant and fuel source…a potential energy put in service of a higher purpose to accomplish that purpose. Right? The old saying tells us “even demons believe and tremble”.

Belief can be the jaw-clench, lip curl, chin raised, nose-pinched blind and maddening mindset that we have all bashed against like waves on rocks…the dangerous powerful set of blinders that can potentially narrow the field to the goal and just the goal…which might empower the beginnings of faith, and might empower the beginnings of hate.

Faith on the other hand…ahhhh…faith is a state of being! A living and active thing! By definition, faith precludes dogma! What is the old and tried and true definition of faith?

“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”.

The substance of things hoped for…
things hoped for…
substance…
evidence of things not seen…
evidence of…
things not seen…

Oh my…now we see jaws unclench! Eyes open! Dogma flee, and wonder flood over souls! Suddenly the throne is empty and there is a possibility of turning one’s heart and will outward, to consider Hope…and to place that hope in things worthy of hoping in…

Used in the context of faith, substance derives from a Greek word which essentially denotes “that thing placed under”, or “foundation” or “substructure”. Very simple, and when combined with various connotations such as

“that which has foundation,”
“is firm”,
“that which has actual existence”
“the substantial quality, nature, of a person or thing”
“steadfastness of mind”,
“firmness, courage, resolution”
“confidence, firm trust, assurance”

Clearly, faith depends on a previous encounter with that in which you are placing it in. Boards, stone, cement, and blueprints all combine to give builders the (insert any of the above connotations here) to continue to build, and then confidently construct the rest of the structure….

…confidently construct…

Sorta like saying “hoping for”, no? Hoped for…this is rooted in that Greek word which conveys this:

“to wait for salvation in joyous full confidence”.

Ima stop there, Constance…but the many-faceted wonder of the place of faith…the state of being…well, clearly there is no room for something that is “not-faith”…such as dogmatic jaw clenching! That is just flat out stubbornness.

Now…here is the pay-off pitch, and the reason ‘Rissa decided to get out her harp and strum some strings:

In what do you place your faith (which would be the foundation of that state of being you inhabit without thought each day)?
In whom do you put your faith?
Is a what more appropriate to put faith into than a whom?
What is the track record of that in which you place faith?

All questions that are like can-openers, and boy are there some cans that need to be opened, cleaned out and disposed of, given some of the whats that have snatched preeminence from the whom…and some of the whoms who have masqueraded as the Whom, and made Them out to look small and mean, and miserly and cruel…or worse, as buffoonish backwards senile old uncles who need to be shoved out onto the back porch and eventually left behind in favour of…

Let me make a bold statement, okay?

If there is anything here, at Grace Notes…ever…that you like…
If there is anything here ever that is beautiful, or true…
If you find here joy, or wonder, or splendour spoken of…
If you find here consolation and comfort, encouragement and exhortation…
If you find here compassion, kindness…

If you find here grace…

That is all…all…due to They in whom I have placed my trust and belief, and it is the life lived fueled by that trust which has resulted in my entering into a state of being which is this: I have placed my confidence in Them, and yielded to Their living and active Presence within me…and all the things you may find here that stir you and make you hungry and feed you all at the same time…it is Them.

They are graceful enough to lift me up out of death…so if They will do it for me, I am confident They will do it for
whosoever will…

With jaw gloriously unclenched, and dogma sleeping in the “dogma house”…

Charissa Grace

Intentional Unknowing

Posted on August 31, 2014 by charissagrace

Constance, one more quick post, and then we are off on the bikes! Yippeeee!!!

So…I am learning to not call my body/soul/mind/emotion clash a prison, or sentence, or monster, or any of those other things…Mama has been quite active and specific in calling me into account and showing me that far from being the result of the conditions of the fall, and something that went haywire as I was formed, my being was very intentionally and soberly purposed by Them! Ever single last aspect!

oh, I was well acquainted with the Psalms which tell us of Their involvement and intricate knowledge of us…but I had pushed these things to a comfortable place theologically…as in there are many things that the Fall mars and wrecks…things that They have not intentioned, but have indeed accounted for with Their Grace. And I had classified my transgender being as one of those things: a result of the Fall and something to be redeemed and eventually cured when all things are made right. In the meantime, I despised myself. My body and its awful clumsy and large power covered in blechy hair and muscle…and that. And my heart…”weak and overly emotional and on my sleeve at all times side by side with streaks of snot”…and my soul…unwilling to hammer down on someone who needs correction but instead draw close and win them over, much to the ire of all the males in my life…I despised my swings from knowing I could do all things thru Jesus to thinking that They literally despised me for longing to have the body I felt I was denied…

…and worst of all? I thought, in my most secret thoughts, that They had done this to me, to punish me for being so bad…They had made this as scourging.

I am so thankful that They are overcoming all my evil with Their good! Truly…

…but this latest round of talks…She has been very specific, and letting me see some of the backstory of what things I have said, or done, or written which have been helpful and life-giving and of service to others…and She has shown irrefutably to my heart of shame and self-loathing that not one of those things would have been possible were it not for the unique balancing of all the various aspects of my being which are seemingly in conflict but are in truth the warp and weft of the very tapestry of life and grace They are making me into!

My experiences in male roles, and the accompanying policing and disciplines (used in a putative sense), the intense efforts made by men when I was young in efforts to “make me tough” or “teach me to be a man”…and later being in male spaces in our culture hearing the naked expression of men to one another, witnessing the truly unconscious taking of privilege and the aggrieved hearts when denied…and hearing men talk, when one on one with me and thinking me male…just different or weird and yet strangely comforting to talk to…

…and my experiences on the outside, excluded by minds and bodies and actions…female roles and spaces and bodies…which heightened my observational skills, and sharpened my inductive and deductive abilities…and gave me an ear to hear…

…and the null…the razor place of horror and emptiness where everyone else had a place and a person, and I had nothing, like literally nothing…and my lil mind heard about the God shaped vacuum? and assumed that was this (it isn’t, by the way, that space is where our spirits are still born and in need of resurrection)…and so pursued God and was pursued by Them,…hey, it was either that or kill myself. Those were my options…

and now…to see…to feel the wisdom and the divine risk They took in intentionally availing themselves of the developmental processes in human biology to make me…and then make me…Charissa Grace…so see that They gambled on Their love and grace and mercy being enough, and They gambled on me to be so slayed by one glance that I would be hopelessly in thrall forever??

No…never again will I call it a prison…and thanks to my bff who asked me once if I could choose one or the other, would I choose that? Giggle…most of the time the Q is which would I choose…but wise wise DDH asked more would I choose, if I could.

I choose Them. I choose Their glory and Their Plan. I choose Their Indescribable Comfort and Joy.

And now to my topic: I believe that God intentionally has chosen Unknowing in regards to relationship with us!

Yes! I KNOW, right???? That sounds heretical, and sounds insane! I mean, God knows all, sees, all, etc etc…They are freaking GOD! And when the One God in 3 Persons and the 3 in One God decide to manifest in Their Oneness, Their THEM-NESS…why then we see that fantastical and indescribable Entity referred to by those who have been in Its Presence as “Lord God Almighty”…and it is too too TOO to the extent that the people who see this fall down as if dead, and their eyes perceive “monsters” with multiple wings and legs and eyes and mouths that fly around the Entity Lord God Almighty and scream at It louder than all loud “HOLY! HOLY!” (and other things…shiver).

So where do I get off saying that God chooses to not know vast portions of relationship with us?

Well, Ima tell ya a story…years ago, I was out and about on a rainy dark clammy morning, soaked to my bones and chilled, and miserable beyond words. It was Oregon rain, and my baby who grew up in Wyoming swears to this day that 38 degrees and rainy in Oregon is a million times worse than 20 below in Wyoming…and I was out in a loud, smelly, noisy truck! Driving it, using it to work with my body so I could provide for my darlings 5. I hate trucks. I hate machines, and they hate me too. They bite me almost everyday and leave me bloody and wounded…and they hurt my heart too with their bellowing and caterwauling.

And my mouth and mind were with God…hey, I had nowhere else to go, it certainly wasn’t because I was any paragon of virtue or spiritual giant! Lol! No…I was more like the bum at the off ramp of God’s freeway with my sign and tale of woe to elicit a few coins…

but I was trying to talk to the Father that morning…and getting no where, because I was so despairing and so frustrated…and Ima be blunt honest with you, kay? This is how I talk to Them, cus I figure They know my heart already, so if I fake it and talk all pretty then not only will I have the regular failures and sins to deal with but the additional sin of lying to Them!! (Cantcha just hear it? “Don Pardo, tell Charissa what she just won!!” <Pardo’s unctuous voice>”Charissa…you just won LYING TO GOD!!!!!!!! No new car for you, girl! Nope…you get the nannygoat prize!” lol)

So, being bluntly honest with Father that day (and you here)… I finally had the following conversation:

Papa, why the fuck do I even bother praying!! It is just a litany of the same fucking complaints, the same awful feelings, the usual puking Pity Party! And the most frustrating things about it is You already fucking KNOW EVERYTHING!”

(yes, I f bombed to Papa…not proud of it…but you all know yo have done this, whether you have said it outloud or not…cus our hearts ARE F bombs, in their deceit and wickedness apart from Their Redeeming love)

Now, this is the distillation? Perhaps this rant went on just a bit longer? Long enough that I was hoarse and in a wrack of sobbing tears pulled over in a wide area beside the road because I couldn’t see?

And then as my sobs subsided (as they always did), as the tides receded and there was still the beach walk with Them to continue, I heard Papa sort of clear His throat and make a very gentle sound…so I listened.

“What makes you think I already know everything?”

“PAPA! Please!! Don’t fuck around with me today…I am not up to Your jokes and tricks and double-back hidey-behind pranks which result in your Wisdom being spoken to this fool! Everyone knows You know everything! It’s in Your bible, even people who don’t like You or believe in You know that You know everything (and by the way, I get super pissed at those idjuts who say they don’t believe in You, and yet ignore that You must be in order to not believe in…but that is a different rant!)!

“Does it? Does My Word say that?”

Constance, I have learned that when They ask you a Q like that it is best to shut up…and re-listen!! For the Bible is living, and so are we…and as we live and grow, so too the Word unfolds to us heights and depths and breadths that are there always, but visible only when we are in just this place…at just that time!

Papa said “What if I made a deal with Myself, with Jesus and Mama (Whom back then I referred to very impersonally as “the” holy spirit, and objectified Her)…and in that deal I decided that I would agree to “not know” vast territories of you and your life and existence…so we can have the Pleasure of joint discovery? After all…We have “unknown” all of your sins and iniquities in Our gifts of Mercy and Grace and Redeeming Metamorphosis…

“Think about your own self, with your own children…which is better…when you drag something out of them, or when you spy from a distance and figure things out…or when they come to you, unexpectedly and all on their own…in just that moment when you are feeling lonely and unnecessary to them or their life…and they begin to tell you their insides!

“The way that feels…the joy and gladness…the sense of miracle and wonder…and the way those things are your treasures and in your forever treasure box?”

and as soon as He said this I was PIERCED!! Whole volumes of reality clicked in for me…experiences lined up, and a whole new way of looking at Them was before me…so I laid down my f bomb boxing gloves, and instead asked in my open-faced and heart showing way…

“..Papa, is this true? How can You not know…but it FEELS true to me!!” And essentially He spoke to me about something I have called since then “Intentional Unknowing”. They chose to limit Themselves in many ways in regards to us….They have given us Free Will, and given us many other things that They have the ability to take back, but because of who They are, They never will, and thus “cannot” take back!

When it comes to our lives…our fears, our hurts, our joys and hopes? They can only know the depth of our specificity if we tell Them!!

Well, the rest is very funny, cus as soon as I grasped all this, I told Papa that I was gonna chirp and chirp forever and He was gonna regret ever telling me He wanted to know me! LOLOL (Hey DDH, can you relate??? giggles…or my baby out there?? or my own Daddy long dead…he is nodding in heaven and knuckle-bumping with the Father in solidarity, having endured the never ending Charissa chatter-flow! lol)

And I leave you with this: God has filled His word with countless exhortations to pray…and we in our foolishness and religious dumbassery have turned these pleas to talk to Them into duties to be performed in order to merit Their activity on our behalf giving us what we think we want!

Well, see it a bit differently…see Them, as you would your own children, pleading with us to talk to Them!! Let Them into our lives, into our thoughts and heart! They are hungry to know us!! They long to be given something that They cannot have in any other way, than that we give it to Them!! And then when you go to pray, do not think of Them as big know-it-alls who are checking things off Their list and tallying our score and computing our “answer to prayer effectiveness quotient!”

No…They are moms, hearts bleeding joy that Their babies are speaking to Them! They are dads, who so deeply yearn for the sharing of Their children and that dialogue which makes every sacrifice an honor and every blow a privilege!

And you wanna know something more? You yourself will come to know yourself better…and Them better too, cus They actually like to conversate!! They will talk back, you know…you did know that right? Right??

“Pray without ceasing” can be read as “Whaddya do t’day ‘Rissa??? Huh? Huh? TellMeTellmeTellMe!!)

Okay…I’m outta here for now…so how bout this? Shut off the computer…go for a walk…and chatter like Charissa!!

All my love and heart to you, and I can’t wait to hear your stories!!

Charissa

A Rosetta Stone

Posted on August 29, 2014 by charissagrace

Constance, I am going to do something, reluctantly…I am going to pull back the curtain and explain the deeper meanings and levels of one of my poems.

See. I have this friend and she loves my poetry, but I had her read “Her Door, Her Red Door” and she enjoyed the process, but had no idea what it was saying. Well, that presents a dilemma…on the one hand, it is my belief that poetry works in our hearts first, it haunts our guts, right? And then slowly, it bubbles up into our minds, and we make connections with the world via the symbols and metaphors that have fallen like seeds into the dirt, or sand into oysters to become pearls.

But on the other hand, if it is too esoteric and not accessible to the reader, then the poem ultimately is a failure. (I am not counting the cases where a reader is lazy and wants it all on a platter, instead of being let out into the garden, and then given access to the kitchen to gather and create their own understanding).

So for one of the very rare times, I am going to let you inside the form and foundation of the poem…it is gonna be sketchy in places, for I just cannot bear to strip her entirely of her mystery…but if it made you feel something, if it made you have an itch, or feel like you were getting one scratched, then you might want to read more of my things, and most of it is far more accessible, with much lower aspirations than this one.

Her Door, Her Red Door (Analysis)

Okay:

So my therapist is named _______. I wrote a poem for her way early on in our sessions, a wonderful lil ditty, small, cute, a lil skert and testing waters…she loved it as a mom loves a finger-painting of course…lol.

But last session, we were both morose, and we both had on our hearts the sad and beautiful exciting discovery that I was ready to “graduate”, and our times together would come to an end, and we would transition to friendship.

As I said, she was so struck by the changes in me, how I was become myself, and not stuck in between or ashamed of where I began, but was woman. I have very strong symbolic resonances with woman as living creature…for instance in the biblical creation myth, woman is the only being created of living flesh…all else is created from dirt. That, and many similar things have absolutely galvanized me with the truth that woman is the crown glory of all creation and that the patriarchy is so fearful and so jealous it tries to “kill her” (a topic for another day).

We discussed many things in my becoming, which led to discussion about why and what it was that brought me the final release in being able to become becoming…in the talking, ______ shared of her own journey thru womanhood, of being pre-menopausal and how hormonal imbalances are affecting her, how hormones have been so liberating to me as well.

So we come to the title “Her Door, Her Red Door“. First, I am talking about _______, and about how she has brought me to the doorway of being, becoming who I am. This door as I saw it was red…but at a deeper level, it is her heart. ______is all heart, and it is her door, by which she “enters” me, and I “enter” her as well…follow?

But then, and this emerged from the subconscious, I realized that “her” is me, too…my heart, and even more, my own red door “down there”…or for me “in there” (Isaiah 54 speaks to this btw!)…the one we discussed, and she shared so openly with me, woman to woman as mother to daughter, as teacher to student, as woman to prepubescent adolescent girl…

…and as you must certainly know, women have doors, are doors…men simply are not.

Next: in the poem she invites me, commands me, bids me follow her, and she has keys (authority, and conferred authority), the means by which doors are opened, for it is not enough to merely have a door, it must be accessible, traversable…

A woman’s booty is completely unique to women, that shape, that curve, perfect and echoing the curves of galaxies, built on Fibonacci sequences mathematically and the perfect mean geometrically. And she sails…there are only 3 capital letters in the whole poem…about the ship sailing…so picture a woman walking, confident and sure, as a clipper ship sails.

I also reference brick house and “back” and when I do that I am intentionally deriding the Commodores’ song “Brick House”…which reduces and sexualizes a woman and her miracle ship…and “Baby Got Back” which is even more blatantly egregious…truth be told? If men knew the half, nay a tenth of a woman’s desire and passion? They would run terrified and screaming in the night!!

And then the repetitive there…here…there…here, and leading into the honky…tonky…(which each start with t and h like here and there)…and that is the connector to the first comment about me directly, as ______has mentored me, drawn me…and so Hank Williams, a singer (building on the Brick house and Baby Got Back reference) moans, and becomes alcoholic, and “sees that end”…meaning Woman’s miracle ship intimidating, and also directly the male role I was imprisoned in is dying fast and is gone…Hank Williams symbolizes my birth name, and socialized role…and his music was wild and despairing as my life was then (not lifestyle wild, but emotionally wild and despairing, and self-destruction was always a siren song.)

Next stanza, it speaks of the new place _____and I were at that day, and had not been there before…she had been far more good and kind mother whom I wanted to be like…and we had at no time discussed sexuality or the deeper spiritual power it channels…it was about recovery and reintegration then…I picked the image of the Columbia river, because women are rivers, have rivers, channel rivers, and oh the power…and all others seek to harness that and benefit, right? Men, turbines in, and women turn them…

The lines about her walk (and remember I am speaking of me as “her” in a very distant sense as well)…and her swishing, ricocheting from gutter to gutter…what a hip swing, across the entire path of being, but also to tie in a pun about balls…”no gutter balls” Picking up a 7-10 split…that is nearly impossible…and becoming myself was to overcome that split in me, between who I am and what I am…see? And no gutter balls…eff yeah!!

Those keys…no sound, bunched…the image of power, seeing keys outlined in tight jeans, and the promise of power and entry granted, authority…also keys are in pianos, so you see the musical theme sowed back around again.

Teena Marie is the next musician, and she is as I recall of Portuguese, Italian, Irish, and Native American heritage…she was a soul singer, and omg was she ever amazing…as good or better than Diana Ross or Beyoncé, and I love them both…well she was also singing a lot about power in sexuality, and I loved her so when I was in my 20s, for reasons I could never articulate then…and I…”half” one thing and half another, and in some ways neither…and she grabbed her keys, her authority, her permission from street corner dudes…(think singers around the barrel fire singing a Capella…)

I also bring her in because Hank is passing, going, going…and Teena, who is dead, is also Marie, Mary, made pregnant by divine fiat…and so me made woman by miracle and Heather, and medicine which is the same as magic and miracle in so many ways…

…and then we come to the door…go read that part again…and you can see a living heart, or a vulva and vagina, and mystery temple of every single human being ever, even the Christ…

her door before us fat, streaks-run-swirls-whorls, depth-breadth flowing
crimson coral flaming, cardinal glowing carmine cerise chestnut cracking
garnet sanguine scarlet and rosy…that door was thick and giving…it blowzed there
full, sprawled (like titian’s venus) and throbbing with certain promise.

…and all the words are all shades and various hues of red…and how is a woman’s heart all that different from her glory? Her temple? Is not every child first conceived there, in her heart, who that child is and shall be?

And then _____gives me a philter, a potion, from her river, from her flow, from her heart, from her glory…

(of course not literally, as you read never allow those elements to do anything but drive the heat and passion of the poem…they are a moan of desire and lusty want…but only that. I assure you of that, but must mention it because I was so honest as to feel it must be there, for it always is there in every woman, if she is blessed enough to know herself, or to be shown like I have been, or strong enough to own herself from the start.)

And at that point we go to Aretha Franklin…natural woman (think of the lyrics, crooned as I drank the philter)…and Respect…

And then the touch of ______’s hand glowing gold (which in alchemic terms was a type and shadow of divine character in medieval times)…and “finger fragrant and savory” is definitely just exactly what it sounds like…but it is a vibrant and intensely earthy form of communion, and also a conferring, an anointing given to me…and I was thinking of ET, and how he had no home, and healed with that glowing finger…but Heather/Woman/Me so much more present and dangerous and contagious…

Me never “phoning home again” (never going back to that cursed male role forced upon me)…and then I swallow the key…(HRT…communion…permission, authority, the key becomes me and I the key…)

And then the door (whom I have been always) is opening and my male biology (the hinges, Hank moaning and dying, my body literally changing, swings open and there I am…being prayed over by the queen (Aretha) and I getting my own locks like _______’s…and Beyoncé with her combination of sexuality and independence, and she like Joan of Arc, divinely appointed to deliver a people (woman)…and then the key moved in me…my own “child conceived”…and then finally my “wad” is no longer this god awful bulge between my legs always haunting me, but instead a wad of keys and my own clipper ship.

OK…so that is the analysis…all of this is in me as I write, but I am not aware of it consciously until after I am done…I just write, and feel my way to it. After, I see it, it starts to emerge, starts to be birthed, and then it is easy to go back and help it.

Nearly every one of my poems operates in similar ways and layers…I invite you to go back and read…think of strange ones like “Spitting Bones” or “A-Maze-In-Me”

I wonder if this counts as a “Found Poem”? Or “Just a Fact”? Giggle…yep, I am still befuddled by that ignorant and intentionally short-cut thinking…oh, I have a poem about that sort of thing: “Bury My Head in the Sky“!!

Constance, if you are inspired to re-read some more inaccessible work, and this helps unlock it, please…let me know?

Thanks forever, and gratitude for reading!!

Charissa

A truism and a signpost inferred

Posted on August 29, 2014 by charissagrace

Constance, here is something I have noticed…about myself and about people in general, I think:

We judge others by their actions…we judge ourselves by our intentions.

Is this true? If so, I think you are canny enough to turn that signpost in the direction it should go in order to better be generous of spirit and kind of countenance and compassionate in actions…right?

Deepest Blessings to you this day, and I exhort you to try out a new thing: a conscious search in each person you meet today, for their intentions which may put a very different light on their actions.

Love and grace to you…

Charissa

Charissa is Content

Posted on August 28, 2014 by charissagrace

But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.

Psalm 131:2

Wean: to deal out bountifully to, to recompense fully, to ripen
Weaned: to have been dealt out to with bountifulness, to have been recompensed fully, to have been ripened

Each and every day, my Mama, the wonderful Lady Grace and Great Holy Spirit of the Almighty God of the Universe has dealt with me generously, recompensed me with great favor and grace, and has and is ripening me.

She has given me Herself, and ladies from Her courts as sisters, friends, and companions.

I am ever eternally grateful to you all

2013 at last makes sense…

Posted on August 26, 2014 by charissagrace

thank you Mama, for your faithful love.

thank you Dani, for walking the folds

Love and gratitude,

Charissa Grace

Matters of Heart and Bloody Core (for Kat, whom I love)

Posted on August 24, 2014 by charissagrace

She rides today, shotgun
in matters of heart and bloody core,
matters of blood, matters of bone,
her flesh become word and wing
and flight to wider blue skies
and pastures…
…rides shotgun atop
treasure boxes soon emptied
but not until
the very last second…God forbid…
please.

She sits, still shielding
but fingers open
and heart unclenched
in the green ritual of becoming
yet again repeated,
yet again echoing
those who flew before by thousands,
swarms searching for Capistrano
and finding college and career and clouds
gathered…and clouds parted.

She rides shotgun,
she, shotgun,
rides with diamond frozen tears
pinned back callous
behind both barrels
cocked and loaded,
her tender torn eyelids
primed with tearshot

(frozen tears rip as they sit
gathered, bunched, clenched)

Waves, washing by, wistful,
irritated, emotions
mendacious and mirror walking
around that carriage of connection
to futures unseen
swirl and caress her face
with terrible talking fingers.

Her heart is still,
on hold,

(she holds him in her heart)

what was once,
and is, and knows
what will be comes…

(Que Sera, Sera!)

…but not yet.

Because across miles, time,
her blood calls to bone,
her soul and spirit moan
remembering, loving, memorialized
and set in stone
forever.

Miles will pass. Time
will roll by, and that
return of body and bone
will glad at last be known…
and her laugh, her squint,
(shotgun)
her head toss
and still wonder
will echo to her heart
from babies to be born,
but still bone of her bone…

and heart will thaw and
throat unclench
at last and swallow
that diamond lump stark and
glistening with inevitability.

But now…
Across miles, time
she rides…
shotgun

White Privilege Doesn’t Mean What You Think it Means | Kristen Howerton

Posted on August 24, 2014 by charissagrace

White Privilege Doesn’t Mean What You Think it Means | Kristen Howerton.

Constance, this one will appear before the other two articles I recently pressed…so the same exhortation I made there applies here…

…simply Go. Read. Act.

Charissa

Clues

Posted on August 24, 2014 by charissagrace

Okay Constance…I am gonna confess a lil indulgence of ego: I really like my new poem “Her Door, Her Red Door“, and frankly I am a little disappointed there have not been very many likes on it…but I am also not surprised for it is inference, symbol, veil, subtly blatant while blatantly subtle…

I actually and for real think it is one of my most skillful poems to date.

But I get that it is not necessarily appealing…but consider, if you would, the poem itself in the context of the work of the poet: I once said “The poet is a desperater man than most. He must get it all down before the ages are up. Which, as any poet will tell you Is A BITCH!” (waaay back in 1982)…

…I was trying to say that there is a “job” in poetry, or perhaps a better word is quest? No matter…if you consider yourself a poet (and I do) then you find this inability to see life as any other thing but a poem and events/circumstances/happenings are all snapshots into the heart of the poem.

Thus, when I write I try to emulate the layers, hidden and revealed, that comprise this Mystery we swim in.

In “Her Door, Her Red Door“, you find me operating on a few very intentional levels…I do not want to just lay it out there. That is a bit too clinical, sort of like the difference between sex education class in Middle School Health class, and the wonder and poignant pain of Love’s First Kiss. But I do want you to have some sense of the structure, the themes and the interplay of them. I can be obtuse…lol.

First of all, consider that it is a poem written by a trans-gender woman who is in the midst of transition. This overall context puts the other elements in perspective and frames the picture.

Secondly, it is a poem dedicated to a person whom I have openly spoken of and the role she has in my life. That role has permutations and multiple facets when considered poetically. What is her “business” with me? What is mine with her? What is our mutual end? And more fundamentally, Constance, what is your position in all this as well? Are you somehow about the same things, in the salient areas of becoming that you face?

Next comes the unfolding of my view of our essential business: becoming. She is a facilitator of mine, and as I participate in her provisions I aid hers as well…and each of you, as you become day to day, may perhaps find touchstones in this poem’s point of view and approach to that becoming. You will, of course, have to make inference and feel your way under the sheet to the true bones of your own transitions in this life as a sentient, conscious being stuck between the macrocosm and the microcosm infinities, and with eyes…

I choose a physical aspect of her and invest that with meaning far other than the expected trope culturally in our pornography laced times…there are only three capital letters used in this poem. That is on purpose.

There are obvious references to musicians…why specific ones? Why them? What are the specific characteristics of those humans? (Remember to ask this inside the “frame” of the picture I mentioned earlier). There are single words that link back to lyrics, and those lyrics in turn echo back the essential business of this magic woman, which echo back to my own quest of becoming.

There are many puns laced throughout, intentionally slanted in relation to the core…that way they can make the connection and then…like leaves in early autumn, gracefully drop away once their purpose for the tree is completed, and reveal the strong and vital branches of the tree beneath that leafy veil…

The door: resist the temptation to skim over this, thinking it is obvious…no? Perhaps, like usual with me, it is a sonar reading on a larger diamond lurking in the dark of unknown knowns…but if you will try, you may very well enjoy letting those things bubble up inside you…from your heart.

Lastly, and remember that I have said before that wine and the process of creating it is for me the central metaphor of the universe, think about the poem again, in entirety (which means you can reinterpret the words on the 4 layers of existential being: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual)…and once you have that palate built? Start to pull elements from one read through, and combine them with elements of the other…sensual elements mixed with sacred elements…becoming and unbecoming mixed with living and dying…

…and always, always: Communion. Bread…Wine…in the presence of knowing knowers broken and shared.

We are given our birth…but we have to achieve our being, and enter in.

I hope these clues assist you into at least understanding why I am so proud of this one. It was “easy hard” to write down and weave, and it tested my limits at this stage of my becoming…as a poetess, as a prophetess, as a woman, and as a lover of God.

In heartfelt passion,

Charissa Grace

Her Door, Her Red Door

Posted on August 23, 2014 by charissagrace

yeah. come with me she said…
she had keys in her jeans that
flexed outlined in tight relief on that
power…shifting, rolling, sailing, barrel housing,

brick house? gawd that is dollhouse up against this Clipper Ship Sailing
and back is just the half of it! forth is there, no–here, no–there, no–here
yeah you get the picture…honky, tonky, honky, tonky rambling roll

(hank williams moaned and climbed into the bottle, seeing that end)

of course i had never seen this, or this place…(who looks at their mom
when they are looking to her power, to tap into her smoulder glow
like bonneville into the columbia thrilling as she turns those turbines?)
…she prolly demurred, magic shawl in place concealing and entrancing…

but now she walked, swished, ricocheted gutter to gutter
picking up every 7-10 split every step without gutter balls and those keys…
…no sound, bunched and squenched tight there, those keys…

(teena marie had keys like these, yanked from the dudes on the corner)

her door before us fat, streaks-run-swirls-whorls, depth-breadth flowing
crimson coral flaming, cardinal glowing carmine cerise chestnut cracking
garnet sanguine scarlet and rosy…that door was thick and giving…it blowzed there
full, sprawled (like titian’s venus) and throbbing with certain promise.

she said (with eyes) drink this and blinked and shook that wild
living crown claret and blooming rufescent from her head
more precious than the curve of Saturn’s iridescent rings

(aretha conferred keys and fierce eyes midst natural woman’s smoky spell)

then her hand glowed gold, she reached and touched my lips with her finger fragrant
and savory with her her.… and cackled wild woman crone songs branding me, said
I’d never phone home again cus I was there, here, there, here, and she dug out a key
and told me to swallow it which i did, and that fulsome door

creaked open with hinges groaning (hank moaning and dying)
and aretha conferring shoutin respect on my own head of wild locks
and beyonce blazed jeanne d’arc and that key moved, and became

(my own wad, key tight against my ass)

Our Tent On 2 Trees

Posted on August 17, 2014 by charissagrace

I’ll tell you a secret, dear.
Let’s make this perfectly clear:
there are no secrets here, this year

Ouroboros
has been asunder rent
here in our own little tent.
Pish posh, we have no need
of eating our own tail,
we already recycle!

Instead, meet me here,
just big enough for us to sit
(but not stand, we learned
to eschew that when
we learned to not chew
our own tails).

Do you recall this place our tent is pitched…
on the bodies of two trees that were cut
from the nearby mountain and brought
in and stood up planted here?

Holding us on our platform so high
we must climb ladders, exhilarated by
heights unfolded, to sit serene
in settings spiritual and high
above the dirt and drama?

So many in our times
are bored with themselves
infected with the disease of self…
they look for things to fill
their inner emptiness
and it’s just over and
over more and more
again and again

Ouroboros

But we pray we are haunted
by moon-drenched thoughts
reflecting that Elsewhere,
filthy with light and love!

We have the sound of rivers
running in our veins
and the smell of wind
in our lungs and
in our flying hair
soaring on the wings
of our wild and precious life!

We pray in flutes and strings
and we wait answers
like fanfares blown
on trumpets of light
that sound like becoming,
like arriving…

For now though,
in our tent pitched
in the air on 2 trees
we take our tea and listen

to fragrant roses blooming,
to seaweed swaying,
to fish flashing
round rose pink ears
of shells (and always singing
the song of the sea),
to leaves stretching
luxuriously into
autumn splendour,

to singing silence
soft and low and
we finally understand why
Ouroboros so mistaken
is so named…

my mouth at your tail,
your mouth at mine,
and at last we are
our Our, our Us,
with no boredom
in the middles
and swelling reborn
again, here in
our tent on 2 trees.

Mama is Pretty Tall

Posted on August 16, 2014 by charissagrace

Trans community can change minds by changing discourse – LA Times.

Oh Constance, I Love this article!!

It has a very similar p.o.v. to what/how/who I feel called to be and the manner in which I desire to influence and educate those people in my life who are most central to the overturning of an insufficient paradigm of bondage (the gender binary) and a harsh cruel paradigm of patriarchal privilege that enslaves both men and women.

To walk, my head held high, my inner self shining thru this shell like light thru a stained glass window…to be gracious in the face of ignorance and courageous in the face of misogyny…compassionate to the face of brokenness and kind to the face of need..to be resolute in the face of hatred and forgiving in the face of repentance.

Whew! That is a tall order…but then again, my Mama is pretty tall…besides, it is the heart and soul of why I took the name Charissa Grace.

Check out the article, and then join my legions in the armies of Grace!

Love, Charissa

My Son Wears Dresses and That’s OK With Me | xoJane

Posted on August 16, 2014 by charissagrace

My Son Wears Dresses and That’s OK With Me | xoJane.

Hi Constance…pretty sure I pressed this already? But just in case I didn’t, here it is again.

Mama, please bless this father…a true confident and faithful man, who refused to be his child’s first bully.

Love, Charissa

Mama’s Clothes

Posted on August 12, 2014 by charissagrace

Mama’s clothes are alive, like meadows over dirt,
like dew over meadows, like sun kissing dew,
like sky holding sun, like night holding stars,
and then there She is, outside the inside and
with me too.

Mama’s clothes move, like wind thru the trees,
like waves on the sea, like swans in the air,
like fish thru the water, like boats on a voyage,
like banners in the wind, like mercy over sin,
like gratitude in me.

Mama’s clothes rustle, swirl, and make my way
to snuggle close, tussle that soft edge to my face,
curl, close and hear the breath She takes, the
breath She gives, the song She croons, as She
sings over me.

Mama’s clothes glow, like rainbows in sun,
like silver in the clouds, like diamonds in my eyes,
like peacocks in their glory, like a single color story,
Refracted in Her eyes and a living quick surprise
to delight me.

Mama’s clothes, my refuge in the storm,
my anchor to the norm, my banquet in the fear,
invitation to draw near, so I do, I snuggle closer,
inhale Her strength, Her Kindness, Her Grace that
pours over me.

Mama. Strong…Soft…There, not “there”.
Deep, serene, intent, inquisitive, powerful
Grace Incarnate. Wisdom manifested,
Means of Creation, Healer and Nurturer of
Her daughter, me.

Mama. Charissa Grace.
A match made in heaven, designed from
the beginning, a leap within Her Heart to
spark in me and bloom, alive and growing free
my Mama and me.

Mama, can I wear Your clothes?
I wanna be
just like You.

Wrinkles In Time

Posted on August 4, 2014 by charissagrace

Good Morning Constance Dear…gosh what a difficult night it was for me!

The deconstruction of my self in order to conform to who I must be in order to earn money is a very rough thing.

It tears me apart!

One of my helps that keeps me centered and knowing myself is the devotional writings of Jill Carattini…I share this morning’s here for you.

Love and Grace, Charissa, who is suffering

tumblr_n7toayaEkz1sifsb9o1_1280 “Uncanny” was one of the vocabulary words on my sixth grade vocabulary list, which was to be found within the book we were reading as a class. I remember thinking Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time was exactly that—uncanny, peculiar, and uncomfortably strange. Yet I also remember that it stayed with me—the story of a quirky girl named Meg, her overly-intelligent little brother, and their time-transcending journey to save their physicist father with the help of three mysterious beings. Madeleine L’Engle, the writer whose books invite readers to see time itself differently, passed away not too long ago. But her stories will continue to perplex sixth graders, and stay with us long after we have set them aside.

L’Engle is the writer who first showed me the incredible difference between two words in Greek, which we unfortunately translate identically. To the English reader, chronos and kairosboth appear to us as “time.” But in Greek, these words are vastly different. Chronos is the time on your wristwatch, time on the move, passing from present to future and so becoming past. Kairos, on the other hand, is qualitative rather than quantitative. It is time as a moment, a significant occasion, an immeasurable quality. The New Testament writers use the word kairos to communicate God’s time, it is real time—it is the eternal now.

So it might be said for the Christian that when Jesus stepped into time to proclaim the kingdom of God among us, he came to show us in chronos the reality of kairos. “Jesus took John and James and Peter up the mountain in ordinary, daily chronos,” writes L’Engle. “Yet during the glory of the Transfiguration they were dwelling in kairos.”(1) With this story in mind, L’Engle describes kairos as that time which breaks through chronos with a shock of joy, time where we are completely unselfconscious and yet paradoxically far more real than we can ever be when we are continually checking our watches.

Whatever your view of religion, it is likely an experience you can recount; a moment so sweet or magnified it seems to stop time. But L’Engle presses the Christian to see it as something to be expected. “Are we willing and able to be surprised?” L’Engle asks. “If we are to be aware of life while we are living it, we must have the courage to relinquish our hard-earned control of ourselves.”(2) If we have the courage to see it, the kingdom of God is close at hand,kairos breaking through like Christ into the world.

I imagine Jacob, too, discovered the difference between chronos and kairos when he set aside the past which was about to catch up with him, along with his paralyzing fear of the future, and found himself living in “none other than the house of God.” The prophets and poets describe similar moments of waking to the present and finding the eternal dimensions of time. The shepherds in Bethlehem were going about their ordinary work when the glory of the Lord captured the moment. “Do not be afraid,” the angel announced. “I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you” (Luke 2:13-14). At this invasion of kairos into the routine of chronos, the shepherds chose to respond with action: “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about” (2:15).

Uncanny encounters with time are a part of the human experience. The Christian is given a language to explain these encounters. We live somewhere between the already and the not yet, caught by the eternal now and the one who dwells within it. The implications are both temporal and unending. Will we have the courage to look for glory in the ordinary? To release control of our calendars and watches and note the eternal in our midst? The apostle joins every prophet and poet who proclaimed the coming of the Messiah in history and the return of the king to come, “Behold, now is the time (kairos) of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2).

Like Christ, glimpses of the eternal come quietly and unexpectedly; they come and upset our very notion of time and all we discover within it. Why should we be so unreconciled to time if the temporal were our only concern? Or could it be that the eternal Word stepped into flesh, into our bounded realm of time, and literally embodied the reality that time is meaningful because of the eternal one in our midst.

The Christian insists that kairos is breaking into chronos and transforming it. With Christ it proclaims, “The kingdom of God is close at hand”—and the temporal world invited to break in along with it. In ordinary moments that hint at such a radical invasion, might we have the courage to be surprised by one who comes so near.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (New York: Bantam, 1982), 93.
(2) Ibid., 99.

Haunted by a Lovely God

Posted on July 23, 2014 by charissagrace

(NOTE: If you wish, you can click here and be taken to a page where I emboldened certain words to try to convey the rhythm and meter of this poem, which is literally essential to it. But: if you wish to just wade in, first time thru and let the rhythms and meters rise and fall, fade and disappear and then come back, well that is ideal because that is literally written into the work as its own “poem of rhythm”. In either case, I hope you are able to read thru it…the things in this poem literally happened to me, with me).

Okay.

I get it. I do…in spite of what you might think, maybe
several of you, maybe dozens of you, maybe
hundreds, or thousands or millions of you
have endured deserts and mirage oasises
vanished in life when it comes to the subject of God.

I hear your stories, the bitter rants of some, the tired futility
of many others, I have taken venom, been covered in acid,
as I lead face first and I listen to tales of one
thing held in desolate common.

“God’s not here”.
“God wasn’t there”.
“God isn’t real”.
“God doesn’t care”.

I bleed when you cry in anguish, and weep as I
hear your recitals, and then in dark rage, and then
finally in grief, that pools on the dark other
side of the desert, in that null empty kingdom of
Ozymandias the great ruler of Vanity.

You might think I weep sanctimonious, sorrowful
supplicant of righteous standing, who’s crying for
those destitute and benighted, the distant, the stranger and
other, from my tower of ignorant pie in the sky…

You’d be wrong.

I weep in guilt.

Yeah…guilt.

For my tale of dark woe is so anti-tragic,
a Mysterium Tremendum, of a wretch so
shattered and shipwrecked in this desert island

…my body…

My story is different, and I feel so guilty,
confused as to why even in existential
despair I am still on the outside of
the common narrative swirling around me?

Contrary to you, in your longing and noble long
struggle to live, and to surmount desertion and
lost lonely silence by God in Their Heaven above…
I have always been

Haunted by a Lovely God.

When I was little and in my first dawning awareness,
and ageless, I recall that I always heard This Voice,
and at first I thought it outside me, I thought the wind had a
voice, or perhaps it was Trees, but it
never was dirt under my feet, no,
dirt is a tongue-tied dull mute.

As I grew I realized that the voice was inside me…in my heart, and I came to
treasure its company and the glad beauty of thoughts, and of musings. Then
I told my parents what it had told me, and,
flabbergasted, they asked where did I hear that?
And I told them “God. God told me”
(for that is Who the voice told me They were
and …Jesus like a Shepherd led me).

They laughed! LAUGHED! And while they were
not mocking, they merely thought
I was mistaken, had fantasized wonders.
So I cried then, and thought that
maybe my parents were right.

And then came the break, the thirsty sword stroke
that cut me to ribbons, my soft girly heart left in shreds…
then the slavery started with harsh words resounding, those
prison door words…and God was still there, holding
me in my tears, wrapped
around my hurt heart…and I longed for death, wanted to
jump in the river from that tall steel bridge I crossed
over each day but God asked me “please”, and…

well…

who can say no to God when They ask “Please?”

Then They would give me a joy for that day…and They
gave me a dog! Oh! How she and I bonded!
But you have already heard some of the tales of Millie…”Good Old Dog!” No…
this is the story of me being Haunted…

Haunted By a Lovely God.

One time, I was alone outside our house

(the one in the Pear Orchards down
near the cold creek where my Millie and me chased those
skimmer bugs and slippery pollywogs all live-long day…)

and it was warm in the soft early evening and dusky and glowing ethereal gloaming,
the good dusk…and wind softly rustling thru fruit trees so
heavy with life and the sounds of the living earth echoed around me…

…and then all was silent…

Suddenly, and it caught all my attention immediately! Slowly I
walked to the pear trees and stood, just to listen…and I heard it…something!
The call of a Mourning Dove

(or is it Morning Dove? I can’t distinguish the
One from the other, it seems to shift
back and forth always and ever).

It cooed and it called, and it seemed to me as if it spoke to me,
saying…”Come out to Me, Baby… Come out to Me. Come home to Me.”

(Lady Grace, She calls me Baby now, here today)

I was so skert! I thought it was a ghost! And this ghost it was longing for
my tender spirit and if I went out there, it would get inside me and
I would belong to it, always and be its flesh, its living body for
it to inhabit, its dwelling place then and forever.

I wasn’t far from the truth… I look back, I think it was Her, Lady Grace,
Dove come down, Her Voice was calling me, claiming me even then as Her own…
I wonder what would have happened, my life had I heeded Her,
gone to Her, run to Her heedlessly on that first day?

It’s not coincidence that our trees now, all around our house are filled with
Morning Doves (Mourning Doves too), calling, cooing…and pestering people in
our neighborhood, but so comforting to me as totems and emblems,
reminders of Mama’s first call to my hurt lonely soul and my soft tender heart.

Then: it was Veteran’s Day, fall, 1969.
We went to town several miles from home for the parade…I insisted that
Millie come with us, and after the music and marching had ended, we
went to the movies: “The Love Bug”. But Millie was left in our Volkswagen van.

(the one that was faded red
with canvas roll back top
and that relentless bamboo pole that
Dad used to poke us and hit us with
when we were clear in the
back and too rowdy and rude.)

and when we came back to the van…
she was gone.

I cannot tell you what that was like. I nearly fainted. I ran in the
street screaming her name, as cars screeched stop and Dad chased
me hollering “Get Back Here!”

We drove the streets hours and hours, me, head out the window, her name become
my tongue protruding and flapping and desperate in the cold wind.
I screamed that name loud, again and again until I was hoarse, and I kept
screaming, my grief-expiation for killing my dog with my stubborn insistence that she come along.

I tried to bargain with Them…in the sibilant cold and the darkness, I lifted my face:

“I will scream her name until I pass out and can never talk ever again, and then
You will receive my burnt offerings of me and give me what I earned with
desperate grief, what I bought with my service…my heart, Millie come back safe home.”

They remained silent, aloof (and I wonder if this is where They were in your tale of sorrow…).
Finally Dad said “she’s gone”…so we had to go home, in that cold rainy dark night of loss
on that day that we remember and honor the valor of
those who faced their fears and endured for me.

I threw up. I do that when I get distraught…I always have done…I cried, and
cried and I cried, and when I had no tears I groaned and keened, inconsolably moaning…
crying til dust poured from my eyes in place of the tears long drained empty by
grief so stark it was a terror strong, threatening to crush me forever.

My folks were hurting for me, so they used what they always had carved me with,
thought was the best for me, raw in my towering emotions and gaugeless deep passions…
words, stern and cruel, words so full of dark violence, and those words’ incarnated beast,
gawd…the spanking…well…yeah, the Red Raving and Hungry Beast.

I was forced to eat my dinner, and I threw it up…on the table, on all the food
laid there for others to eat. Then I got spanked and sent straight up to bed…
where God was silent and no where to be found… but hey, Ima talker, right?
So I cried out to Them into the darkness thick…

(now get this, and understand that I’d been thru the
wringer of Sunday School, Hellfire Sermons,
Damnation Devotions, and I knew enough to be good or the
devil would get me. I once was told: “I will not spank you…
I’m just gonna let satan get you”…and I roamed behind my mom
hours, and wailed agonizing in fear and stark terror, and
begged her to spank me, deliver me from evil on the cross
of my butt, and her hard paddle the hungry
propitiation for my sins and my wrongs…and
I knew that so many times I had done things,
hell-things like say “shit” or steal cookies, or
sneak out the window to sleep with my Millie and
her wriggly puppies though I was forbidden to,
or watch cartoons on a Saturday morning so
early and low before anyone woke up and caught me at it…and I’d
never been sent to hell…God had not bothered to notice or
even to thunder at me, or make trouble over me, and I
knew lots of people thought God was a fairy tale, which, frankly,
mystified me cus They talked to me so much when I was so little.)

That nite…I cried in a jagged blood whisper, my voice bleeding raw, and the
words, still they linger there, seared deep in me to this very day, now, here with you.

(and now, in this moment… I feel so damn guilty!
Why me??? Why did They talk to me of all people?)

I cried out “God…if You’re really there, real…bring my doggie home…PLEASE!” Then…
somewhere, somehow, I moved past bargains, and buy-offs and bribes…I had cried my way
thru the stark castle of filthy rags and entered into the place of no exit, the
inner sanctorums of grace, where there’s nothing to buy there with money, and
there is no bargaining, no supplicating, no pleas, there is just the
beginnings of Mercy Free…

and crying out the word please in that dark night, eyes
gummed shut with sorrow and tacky tears I at last faded off into sleep
dreamless as I grieved and wished I was dead, like I did every night, and at
last I knew nothing, released and insensate and absent within the lost
shoals of sleep’s gift of respite from my agony, sorrow and grief.

Until I woke, instant and on point, into an electrical dark of night
black glowing bright-black that cast light and filled the still air with a
presence, thick, substantive knowing, and threatening to
rend plain reality like the quick ripping of shrouds in the
hands of the dread faced and tall grim deliverers….

…and I heard scritching, and

(oh oh oh)

her whine (that lil ki-yiy-yiy she always used to call me heart to heart)
and I jumped from the top bunk with a thunderous thud loud enough to wake
even the dead and I got up and ran thru our house in that miracle moment:
“GOD BROUGHT BACK MY DOG!”
“GOD BROUGHT BACK MY DOG!!”

Babbling over and over again like a babe, Bartimaeus had nothing on me!
Shattering slumbering sundering darkness and giving voice
to that One Thing that I am:

Haunted by a Lovely God

Fumbling feverishly I rolled the gravestone away in my heart and threw
open the back door where she called me eagerly whining in joyous returning at sunrise…
she’d jumped a 6 foot fence out of obedience so she could come in thru the
Eye of the Needle: the back yard garage door. She limped and jumped on me
and I went down to the ground, I was crying and kissing her and she was
kissing me too and I ran my hands over her, scarcely believing that she was real,
she was returned, she was home and alive, and my heart was restored unto me.

Then she rolled over, so I could scritch her tummy like she loved
and when I ran my hands over her precious side, my fingers slipped inside
her skin and I drew them back from her side which was pierced and torn open…

(I swear!
I know, the metaphor seems so damn cheesy, right? It really
happened this way! That’s the kind of thing I feel so
guilty for… it’s like They shouted it from the Bright Heavens that
I was not ever escaping Their Undying Love never ceasing and
new every morning. I’m telling you that I have always been
Haunted by a Lovely God).

She had torn open her side, and I’d thrust my hand in just like Thomas and drawn it back,
bloody and warm and changed and I collapsed,

(cus I can’t handle blood, even though it has
handled me, covered me, branded me,
marked and commanded me
forever Under the Mercy)

I murmured brokenly “God hear my prayers, God heard my prayers, God hear my prayers,
God heard my prayers”.

Later, my parents made sure I knew that this was highly unusual, God has more
pressing concerns than my dear dog, or listening to me scream and demand…
yeah, there are all kinds of other prayers over the years, that went up and bounced off…

you know the kind…yeah, those

…and life went on…went on…until

Puberty hit and then hell came home hard to stay…in hair and voice and a
horror-beard (and oh god oh god, oh god down there, oh god please no).
And life required again its cruel ransom, and I wanted, longed to lay me on the gears and cogs
that turned in schools and the church groups that seemed to me incomprehensible
strangers, in their innate knowing of how to move and how to laugh and to be… again
I longed, desired to do away with me…this gender-joke…absurd and ugly mistake, just an
ironic blight on “There” and “Here” because I was neither…here or there, just a null thing

…and then…

…I had another time, deep in the darkness of night and numb tears and dumb talking to Them…

…Them…

1973…14 and awkward and lonely and numb from the bashing I gave me to
un-know who I was and was not supposed to be, allowed to be, allowed…
On that nite, cold and alone in the darkness I told Them that I was not going to follow Them.
I was resigning from being a christian and that I was leaving Them once and for all.

“No offense”, I said. “It’s not you, it’s me”

(I’d yet to discover how this trope is used when we
want to abandon an unwanted suitor or
how its thrown out…to hurt and to wound a familiar dull
lover become coarse and rank and too shrill)

“You have done nothing wrong, You have not failed me, no it’s I who’ve failed You, and
what’s worse, I cannot BUT fail You…always, because I’m a

“horrible boy, I’m an
absent mute girl, I am
nothing, and I count for
nothing and I live on
nothing and I mean more
nothing, just more black
horrible, lost empty nothing.

“I am not going to church anymore,”

(for in those days I, like others around me, assumed that if
you went outside and climbed into the
chicken coop then such a fat happy bird you’d become.)

“…when school starts up again, I’m going to say yes instead of
no thanks when they offer me pot, and offer me drinking, and
offer me bodies and no clothes and company there in the darkness and then I’ll be
numb and feel wanted at least…

“I cannot do it, walk blameless and upright, for
I am a constant habitual wallower in my sin
all the time in my heart, in my mind as I fail ceaseless,
besides, I don’t even desire to be in on this world full of Leavenworth walls…

“I will not fake it! I refuse to be like them, sitting in their pews…

“with hallelujah on their lips and wanna screw ya in their hearts!

“I’ll stay alive, take my medicine straight and deserved and so bitter…and
maybe if I try I will even manage to conjure up a hearty yummy while
I drain the draughts of despair bone-dry…

“I know You’ll send me to hell…I deserve that, and even more so…I don’t
hold that against You, for You are and You always have been so Beautiful…
no, it is me, blight and curse, it’s just me, a disease in this world and pure poison.”

Fountains of sorrow again welled up, even as I wondered why they could
never be fountains of joy? And I cried and cried…softly so no one could hear me…
my brother sleeping…as always in these cut-off times…and

Millie was newly dead, gone to run free in the fields of her dreams, yet another cruel
tribute collected by Usurper death…that left me so empty,
so cold, so cut-off and bereft.

Until I heard it…the Voice!

Calling me gently (as always), so I held my breath, listened to be sure it was Them, then
I heard a soft quiet question asked so plaintively…

“What would it take?” (Ummm…whaaa? I didn’t get it)

“What would it take, Precious One? Child, what would it take for you to not check out,
not go away, but to come here and spend time with Us everyday?
Talk to Us, listen and just be for Us… just be Ours always,
just as your dog, Good Old Millie was your friend, and she belonged
only to you?”

This was a careful and startling question and it was quick,
coming at me curving sideways! So I had to really think!
Something absurd, something so damned unusual, that there was no way it
ever could happen, I mean, don’t get me wrong…I still wanted to be with Them,
wanted to share in Their sweet soft communion, cus I LOVED my Jesus, my Shepherd who
I always dreamed someday would leave the 99 and come to rescue me, I dreamed that
He was my Jester to make me laugh joyously, dreamed that He was my best Friend

…I just wasn’t…His best friend…and I couldn’t fake it. Nope.
So it was crucial I create conditions that even the Almighty God couldn’t meet

…you know…

God cannot make a rock so big that They cannot lift it, but They can do anything
so They can make this rock so big that even They cannot lift it…wait…

I was searching for that Rock that God couldn’t lift… right? So

I said to Them “If, when I wake this morning, and my dad says ‘Kids we are moving’…
if there’s a strange town so distant where nobody knows me, and no one has
seen me, and I can start over, start fresh and anew, then I’ll choose you forever and
give my heart freely…lock, stock, and barrel, completely to You… I’ll be Your Millie,
all of my days till I die and my sentence is over.”

Silence gave answer…then after a bit…I drifted away breathing
deeply again as my tears crooned soft lullabies
to my hot cheeks, they ran down in such ancient deep
canyons of sorrow…down my face, down my heart,
down my soul to end up glistening in sorrowful streamers.

When I got up the next morning, things didn’t sparkle or gleam, and I didn’t
remember the Voice, the Epiphany…I was just staring at breakfast my mom used to
“cook” me in those days…Shredded Wheat with skim milk…and feeling
…that gulf, that dark feeling. That feeling. Yeah… The relentless sharp
razor slash cutting inside my soul, forever aching and Constant.

I wasn’t list’ning, as Dad droned on talking of somethingorruther… until I heard
him say the word…“moving”…something about that word…
why did it stick out?

Then in a quicksilver windstorm of memory-shredded, each piece was
hitting me, sticking, unripping its way to become one
coherent experience, and I recalled my reply to Their inquiry…
so I turned quickly and asked my dear father what did he just say…and he
said it again! He confirmed it! Just as I’d laid forth, to a T!

Haunted by a Lovely God.

(I feel so guilty… why am I treated thus?
Why me? Why not the prayers of parents
whose children suffer and die in horrible pain for
nothing that they ever did?
Why not the prayers of wives for soldiers
Cain has already marked for death’s dark
gaping foul maw, prayers supplicating
deliverance, protection, but
they go unheeded and
Death eats again?)

And of course, we moved, and I did…commit myself to Them…
once all for always…yep, I was in…And I’ve hated it sometimes, and loved it at others.
I’ve grown and I’ve changed, seen Them change before my eyes as they were
opened and I could see other than my own idolatrous self and that
small god I fashioned, so stunted, blind, deaf and so mute in the
vanity of my self worship when my box, my image of Them I had
made was so gloriously broken!

I’ve sorrowed and railed… I’ve been outcast by mean so called
spiritual family, been stunned by the towering cruelty of those who should
know better, done blindly in the Most Wonderful Name of Them…

Lovely God to me, and so ugly and coarse, buffoonish in their mocking mouths.

I met my darling, and we had our babies…
she/they are amazing miracles…I watch the
lives of my college acquaintances shipwreck, their
marriages foundering on the black jagged rocks of their alluring
careers and blood money…and I watch the children of
hard working salts, such dear people around me, more worthy than I, better
people than I, quaff drugs like their hearts are on fire, and join themselves
numbly to anyone there in those earthquakes of loneliness,
wreckages strewn in their wake and their orphans tossed
careless like litter abandoned.

And I have prayed with these people, so passionate, supplications far more
suitable than my own bumbling tongue-tied petitions and tall ebenezers…
and seen them bounce off, with dust poofing, dry-cloudy in
dull drifting mockery…

…and I feel so guilty.

Such. Guilt.

Because They have haunted me… They’ve apprehended me… taken me…
They have not let me go, not let me drift… and I,
transgender woman held in such derision by
most of the offspring of the Blood of the Lamb…
The Holy Spirit has even shown me Her Name and Herself, Lady Grace,
and She’s drawn so near to me, to be ma Mère…my Mama, and teach me
my secret heart and my self, so young and emerging.

And yet still I ask myself why am I haunted?

I could go on, forever recounting the
stories of Their faithful presence and meddling hands…of

Yosemite Sacred, cathedrals where mountains became the
Triune God, and I fell asunder to claw at the dirt in despairing blood-guiltness and
crying for mercy… and wonder of wonders!
El Capitan: Papa…Half Dome, cut asunder became My Friend Jesus…
Yosemite Falls: my Lady Grace, flowing and washing forever until I am pure…
Bridal Veil Falls was me, shifting emotions and prevarications blown
lacey and wandring across rocky faces but always to Them…
rising up from the ground, clean and unsullied as
Waterdeep sang for me They have been nothing but
Good in my life!

Each time I hear someone’s tale of woe filled with despair or with cynical bitterness flowing,
or just fatigue and futility…I am worse than any teller, and merit less than the askers, more
toxic than anyone else whose had issue with God, or
issue with Their present absence, or make issue with Them because

“there is this construct God which has come
out of nowhere, seemingly and thus doesn’t exist
(unlike anything else which its knowing of testifies to its being)…”

I have not told you this tale to shame you… I who am shame incarnate for so long.
Nor to claim privilege or power, position… I do not have an iota of that.

…I have not told you to lobby, convince you… or
proselytize, or evangelize you. God No!
I have made my expiation to you, my confessors…
The sin I am guilty of? Of this I Charissa Grace stand blood guilty:

Being

Haunted by a Lovely God.

Come Home To Yourself

Posted on July 21, 2014 by charissagrace

It all seems like a dream…like I woke up
into Real life and there you were, grinning,
that crooked lil smile and that small dimple
at your mouth’s corner, honey cupid bow.

It was as if we happy-laughed forever!
And cried for ever too, both all at once.
It was as if my torrid fever broke!
Things clear now to me, I’m in on the joke

regarding the us that we were…we are.
How I must have puzzled you, my dear!
Befuddled you and discouraged you too,
for you saw my real red and pulsing heart,

and underneath, the shade of deep dry rot.
From that mad carnival my wistfulness
and longing that you would be double blessed
sprang up to cover over my despair

and make a castle for you in the air
(I long for naught but glad good things for you!
Blessing and health, and most important Love.)
Capital L Love, vital and alive.

Thus my recoil from your beguiling ways,
from that slight space you harbor to survive
and aloofness you must have to thrive.
But passion, fire for you…remained and bloomed.

I give you those things, slight space, aloofness,
so crucial to your sense of who you are
and how you are…BUT…you… you must cast off
the boredom of the same old peccadilloes!

Soon you will find your true-north self again,
your way again, to walk the sacred spaces,
and haunts of ancient peace, familiar places,
to draw comfort from them, at rest within.

God placed such presences in this bright world
and lets them flourish, glad and glorious.
God’s threatened not by great manifestation
of beauty taken to be gods unknown…

God simply is not threatened. Pure and simple.

God’s given us Beauty, and this is Truth…
…God gives Truth, and this is our Beauty…
Alas! It’s we who fracture and dismember
with reason’s rule we drown out Beauty’s ember.

So…Walk those roads, the trails, the barren beauty
verdant with its own color and life…and way.
Hear the sea, she’s ever-always singing
her ever ancient, ever new swan song.

And let yourself come back home to yourself,
as torn, defiled places are knit together.
Cleanse all the places pain has hollowed out
with haunts of ancient peace…and grace throughout.

To treasure your words, modulate my own,
…“return to that self I have never been,
and yet I always was in breath and being”…
The trust to simply talk to you about

anything gone awry in innocence,
and you will hear my heart as clear as day,
and I will hear your heart as well…the warmth,
connecting, friends who’ve gone thru thick and thin.

So…we dive now into our sleep together,
and when I wake with terrors in the night
you’re there…and when I get up because sleep
avoids me like I haven’t washed for weeks,

You slumber on, and I pass time until
at last I sleepy get, and gently slink
back to our bed and you in graceful slumber
still know that I am there and slide your arm

under my head and pull me oh so close.
I fall asleep my cheek upon your chest,
hearing your breath unguarded, raw and new,
your heart, steady, flutt’ring on so different

than my erratic anxious dark contrast…
And you, temple of Love so tender-fine
comfort me…and I lose myself at last,
to be found…yours…and you forever mine.

I told myself that this “happens” to other people — not me. Wrong.

Posted on July 15, 2014 by charissagrace

Hi Constance…I found a cool article about yet another parent who has the vision, courage and love to raise her transgender daughter with love, acceptance, and support.

She made a statement in her article, and it so resonated with me, because I remember that fateful late March afternoon just last year (!!!)…after extensive reading about transgender people and lives…I was so lonely, and so separated from everyone and everything. Surrounded by people who loved me, but not me me…just who I posed as for their security and happiness, and yet I felt totally alone.

I was worthless. I had no meaning. They had actively and intentionally sought me, found me and time and again healed and sustained me…and I still just wanted to disappear.

And on that day, rain drizzling coldly outside, heaters ticking and popping, I read of the loneliness and alienation of my trans sisters and brothers…and I was soo struck by how their stories jibed with mine, how people whom I had never met wrote as if they were inside my head! My compassion welled up, and I wept for them, because I truly knew what they were suffering…and then the stories of the people who decided to transition instead of kill themselves, and such a longing consumed me…a longing to feel something normal, a longing to be “right”, a longing to know I belonged to someplace…

…belonged to myself…

and then I heard Mama say to me in my heart, that if I was totally honest with myself, I would see that I too was transgender, just like the ones I was reading of.

And that is where the statement that Julie Ross makes came out of my mouth…”No Lord…that happens to other people, but not me. I mean, I have always thought I was a girl trapped in this male body with no way out, but that doesn’t make me transgender! lol!

But She persisted, and besides…I knew, right then that she was right. All that had to be dealt with was the constructs of immorality and perversion that had been formed in my mind and heart due to the childhood experiences I went through.

All of that is going to be avoided for Julie’s lovely daughter! She will still have trials, and heartache like every human in this shattered world…but she will never feel the emptiness, the horror of nothingness where there ought to be life.

May Mama shine on each of our hearts with Her convicting love that upholds us, sustains us, and washes us everyday…and may we find the courage to go out of our way to ease the journey of someone else today.

Much love and rejoicing, Charissa

Julie Ross

Blogger, George.Jessie.Love

Raising a Transgender Child: A Star is Born

Posted: 04/20/2012 5:08 pm

Adventure , Children , Family , Courage , Honesty , Keeping Perspective , Parenting , Social Transition , Support , Transgender , Work In Progress , Parents News

Eight months ago, my 9-year-old son tearfully shared with me that “his whole life, he had wanted to be a girl”. Pressed by the therapist (who, thank G-d, was in the room with us) to clarify whether he wants to be a girl or is a girl, George immediately replied that he is a girl. And so began a crazy-ass adventure that I never, in a million years, expected to find my child or, frankly, myself, on.

To be clear, my husband Rich and I always knew that George (who is now Jessie) was different from not only our older son, but from other kids — male and female alike. With sparkling eyes and a wildly observant and funny personality, he was known by everyone everywhere we went. Never one to shy away from a conversation or situation (particularly if it involved dolls, dresses, wigs or mermaid tails), he captured the attention of anyone he came into contact with. When behaviors that concerned us in preschool and kindergarten — including, but by no means limited to his self portraits (a frequent drawing assignment) consistently depicting a girl in a dress with long, flowing hair — continued with even greater vigor in first, second and third grades. We concluded that he was probably going to grow up to be gay, yet didn’t quite buy it ourselves. He was a boy who greatly appreciated a beautiful girl and what she was wearing. He never met a doll, wig, dress or mermaid tail that he didn’t feel a total compulsion to own — no matter how strongly he had to fight for it. And despite the fact that he was not even slightly effeminate, there were several occasions that he harassed and harangued me for hours on end requesting everything from hair extensions to wigs to dolls. It never added up. And then he asked for (and by “asked for” I mean “demanded”) a pierced ear.

Our initial reaction to the earring request was that “little boys don’t wear earrings”, but he was having none of it. As he obsessively pursued this request, it became increasingly clear that it was not a desire, but a need. Since growing out his traditional little boy haircut was going to take some serious time (we had agreed to allow him to grow his hair — anything to stop hearing about hair extensions or wigs), a single pierced ear seemed an easy enough allowance in hopes of placating him. Of significant note was, just prior (and I mean as the alcohol was being rubbed across his lobe) to the piercing, he implored the piercer to be sure to do it in the ear that doesn’t mean “gay”… clearly he was building up the courage to tell us something, we just didn’t know it yet.

It was not long after the newly-pierced ear that our confusion was put to rest and we were told of George’s truth. It took me about a minute and a half to absorb what he was saying and to give myself a virtual whack upside the head. It all started to make sense now, except for the part when I told myself that this happens to other families — not mine. Wrong.

We continued along with our “if-it-was-ever-normal-it-isn’t-now” lives for a few weeks, noticing a huge change in our child’s mood and temperament. Clearly, an enormous weight had been lifted. And then there came what we refer to as “the article”. It was a Sunday in December, which also happened to be George’s tenth birthday. On the front page of The Boston Globe there was an article about identical twin boys, one of whom had identified as transgender and was now living fully as a girl. I, not surprisingly, was raptly reading the story when George came up behind me, noticed the photo and asked who they were. Upon telling him he responded, with his mouth agape, “You mean I’m not the only one?” It was at that moment that Jessie was born, moved in and has since made herself comfortable in my house.

The following day, I dropped George off at school and told him to be cool; we would come up with a plan. He was cool. Until 11 a.m. (not bad considering the school day starts at 8 a.m.), when he simply could not keep the truth to himself and, without fanfare or drama, told one of his teachers about his “secret”. The cat, ladies and gentlemen, was out of the bag. The next day, as it happened, was pajama day and, after a hasty, late night trip to Target, I successfully outfitted my “son” in head-to-toe pink, purple and green polka dotted pajamas in which he ran (not walked) into school with zero hesitation and without so much as a glance over his shoulder for support. Jessie had been waiting her whole life for this day. I almost wonder if that was why she felt the need to share when she did… just to ensure the perfect little girl pajama ensemble for what will likely (hopefully) be her last school sanctioned pajama day ever.

Since those first crazy days, we have had her second ear pierced and have had countless meetings, discussions, questions, plans and concerns hurled in our direction. At times we have laid low: mostly at the beginning, when we were nearly immobilized by the mere thought of what it meant to have a transgender child. Other times we have been “out there”: when, for example, we announced on Facebook (with her encouragement) “George becoming Jessie”, complete with a photo of her in her inaugural dress. This was a means of survival for us and done mainly so that we weren’t forced to explain the situation to everyone, everywhere, every time we left the house. But no matter how people learned of Jessie having identified as transgender, the response has been consistent: total acceptance with a healthy and appropriate dose of trepidation — both for us and, frankly, themselves.

Our family has been lucky. We know that we are just getting started, but are grateful that Jessie’s social transition, thus far, has been as seamless as we ever could have hoped for. She has that sparkle in her eye and a new confidence which is the envy of many an adult. We take each day as it comes and have as little an idea as to where this will land as we did eight months ago… but at least now her self-portraits make more sense.

PS: At this point, it is noteworthy to tell you that it felt strange to refer to my child as George or to call her a “he”. “New normal” surprises me every day…

This post originally appeared on George.Jessie.Love.

The Doctrine of Trans, Part 2

Posted on July 14, 2014 by charissagrace

The Doctrine of Trans, Part 2.

Good Morning Constance…Part 2 from Trans-girl at the Cross.

Prolly of interest only to my readers who are Christian, but even if you aren’t it is worth a look, for it gives some insight into the subtlety of biblical interpretation, and the importance of letting the text speak for God instead of the reader reading her own opinions into the text and then taking the name of the Lord vainly by claiming that God has said something He has not said.

Praying that Lady Grace prevails in the hearts of the Church, and that a place for all LGTBQ people is warmly secured at the table of Their Communion and Fellowship,

Charissa

Suzanne Grossman Writes: “Why I Chose Grace as a Gay Christian”

Posted on July 12, 2014 by charissagrace

Suzanne Grossman

via Why I Chose Grace as a Gay Christian.

I love this young woman’s faith, courage, and orientation to grace!

Hang in there Suzanne…there are fellow believers who realize that Faith thru Grace in Love is the winning recipe for connection with Them!

Please…read the article, and then think if you had those obstacles in your faith journey, in addition to the common difficulties we face.

Grace and Peace…

Charissa

Do Not Be Conformed To This World…

Posted on July 12, 2014 by charissagrace

My Butterflies, Myself

Posted on July 9, 2014 by charissagrace

…and free they fly, finally…

while with shining earthbound

feet we dance watching

hearts aflame, yearning…

fates alive, turning…

death, forever spurning.

CGW
7/9/2014

If I Could Explain The Love Of God

Posted on July 1, 2014 by charissagrace

The Love of God is literally the one thing that transforms all things. There is nothing that is greater. Nothing can stand in its way or resist its power…

…well, except for one other thing: the human will.

The human will can say no to this love…and yet, even human will, no, especially human will, is but the ultimate extension of the Love of God. Because God would rather have children who are free instead of children who are slaves. That liberty is so important that They even found a way to show the Ultimate Love by laying down His life for us all.

It is the one and only thing that has kept me alive all these years, that kept my finger off the trigger and the barrel away from my brain, that kept me getting up everyday and walking thru that gender prison camp I was locked in for so long…the Love of God has been underneath my wings when I can no longer flap them, it has been miles of pillows and cushions when I have cast myself from the precipices of despair and resolved to never ever smile again or ever look someone in the eye.

The times on my bike, when Mama drew near me in the high mountains and loved on me and in me as I slogged mile after mile up 10% slopes, and then came careening down at 55 miles an hour, nothing between me and the pavement but thin tires and bike shorts and the Love of God.

The times I was in my kitchen, hidden inside a big, awkward, hairy temple that was so defeating and monstrously final…and She would touch my heart and light up ingredients and show me how to put together food preparations…and speak to my heart as I did about what is true food and drink.

The vineyards, and the life surging there and the insights She gave me.

When my precious precious doggie was lost, miles from home, and I cried all night at 10 years old and begged Them bring her home…and I said that if You are really there and You really love me You will hear me and have mercy…that same prayer that millions have prayed in one form or another, but never got anything but blunt silence…and in the morning, she was there, my Millie…and I cried so hard, and words cannot express that strange mixture of relief, wonder, and yes a bit of shame for my naked doubt…and literal overwhelming wonder and confusion that They chose to answer my brokenhearted plea.

The night at the end of 8th grade that I cried all night, wanting to die, and finally resigning from being a follower…I told Them “no offense, this is not Your fault, but mine…I literally am not good enough and I am not strong enough. I am not going to live a lie, so I am checking out and will become like everyone else and bury my sorrow in drugs and alcohol and sex”…and wept some more…until She whispered soft but completely clear, asking me what would it take as a sign to me that They would be my life, and my strength, and my hope…

…and I said the wildest thing I could think of: “If Dad gets up this morning (for it was after midnight) and tells us we are moving to a completely different town, where no one knows me, and I have a brand new start, then I will still try and follow you. I will be Your child and always stay near Your side…but what a joke! Who does that, just up and moves to a different city?” And I cried more, until sometime just before dawn I drifted off to a troubled and thready sleep, wishing I could die…

…and when Mom got us up to get ready for school, Dad came in to the table where we ate our cold cereal, and said “Kids…I have some big news for you. Mom and I decided yesterday that we are moving to Gold Hill. It is closer to the house I want to build, and closer to Mom’s school”…and I burst into tears again and they all thought I was distraught from the move, when really I was shattered by the overwhelming, generous, graceful Love of God given to me, ton after ton after ton.

The night, when I finally cracked and admitted what I am, who I am, and Mama sang over me as I cried so hard that the sheets were literally wringing wet…She sang “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. Our mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning, new every morning! Great is Our Faithfulness!”

My dearest darling…the amazing manifestation in human form of Their love…

…but mostly, the tears that pour down my cheeks whenever I, the whore at the feet of Jesus, washing His feet with my tears and drying them with my hair, think about Their love…higher than the highest hills, deeper than the sea, broader than the skies above…and those words, vibrating at the core of all things: It Is Finished .

Love, Charissa Grace
the girl loved without measure
for reasons ever mysterious

The Crucible of Disappointment

Posted on June 11, 2014 by charissagrace

Constance…have you ever been disappointed?

“Yeah, riiiiggghhhht, ‘Rissa!” you are prolly thinking! “Who hasn’t!!?”

And that leads me to my topic. See…lately I have been experiencing a lot of disappointment…plans made with loved ones and deeply anticipated, only to find that they have changed so the loved one can serve someone else…understandable…but disappointing.

Or trying hard to nail down an appointment, only to get no reply regarding which of a number of dates would be best…and then worse, feeling like I am making a pest of myself in seeking to simply get this thing scheduled…wondering if I am being avoided, if I have been intrusive or over-bearing…and yeah, disappointment.

We all experience it, but here is a secret: disappointment can be a crucial and pivotal agent of transformation in your life…or rather, the way that you handle it will lead to radical transformation.

I think the most crucial thing to grasp is this: Disappointment is divinely planned to result in death. Think about it…frequently when we are disappointed, something inside us dies–a dream, a desire, a hope, a plan…but as has so often been the case for me, the death of those things opens the gateways for the resurrection of those things in some far more pure and properly motivated form.

It is a tool that is similar to a surgeon’s blade. It is wielded with great skill by the Ones who love us best. But there is a team aspect to passing thru the death of disappointment and int the realms of resurrection! Like so many things, what is most crucial is not what happened, but rather how we choose to respond. The power to choose is what separates the Mandala’s from the Mansons!

Generally, we tend to deal with disappointment in one of two ways:
#1: Fear. I know that I am guilty a lot of being so confused when I get disappointed, and then to think, and react in fear…fear that I am being rejected, fear that I am unloved, fear that I have driven someone away with a careless word or mis-timed joke, fear of pain or sorrow.

#2. Faith. Faith that love bears all things, and never fails, and Joy will always find a way. When we are able to faithfully continue to the person we wish to be, to keep our eyes on the vision and keep them off ourselves, it is miraculous how disappointment becomes the catalyst for the transformation we so deeply desire.

I am struck by a series of contrasts in the lives of several Bible characters, and please, remember that the things in the Bible contain truths that we are privileged to suss out in our day and age. It is possible to learn from the truth of the stories without necessarily subscribing to a specifically Christian position or theology.

I see a vast difference in the lives of 2 men, who at one time were very close, who both were destined to rule as king, who both endured disappointment and sorrow…and yet one of these men we have heard nothing from or about other than the things recorded about in in the Bible, and the other of the men wrote poetry and prayers that are still to this day echoing in the highways and byways of the human heart and soul! I am talking about Saul, and David…one walked with fear, and one walked with faith.

Saul is said to have encountered a big disappointment when the prophet Samuel did not show up when Saul had planned for him to. Samuel told him to wait…wait until Samuel arrived! But Samuel delayed several days…and then the people began to grumble, began to demand that their king take action…and Saul’s disappointment became infected by fear, and he began to move and think and decide from a basis of fear.

In the midst of the crucible of disappointment, Saul fearfully decided that he could not rely on or trust anyone else, so he chose to embrace self-reliance, in a twisted way. And within a few chapters he is in the grip of self-deception, which bore the bitter fruits of despair and ultimately destruction…and we see this cycle of disappointment/deception/despair/destruction repeated in Saul’s life over and over again.

By the end of his days, Saul is alone and finds himself in the house of a witch, seeking dark and sinister remedies for disappointment. A few days later, Saul commits suicide, and the life of a talented and promising human being came to a tragic and futile end.

David, on the other hand, found himself in the crucible of disappointment over and over again just like Saul…but instead of responding with fear, he responded with faith. He made a choice, to delight himself in whatsoever was true, good, noble and worthy. He spoke of his choices to do this, to trust, to have faith. He wrote about them, and about the Ones with the power to deliver him according to Their riches and mercies. David declared over and over again that even in the midst of disappointment, God is good.

And ultimately, David experienced deliverance from that crucible and resurrection into a more yielded and humble vessel.

Disappointment met in fear=> deception=>despair=>destruction=>death. The root force behind this whole path is self-reliance, in its unbalanced and unhealthy form. The soundtrack to this path is the song “What about me? Me, me, meeee!!” Tragically, death here is the ultimate and final end.

Disappointment met in faith=>delight in what’s right=>declaring what’s true=>deliverance=>resurrection and life! The root force behind this whole path is a yielded spirit. The soundtrack to this path is the song “I Surrender All”. Miraculously, death here is the gateway to life, and is just a new beginning!

There are many other contrasts available for your examination…consider the man of fear (Samson) vs the man of faith (Samuel), and how each one dealt with disappointment, how each one walked a road that was determined by their choice of fear/faith, and the fruit that came from their lives by the end…

…or consider Judas and Peter (who aren’t that much different! After all, both men betrayed the Lord in His hour of travail!). Judas encountered such disappointment that the Messiah was not setting up a physical kingdom in which he would be an important governor, but was instead setting up a kingdom that was not made from wealth and fame, but from love and sacrifice and kindness…and so he stole things (out of fear), and justified it to himself to betray Jesus (deception), and then when he saw that every attempt he made to force Jesus to show His power physically and save Himself had failed, he wept bitterly (despair), and then hung himself.

Peter, on the other hand, entered into the same crucible, and was guilty of the same things, having taken up a sword and cut off the ear of another person (it took the touch of Jesus to heal that person!)

And as an aside, have you ever noticed that before? When Peter got militant and angry and attempted to bring the Kingdom in by human strength, he effectively rendered another person incapable of hearing! Ask yourself: how many times have YOU with the best of intentions but firmly ensconced in your own strength and agenda taken your sword and hurt someone, deafened them to the very message you so deeply wish to communicate? I think we need to take a hard look at ourselves, and consider hard the lesson Peter learned here!

So when Peter did this, he was rebuked by the Lord, and got disappointed, and even more so when Jesus allowed Himself to be taken away…and then he walked in fear, which led to deception that he would be safe from harm if he just kept quiet…which led to his denial of Jesus vehemently…which led to his despair as he saw His friend and Lord taken and tortured…

…but Peter then found the space and the grace to hold on, and a few days later, the Risen Lord appeared on the shores of the sea and called to Peter who in faith took action! He dove into the sea and swam to the Lord, and there in faith he let disappointment be turned into resurrection as he found his way through delighting in the Lord, declaring Who He is, and thus being delivered into new life.

Constance…I encourage you to take a ramble thru these stories. Whether you have a Bible or just use aan online tool like Bible Gateway…whether you consider the Bible authoritative in your life, or a collection of wise spiritual stories…do not lose the opportunity to glean some wisdom and a skill set to assist you in dealing with a very common assailant in our lives here in this time and place.

The contrasts between the two ways of dealing with disappointment are stark and meaningfully salient:

Fear seeks to escape…Faith seeks to embrace.

If you have chosen a lifestyle that is fear based, this is sort of attempting to save yourself by yourself, and essentially that is tantamount to spiritual suicide eventually. Ultimately, none of us is big enough to bear all our burdens all by ourselves! We need each other, and in my own world view, we need They who love us utterly and completely!

But if you choose to take the risk of responding in faith to disappointment, and to embrace your life rather than attempt to flee, then you will find the peace and relief in laying down your life into Their loving hands…trusting Them that you can be who you really are with Them, and that They will be who They really are with you!. You take your eyes off of the fires, off of the hurts, and you fix your eyes on the promised prize waiting on the other side…waiting thru the crucible of disappointment.

Disappointment: it brings us to the crossroads…and we can travel to that cross, and then thru that cross and into new life and deeper peace and joy.

Thank you so much for reading, and may you be blessed this day with oodles of grace, and boodles of joy, and blankets of peace.

Love,

Charissa Grace

Kevin Williamson shows us how to dehumanize a trans person, in three simple steps.

Posted on June 5, 2014 by charissagrace

Kevin Williamson shows us how to dehumanize a trans person, in three simple steps..

Constance…this will give a snapshot into ways that so often we dehumanize one another…specifically in the LGBTQ community.

But think about it: how often do these same concepts and methods get applied to one another in whatever social context we find?

Love Mercy.

Do Justly.

Walk Humbly.

Love and Grace,

Charissa

Kevin Williamson shows us to dehumanize a trans person, in three simple steps..

‘Neath Marvel Skies

Posted on June 3, 2014 by charissagrace

I sit, quiet in morning, in a fuzzy gold dawn of…yet another.
This day, like them all, like none before, stretches out horizontally
(my cramped and sleepy legs), stretches out vertically
(my free unfurling soul), hums with eternity’s pulsing center
and calls my name with its wafting breezy mouth.

My heart pulls, rises with the sleepy sun and warms
to its task of pulling me up to the easy estate of becoming.
Flowers send fragrant potions in answer to beckoning
gestures from cloudy gentle giants floating in graceful skies
bluing up for warmer dances coming when the sun opens its eyes.

There is a space for you here…beside me on this soft and leafy bench.
But you must turn a quarter turn, and step three times to your left and hop,
and fall up out of that dreamy safe sameness and routine slumber.
You must say the words and rub that dull and tinny lamp
that stands beside your desk, your bed, your chair, and then…come here.

The air shimmers, blades and branches sense your approach, your desire.
They lean, beckoning, they sing and lark in this breezy vibrant dawn.
There is quiet at the heart of this singing day, but deeper, within that quiet
burns an ever-flaming core of wonder-song, facets flashing, gleaming, fiery
like some magic carpet woven from Auroras and last night’s wild starry strays…

I wait in the quiet, I wait in the core, I wait ‘neath these plush and pearly-gold skies
swimming before a broadening emboldened sun. I wait for you…
I feel you turn, your first, second, third step, your hop…
I see rose air displace and bulge and nearly tear,
I hear that lamp purring ‘neath your eager hand!
And I join the flowers, blades, branches,
birds to herald your arrival, here ‘neath marvel skies!

Bury My Head in the Sky

Posted on June 3, 2014 by charissagrace

My wet red heart beats in time to music
flying in soaring skies and wonder-winds…
it is my womb, my temple and matrix,
at long last no more a stranger to myself.

Contractions, pangs, contraction, pang…
beating out my birthing, my being, my life,
long brownly-buried in dry dirt dusky,
deeper than an ostrich can see on its best blind day!

Strains, arpeggios, wildly dance and swirl
in bluey blasts and exultations and voices lift in high chorus
and wallow in jammy joy, crooning to me, babe in transit
from womb to shiny bearing-burst to tomb.

I, halfling of becoming, in and out of grave ground,
fidget fast and twiddle and twitch, touchy and unleashed
and free soon flying and yet bound, sommat
still in cloddy clutches of dust to dust.

But here…in this middle earth ethereal and having boundaries not yet charted…
I glance with gleaming glad eyes all round and see the ostriches burrowed down
and crammed, obliviate wings futile and folded and settled, serenaded
by secure and intentioned monotone unknowing.

I lift my voice and my words, and they drag dirty distressing fingers
from the tender white curve and arch of my throat
and my song squirms and heaves and lurches forth from fleshy grave
to live again in light and take its place in that Thundrous Sky Music Throng!

Words, familiar and yet never heard or said or sung spring
glad and fresh and ageless from my lips, and my yearning theme flashes brilliant
and dances on voices and notes, sings of birth and never wonders why
but simply shouts resounding “Bury my head in the Sky!”

F.I.G. L.E.A.F.

Posted on May 29, 2014 by charissagrace

Ever lived a life of cover-up? A life that maybe you were even hiding from yourself?

I have. And I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that I was authentic, honest, and transparent to God, others, and myself.

HA!!! Just as my father and mother from eons ago, I had fig leaves for coverings. A fig leaf is anything other than the glory of God that you take refuge in. When the scripture says that Adam and Eve were naked and ashamed, it wasn’t talking about that they suddenly knew they had no clothes on! What it meant was that the inner life of God, the Spirit of Life that Shines and gives Life had been extinguished…had died.

They had died, spiritually. And now they were dim, burned out, diminished, and it was obvious to one another, Thus, they sought a cover-up…fig leaf…just as we do to this day.

Thankfully, through the love and mercy of God Jesus who is the Second Adam has made a way for us to get a bulb change, and get our god-light turned back on, and gain in our confidence and faith in His work to the point where we can discard our fig leaves and stand boldly with unveiled faces.

But they are tricky…they are subtle and insidious…and of many and divers forms. I guess I was/am sorta an expert in wearing them and hiding. But no more! 🙂

As I was/am walking away from these, LG has given a funny little acrostic as listed below…do you see yourself there anywhere? I know I said OUCH!

Love, Charissa Grace

F     ear
I     nsecurity
G     uilt

L     oneliness
E     xile
A     nxiety
F     rustration

He Cares (Song from Isaiah 43, 1988)

Posted on May 28, 2014 by charissagrace

In 1985 I got very sick with a kidney disease called Nephritis. There was no cause that could be found, but there was a prognosis of immediate dialysis, followed by transplant at the first available organ.

For 9 months before this manifested on October the 4th, 1985, I had been getting a specific biblical reference virtually every morning during my prayer time. It was Lamentations chapter 3. This is a famous passage where the prophet Jeremiah is vicariously repenting to the Lord on behalf of the nation of Israel, and also lamenting his own personal hardship. The verses that stood out, as if in flames to me, were 12-13…

“He has bent His bow and set me up as a target for the arrow.He has caused the arrows of His quiver to pierce my kidneys…”

Of course they were a huge puzzle for me, and I delved into the chapter, and had fruitful study for months, but could not for the life of me figure out what was so significant about those fiery words…

So there I was, in the doctor’s office while they laid out my future for me, and by then, I knew the meaning of those words, in all their dread. I knew that this was some sort of trial/discipline/classroom/reproach/something that was from God, and only God would be able to help me. I had a deep certainty that I was going to survive this (and I was not very happy about that, to be frank. It was during this time that I tasted gun oil on a barrel, if you get my drift), and I decided before things got too far, that I was going to seek Them and beseech Them for mercy and see what happened…why it happened…what was happening.

I refused the options they laid out. The doctors told me I was crazy…but I didn’t care. When they asked me what I was planning, I simply told them the verses, what God had been putting in me for 9 months, and that this was something divine that had to be dealt with on that level. Of course they ridiculed me, sought to belittle and demean me for my stupidity.

It was rough to take. I knew how it looked…Jesus Freak outta yer mind etc etc.

But I was firm in my understanding, and knew that anything else they did would be futile, so instead I sought help through natural means and prayer and repentance. I did intense research and found several herbs that had verifiable healing qualities for kidneys. I prayed a ton.

And I had to work during this time. I had no time off available, and my new wife and baby needed to eat, right? So I went out to my very physical job picking up trash in our town, and I slogged zombie-like through the days. I had a constant 101 degree fever. My muscles constantly ached like the worst flu you have had. I felt so sick, so full of toxins, and so absolutely alone.

Imagine the silence, after virtually everyday for 9 months there had been active voice in my spirit from Them.

Imagine the horror and lonely realization that I was literally dying, and I had chosen to either live or die by Their intervention, and They were not talking.

It was bleak…for real.

But in a few weeks, I began to hear stirrings, and eventually They established dialogue again with me, and then came weeks of gentle revelation to me of my own carnal dependence on religion, theology, and the word itself. They showed me that I basically worshiped the Bible instead of Them. I could quote the word 9 ways to Sunday, but I didn’t properly care for Their down-trodden and weak and lost sheep. I was self-righteous, boasting in my credentials, my position as a life-long christian, and my status as a “good person”. They showed me my dependence on my own abilities and gifts (which THEY gave me, btw), and finally, how I had put my trust in an ethic of law and right behaviour, instead of trusting Them in relationship, with an ethic coming from righteousness equaling right relationship with Them.

These revelations were in some ways more painful than the physical issues I was dealing with. OOooohhh my pride was sooo stinky and offended! But They were right…They always are.

There was no immediate relief, no instant healing after I got the message and began to pursue repentance…repentance: simply a changing of the mind resulting in traveling the opposite way you were traveling. Metanoia. But there was a coming along side, an empowering while I was so weak, to complete each day, everyday, and slowly but surely embrace the fellowship of His sufferings (sanctification and death to self)…until finally…the day this song was born.

I was working in a neighborhood in our town, and as I was picking up trash, I saw a young woman in her mid twenties come out of her house, and walk to her car. She had been weeping, and was bruised (literally). She was smoking a cigarette, and was somewhat unkempt. And above all, underneath the veneer of hurt, pain, sorrow, and slow hardening of her heart, I saw that she was incredibly beautiful. Now…I think what happened is that They gave me eyes to see her as They see her! And in that moment, the lyrics to the song came into my heart, and the melody out of my mouth, and basically I got the song in about 5 minutes. I quickly pulled around the block and jotted down the words, finished the day, and went straight home to the guitar and firmed it up.

I went back to that house a few days later. I intended to sing that song to that woman…but the house was empty. Whatever violence that had occurred had flowered into its bitter and deadly fruit and no one was there any longer. I went back to my car and sat…and cried. I cried for her, for whoever hit her, for the sin and brokenness we were hemmed in by, and I prayed loud and without thought for how I appeared to others or what words I used or how spiritual I sounded or looked…and I begged Them to watch over her, draw her to Themselves, and other things as well.

The tears finally stopped, and I was ready to leave…and I heard Lady Grace speak to me, and She said that what I had just experienced was why They had pierced my kidneys with Their arrows…Their discipline had at last resulted in the good fruit They desired. She basically told me it was the first time I had ever prayed for someone else with a whole heart aware only of the person, and not of my own role as the spiritual champion, warrior, super-christian, etc. etc. And that I was incapable of hearing that song from Them previous to Their scouring and wounding stripes.

I will never, ever forget that…and the lesson of Their Faithfulness. “For I am confident of this very thing: that He who began a good work in you shall be faithful to complete it until the day of Jesus Christ!”

In light of my posts taking a very sharp prophetic stance against misogyny, I think it is timely that I found this song today in the annals of my past…“He Cares” (it is in waltz time in a country gospel style)… tumblr_n64n4yXMxA1qbc8lko1_1280

Don’t let the world steal your beauty.
Don’t let the world take your joy.
When you’re too hurt to cry, and your spirit is so dry,
oh don’t let the world steal your beauty.

When you pass thru ferocious deep rivers,
when the water is chilly and cold,
Though the floods be so grey, you will not be swept away,
when you pass thru ferocious deep rivers.

Chorus:
Cause He cares, He cares.
Jesus cares for you.
He will gently lift you up. He will fill your empty cup,
Jesus cares for you.

Don’t let the world steal your victory.
Don’t be defeated by the pain.
When you’re wounded in the fight, when you can’t see any light,
oh don’t let the world steal your victory.

When you walk thru the lonely hot fires,
and dark flames of despair lick your soul.
Do not be concerned, for you will not be burned,
when you walk thru the lonely hot fires.

Chorus:

Bridge:
Do not call to mind what has happened before,
don’t ponder the things of the past.
I will make a broad roadway in the wilderness,
and rivers of life in your deserts.

What My hands hold, none can snatch away.
What I do, none can undo.
By My Blood and My Name, you are fee from all shame,
Oh! I LOVE you, come to Me!

Chorus:
Cause I care, I care!
My people, I care for you!
I will gently lift you up, I will fill your empty cup.
Oh My people I care for you!

Don’t let the world steal your beauty.
Don’t let the world take your joy.
He will gently lift you up…He will fill your empty cup,
So don’t let the world steal your beauty.

This Desperate Prisoner Song from Psalm 69 July 1992

Posted on May 26, 2014 by charissagrace

I remember the season that I wrote this…one of the worst of my life. A parent of 4 marvelous children, married to an amazing and wonderful woman, successful, respected…and absolutely terrified constantly inside, haunted by feelings of suicide and alienation, and carrying the deep shame that I was not really a man at all. And what I was I had not been allowed to think of since I was 6 years old.

The pressure would build, to almost intolerable levels, and then somehow They would give me grace, carry me, and another period would pass where I could tolerate the pain and sorrow.

I didn’t think I was gonna make it thru this one. I thought for sure that I was gonna lose heart and kill myself, and there was no one to talk to about it, for I was ashamed that I was not “strong enough!” And then I ran into Psalm 69, and this song was born.

Looking at it now, I can hear that I, Charissa, was beginning to shout…I was the desperate prisoner. In many ways, we are all that desperate prisoner…and He is always the Liberator…for I was set free, and never have I known such peace and contentment.

Thank You Father…thank You Jesus…thank You my Mama Lady Grace.

I love You all!

Save me oh God, the flood o’er whelms my broken heart, my throat is parched!
I’m weary, Lord, from crying, my burning eyes fail while I wait for Thee!

Oh God You see my every folly, and all my wrongs are know to Thee.
May they who seek Thee be not dishonoured, because of me, because of me!

Reproach has broken me, and I am sick and shame covers my face.
I look for sympathy, but there’s no comfort there, no life for me.

Answer me Lord, and have compassion, and do not hide Your face from me!
Deliver me from the deep waters, draw near to me, please draw near to me!

O ransom me, my God, set me on high and I will sing Your song.
Zeal for Thy House consumes my soul and I will ever seek Your face.

The humble see, and they are filled with gladness, and those who seek Him, He will revive.
For Jesus sees our every trouble, and sets the desperate prisoner free…
Oh Set This Desperate Prisoner Free!

Judge Me Not

Posted on May 24, 2014 by charissagrace

This poem (or is it more just verse?) is attempting to say that if you ever find yourself looking at the outward actions of someone and coming to a conclusion about their motive or heart, it is a dead giveaway that you have unconsciously or consciously begun to trust in your own self as the source of righteousness and goodness, and have poised yourself as the standard of measure…otherwise how would you come to such a conclusion about the person’s heart??

A wise man told me once, “We judge others by their actions, but we judge ourselves by our intentions.”

Wow. So true, right? No, instead, when you are filled with the wonder and majesty of the glorious work Jesus FINISHED when He became our sacrifice and ransom, and when you truly grasp that when you say Yes to Them it is no longer you who live, but Christ in you, and that ALL old things are passed away and you are a brand new never have been creature that is a human being incarnating Very God…well, then…you are free, to simply be Their Ambassador of Love and Mercy and Kindness.

Love Mercy

Do Justly

Walk Humbly.

Love, Charissa Grace

Judge me not by the deeds I do, e’en if they tower tall
Or if they glower and echo failure and show all the ways that I fall
Judge me not by my actions, for actions only tell a part,
Judge instead the Deeds of Them whose works show the True Heart.

The True Heart gives, in lavish ways, compassion, joy, and grace,
It knows our frame, that we are dust, and knows we lost our face,
It responsibility takes for every step astray
And makes a way for us lost sheep to run from night to day.

tumblr_n5ut1fDRHc1qmr38bo1_1280

When actions you look only at, you show the god you trust,
Your own soul’s will and naming good, your own judgement…your lust
To at the core be your own captain, commanding your own soul
And God’s Name becomes vanity as you crash on ego’s shoals.

So judge me not, for I will fall beneath your scrutiny
But look instead at Lady Grace, at Jesus, at the sea
Of Love unceasing, perfect and fulfilling all the law
Indwelling life in me…judge Them…and then kneel down in awe.

Some thoughts on Homophobia and the definition of sin

Posted on May 23, 2014 by charissagrace

I was just now thinking…it seems there is a huge virulent reaction to homosexuality in most of conservative/fundamentalist/evangelical christendom. It is thought to be immoral and sinful to “be homosexual”, and if you act on that orientation, regardless of how chaste and monogamous and full of integrity you might be, you are doubling down on your sin quotient.

Hmmm…let’s consider this: First of all, for the sake of this discussion, let’s assume for the moment that being homosexual is sinful in and of itself (I do not think it is, btw). That said, can we grant that there are many many many MANY other sins present on a regular basis in the people who comprise the body of Christ? I believe even a brief moment of thought will reveal this is true. And I would furthermore assert that these sins are even present regularly right smack dab in the middle of the congregation on Sunday Mornings during meetings! Sins of gluttony, gossip, greed, lust, lies, and I don’t really need to go on do I? THEY. ARE. ALMOST. ALL. THERE!!

And yet I have heard sermon after sermon which gently and compassionately reaches out to the so called sinner with grace…while at the very same time a virulence and abhorrence of homosexuality is railed out the likes of which is almost shameful in its implications…that perhaps even the precious Blood of Jesus is not enough to save a gay person! They have to get clean FIRST, and then…just maybe…suspiciously…we may accept them.

Why is this? Are not all sins of equal moral weight in the eyes of God? (yes, they are)

Here is my theory: so many things that are egregious failures of God’s good standard of whole relationship are interior states of being, or thoughts, or hidden attitudes, and not actions. It is quite possible to live in christian communities looking beautiful and white on the outside, and yet within be a tomb of death. But “no one knows”, so it is “okay.”

Homosexuality on the other hand, or for that matter being transgender, is something observable, visible, and obvious, and it is also something that can be hidden…either by not talking about things, or living a full life, or engaging in the cross-dressing that a trans-person is forced into when they are policed and othered for dressing as who they truly are. And thus comes the judgement.

The heart of this approach considers sin to be defined by actions: wrong acts = sin, and those acts defined by a list that is derived from a selective reading of behaviors spoken of in scripture…in the OT it is a capricious selecting of things from the law that one desires, and in the NT it is usually behaviors that are mentioned in descriptions of what life is like after we have an existential encounter and transformation of our being!

In truth, sin in the large and most deadly sense is simply separation from God. Period. Last word. When this is understood, one sees that no matter WHAT one does, or refrains from, it does not address the fundamental issue, which is restoration of our relationship with the Ones who made us. After that relationship is restored, the word for sin changes and means simply “missing the mark”. Once we are truly adopted and resurrected within with Jesus, we are set free from law…completely free. If you do not accept that, you need to re-read Romans and both Corinthians and Galatians. Paul makes some very bold statements about law and spirit and sin.

When one is in the very common error of attributing moral status based on actions, one is in grave error, and I think this is the root of the hatred of homosexuality above all other “sins” (again, it is not a given to me that it is sin)…because it is an easily identified behaviour and one can consider one’s self “sinless” merely by avoiding that behaviour!!

Here is a suggestion: let’s get our own house in order. Let’s spend our time and our zeal within ourselves seeking deeper connection with Them, deeper character development, deeper sacrificial attitudes towards all we meet…ok?

Love God.

Love yourself.

Love your neighbor.

Amen.

This song gets to some of the longings of my heart

Posted on May 23, 2014 by charissagrace

Constance, perhaps you could take the time to watch this video…it’s lyrics also apply to me and my situation. I am soo very lucky, in that my beloved loves me, from the beginning, and now, and to come.

But so many people are outcast from the circle of love and affection by the ways our culture has formed expectations and unspoken rules and allowances, based on specific understandings (or lack thereof) of moral codes, on binary gender expectations that do not even come close to fitting the wide expression of actual physical expression of gender, even down to the DNA…

As you watch, won’t you please resolve to be kind t everyone you meet?

Oh…and here is a clue: being kind does not mean “hating the sin but loving the sinner”! That is a nice and neat idea, and yet it is designed for the sake of the one who fancies themself not a sinner…it unconsciously creates a barrier, and regardless of how nice you are then? You will be condescending, and you will undercut your message, and ultimately fall woefully short of the example of Jesus.

Remember Him? Yunno, the One who drew so close to sinners He was accused by the conservative religious crowd of His day of being a sinner…and let a prostitute wash His feet with her tears (oh, you sin-haters and sinner lovers…have you ever cried such tears at the feet of Jesus, and then dried them with your hair because you were so grateful for His kindness to you? Just wonderin’…), the One who ate lunch and dinner and celebrated with sinners everyday.

I know these things to be true…because long ago, when I was still deeply dissociated and yet drawn by Their love for me and thus had said Yes to Them, I was a staunch practitioner of that glib maxim above. And I recall how finally it dawned on my how haughty I was, how like the man in the temple who was thanking God that he was not like the sinner over across the way who was weeping and howling and crying out for mercy as he beat his chest in agony and desperation…

A kind word to those in need. Such a small thing really, and yet it is the biggest thing under the sun.

Becoming

Posted on May 22, 2014 by charissagrace

Dirty with me,
dirty with Your love for me,
You plunge Your tender hands
into the messy miry clay I am.

You grip,
grab,
grapple, and
pedal,
whirling me,
spinning and scattered
becoming
moving from
Your heart to me.

…becoming…

Becoming?
Mama,
with pain pulsing, and
Ache throbbing and
that void crying within?

Becoming?
Mama, with
the spin and
the pull…

And WET! Ugh!
You drench me, and
drown my
Objections
(which meander forth like mewling kitty-cries)
in floods of word,
of blood-sacred and red,
of water alive…

Til I am soft and tender too,
and moldable by You.
I cannot but trust You,
Mama, Faithful Potter,
busy and intricate,
tender and tough,
Teacher and Creator.

Yet Fire awaits, I fear…
no, I know.
Fire to dry,
to bake,
to cure,
prepare…
And then use,
filling and pouring,
and all the while

Feeling
Your hand on me, and
Your life in me,
and seeing flowers
bloom and blossom…

so my Mama,
take me in hand,
and redeem my days
in Your Becoming.

Hymn in the midst of Shame and Sorrow

Posted on May 21, 2014 by charissagrace

Hold me close, I beg Thee.
Never let me go,
though I pull like wild horses at Your tether.
Wrap me in Your love please!
Tender, tough, and total
as it presses me and puts me back together.

Father, You have reached me!
Taken me back home, into
Your house that is the essence of Your Heart.
Jesus, You have breached me!
Leapt the walls and plumbed the gory
depths of death and caused shame to depart.

Oh Mama, my Help and comfort,
You are healing, changing,
breathing in me Hope and Joy and Grace on Grace,
So hold me close, I beg Thee!
In Your wonders and Your Love,
so someday I will look upon Your Wondrous Face.

tumblr_n5wl1xPT9A1rw5ktmo1_500

Can’t Cry Hard Enough

Posted on May 21, 2014 by charissagrace

The shell is brittle…
like dry bones fallen like leaves
from the table of bone.

It clasps,
grasps, and
feeds on my
gristly gasps
with my every breath,
every sob…

…and I can’t cry hard enough.

They must be pierced,
these bone-shield
prison walls that comfort
and secure me safe.
She is knocking…
knocking over my defenses
and my usual.
But it hurts so…

…and I can’t cry hard enough.

Discovery’s pain is surpassed
only by the pain of hiding,
and what terror there is
as She sees,
and knows.
She reaches,
and grows,
and tears me
out of myself
into Life…

…and I can’t cry hard enough.

“Today’s tears are tomorrow’s treasured triumphs, ‘Rissa!”
shouts my Mama,
Lady Grace,
Queen of Grace,
Heart of God
to God & man.
She promises victory,
and being,
and glad Joy…

…and I can’t cry hard enough.

More Than I Have Known You (a song of desperate longing, 1995)

Posted on May 14, 2014 by charissagrace

This song is from my life book, and specifically my life passage: Philippians 3:8-12 (do you have a life book and/or passage? Something to think on). I remember that the nights were getting worse…nearly unbearable, and my poor beloved who suffered beside me, holding me as I shook and trembled and cried and suffered in the dark.

I remember getting up around 2 AM one morning just a few weeks after the first of the year. The thought of enduring another year towered over me like King Kong over Faye Wray! Suicide was not an option, as it is so unfair to the ones left behind, and it is the ultimate self-oriented act…but going on was not an option either.

I longed to just simply “never-have-been”…because it was as if I wasn’t there anyway, and yet horribly and terribly aware and having being…rough.

I got out my guitar, and began to strum softly in my favorite chords, and just hum…and a lil melody bubbled up inside, and the chord changes manifested themselves to me, and then I spontaneously started singing these words…but I actually believe that Lady Grace sang them for me, for I was without mouth, without tongue, and screaming…

It got me thru. They are enough…always, always enough.

(I am crying as I recall, in total and complete gratefulness)

When my life is shaken in the storm,
You are there…and You draw me near You.
In Your Arms my heart is made secure,
as You kiss my tears and call me Your own.

Chorus:

I want to know You, I want to know You!
Deep in my heart, Lord…I want to know You!
I want to know You, I want to know You!
More than I have known you Lord…I want to know You.

When the dark night presses in on me,
You are there, You’re shining so brightly.
Then Your sweet love brings the dawn again,
and my heart is filled with only one cry…

Chorus

So I come and kneel at Calvary.
You are there, and You draw me near You.
Then Your Blood, Your River washes me,
Jesus, I surrender my life to You

Chorus

A fantastic and very informative essay helping to clarify gender

Posted on May 10, 2014 by charissagrace

Constance, I think the biggest obstacle between most people and acceptance of the multiple gender expressions in our world, is ignorance.

Ignorance.

So, the most effective way to eradicate that obstacle is education. In that spirit I offer yet another reblog of a post that does a great job providing such education. As technology has advanced, the nuances of our universe are increasingly revealed…they have always been there. We have defined things by what we see, what we know…it is only natural to do this.

So…I pray that your eyes would be enlightened and your horizons expanded by the following post.

Love, Charissa

***********************************************

Intersex: What is It, and What It Means for Sexuality

Kat Callahan

Intersex: What is It, and What It Means for Sexuality

If some people are born neither male nor female, what does that say about our traditional views of sex and gender, and as these individuals will grow up to have sexual orientations, how can those orientations be defined? These are the questions asked by Michael Passaro in an essay which explores the possibility for a labeling system which validates and makes visible intersex individuals.

Lately I have been doing a lot of thinking about the gender and sexuality spectrum. I’ve discussed many things, from how we can and should define bisexuality, to whether sexual orientation should be a special class from other attractions. I will most likely do separate posts on each of these but one of the topics which interests me most is that of biological sex. What is sex? What are its defining characteristics? And how does it intersect with our many other characteristics and identities?

Lets start with the very basic. What is sex? Seems obvious to most. Sex is being male or female. Right? Well, yes. But maybe no. At least we can say that this is the widely understood use of the word. Let’s note that sex is not to be confused with gender. Gender is the social construct of categories of people and the behaviors and ways people are supposed to feel and relate to those categories/behaviors. But let’s explore a little bit into what it means to have a sex.

I suppose the simplest way to do this is to ask how do we know what sex you are? This is determined at birth by a doctor and is dependent on your developed sex organs. If you have a penis and testes you are male. If not, female. Simple right? We run into problem with this system when we encounter infants born with differences in their sex organs’ development so that they don’t really have a penis or a vagina or a clitoris. So which sex are these people? Well, doctors have decided in the past that they should be altered to fit into a binary system that cannot represent the form of the child.

As you can imagine, this worked for a time but soon came under scrutiny. People were slipping through the cracks. Because most of the children who were operated on were made into ‘girls’ these cracks were pushed open when people started to experience problems related to men’s health. This combined with the growing science around DNA moved sex’s definition to determined more by the the chromosomes contained within your cells.

This has led to even more interesting areas of what it means to be male or female. Almost everyone knows by the 7th grade that a female has two X chromosomes and a male has one X chromosome and one Y chromosome. However like all things in life, things aren’t this simple. There are many variations that can occur. There are people who only have one X chromosome. People who are XXY or XYY. There are XXX people and there are XXY people. What do we make of these? If DNA is the defining factor and there are so many different possibilities why do we only have 2 sexes?

Science has created a circular loop. We look at your physical characteristics at birth, and if needed we look at your DNA, but if your DNA isn’t fitting into the XX or XY categories we then look at your physical development again.

I, and many others, propose that there is a false sense of security in there being only two sexes. Anne Fausto-Sterling, a professor in biology and gender studies at Brown University, put forward that there could be as many as 5 different sex classifications (in a thought experiment). There is growing recognition in the scientific field that intersex is a legitimate claim against a binary understanding of sex. Germany and Australia have officially recognized that sex may not necessarily be only male and female. Australia allows for a sex “X” and Germany allows for children to be born with an indeterminate sex (to be determined at a later time).

There are many issues to deal with for intersex individuals. Issues of gender, issues of recognition, issues of bodily integrity and many more. All of these are best addressed by those who are directly affected by such things. So I would like to look at what this means for the rest of us who are (think we are) conventionally sexed. What does this mean for our understanding of sexuality?

The most glaring complication is what this means for our understanding of sexual orientation. In general sexual orientations are in relation to one’s self and the object of desire. Namely, if they are your sex, or the ‘opposite’. This is complicated when we talk about sexual orientation in terms of gender instead of sex but let’s focus on sex. Because now we do not have a binary what does it mean to be ‘heterosexual’? What is the opposite of male? What is the opposite of intersex? This is further complicated dependent on the number of sexes we allow. Can only some people be heterosexual then?

A further complexity arises when we look at what it means to be bi/pansexual. Again, operating under the assumption of sex as the object of sexual orientation, bisexual and pansexuality are the same (because traditionally there is only two sexes). However with the introduction of intersex this changes. Do we then interpret bisexual to mean two sexes? Do we adopt the view of many bisexual activists and say its attraction to one’s own sex and others? Maybe this would depend too on how many sexes we deem there to be.

Lets assume there are 3 (male, female, and intersex). Is a bisexual person still the same as a pansexual one? A person who is attracted to their own sex and others? Or is it a person attracted to two sexes? Many people might say the latter. To those I raise this question: Suppose I am a male, and I am attracted to females, and attracted to intersex individuals. BUT let us also say that I am only attracted to intersex people who resemble females. What is my sexual orientation? I seem to be bisexual. Because technically I am attracted to two sexes. However, am I really attracted to intersex people or am I actually attracted to their female-ness? It seems inaccurate to say that I am attracted to intersex people as a whole because its really only some.

This seems to justify breaking sex down further than only 3 sexes. Lets say we adopt the 5 sex system put forward by Fausto-Sterling (or even more sexes). Now how do we deal with the bi/pansexuality issue? Does/should bisexuality apply to those who are attracted to 2, 3, 4 sexes (and on and on)? Or ought we have trisexuals, quadsexuals, etc.? I’m not sure.

For clarity’s sake maybe classification ought be specific to the number of sexes you are attracted to. But is it the same for a male to be attracted to a female and a male as it is for a female to be attracted to females and female-presenting intersex? I’m not sure. Maybe we ought overhaul our entire classification system? Maybe the number is not the important bit but the specific sexes we are attracted to. Is it better to have a more complicated but also more comprehensive/accurate system?

Its clear that the system that we have doesn’t work. We can’t decide how to determine sex, let alone tell how many there are. The current binary places people into tiny boxes and clearly others many. It has been used to justify altering infants bodies unnecessarily, not only dangerous for the child then but then altering their entire life (forcing them to take hormones and still have the risk of medical complications later). As for sexual orientations – as a classification system we need to make a judgment call as to what it is that is important. Is the defining characteristic the number of sexes your attracted to? Or is the sex of the person important? If all we want is simplicity then clearly numbers is the way to go but I would question the value of a classification system that doesn’t accurately reflect the diversity that exists.

Read more about sexuality here.

This essay was originally published at Issues of Humanity. Republished with Permission. Image via Shutterstock.

Wasted For You (worship chorus 1995)

Posted on May 6, 2014 by charissagrace

(Back in 1995, I was a full time worship leader for the body of believers that I was attending…the place where I taught, led, and tried best I could to serve. This is a chorus I wrote in those days, to try to indicate a total resolve to follow Jesus where He led, regardless of the cost or place.

Little did I know that the journey would lead here!! Honestly, back then if someone had told me the road would lead to a discovery that I was a transgender person, I would have thought they were crazy! See, I was like most people…I thought that being transgender meant being sexually interested in dressing as a woman and having homosexual activity with another man.

I was totally ignorant, but in my own “righteousness” and view of anyone different, I automatically assumed that A: they were “weird” and B: they were sinful. Oh, and of course I “loved” them…Hah!

SO much has changed, and Jesus and Grace did indeed take me up on my bold words. I never knew how much pain and wrenching would be involved in such a revelation as They brought…and I also could not even imagine the liberty and healing that has resulted.

The good fruits in me are wonderful, and they in essence build my trust, to issue another bold proclamation to surrender even more…and that is scary, because the last one was so difficult, that the thought of something else like that makes me quail!

But here is the truth: I would rather die running towards Them instead of running away.

I hope that the next phase involves opportunities to tell people about the real People I know…the real Father and Jesus and Mama…the tender and loving and humorous and creative and accepting and teaching and transforming Beings that They have been for me.

Constance…please, if you are not used to reading about God, or talking about who they are, or if you have past wounds, bad experiences or pollutions from people who took Their Name in vain, give what I have to say about Them a chance.

I assure you: if They accept the likes of me, they will accept anybody!!)

There’s a cry in my spirit, an unquenchable flame.
I’ve been captured by Jesus, and I will never be the same!
I’ve been branded forever. I’ve been cut to the core.
By the Lion of Judah, shaken by His Mighty Roar!

So I will spend every moment, and I will waste all my wealth,
Jesus, come break me open, and pour me out for Yourself.
For I have burned all my bridges. I’m past the point of no return…
Jesus, let me be, yielded totally, and wasted for You.

Descant: I want to be wasted for you Lord (repeat) tumblr_myrya9xwTw1sv2qqoo1_500

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Raising a Transgender Child: A Star is Born

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