12 Transgender Christians Share Their Journey… | Believe Out Loud.
I think I will go ahead and press this. Constance, I haven’t read these links yet…but Ima take that small risk and put them up here for your perusal.
Let me know how it goes?
❤
Charissa
I will never stop pursuing Them
for only They have the Words of Life.
I will never stop seeking Grace
for only in it is there power and mercy.
I will never give death the satisfaction
of my total surrender.
I will never stop seeking yieldedness
as my steady state of being.
I will never stop giving.
It’s what I do. It’s who I am.
Sworn this 14th day of March 2015
“pi day”.
vow expires when this day next happens
…warm, snug.
Side by side, sisters
nestled against Her
and to each other
learning how to be white
and to bear all things
as our day dawns (you/me/She)
in all of our colours.
Jesus Blog: God’s Expectations Of You Are Not What You Think.
Read what Jesus might say to you today…
I fear
being able
to soundly navigate
through noisy choruses.
I fear
the blind spots
that I have—
and nurture.
The will of God
involves giving our lives
for the sake of others
on this downward path
this downward path of Jesus
that I follow
or try to.
She tears
my clenched fingers
from my own throat
She says
put others
before me
(interests, preferences, desires)
and this putting
endures beyond
stronger than death.
is there a resurrection
from this desperate
self-preservation?
is there a life raised
here/now
where I can matter
to someone
and result in
a shared existence
renewed,
restored
hopeful?
She says
I will only find out
when I seek not to save
but to lose my life
as I have said before
it is the season
of dust and ashes
We start this life with such bright expectation,
each sunrise morn of discovery and
each eventide of hope, our lifetime passes
and time flows like tides constantly in waves
that wash in over us, the same and ceaseless
yet we, in ever-new anticipation
that this new day is diff’rent, something yet
to be discovered in the shell-pink dawn,
we lift our hearts up cheery with bright song.
But there are ashes from the desperate fires
that we assemble in the long sloe nights
so cold upon those yawning yearning shores,
when stars hide behind black clouds of unknowing
and oceans hide in mists of dank despair,
and we are forced to burn all our Hosannas,
those palms fronds of our hopes so optimistic
waved innocent and arrogant and prideful
because we hadn’t seen the moon’s dark side.
We built frail fires from those brittle branches
and clutched at weak warmth, bathed in dim wan light
and marked ourselves with those imposéd ashes
and mourned those days we sang triumphantly
unknowing of the coming loss of all
our innocence in suffering…
and sorrowing…
and death and…
Ashes…ashes…
we all fall down…
and we are mindful of our common crown,
our destiny of dust wreathed round our foreheads,
that destiny of dust around our hearts,
that destiny of dust from which we came
and thus departed
that destiny of dust and our return…
to dust returned,
from dust departed, dust returned,
from dust departed, dust returned,
from dust departed, dust returned,
from dust departed, dust returned,
dust returned…
And it is only at this place, in ashes
after our hopes and dreams have burned to ash
and we have lost our hope and optimism
that we can finally see that stony path
and squinting, see the bloody foot-print outlines
left by the One who goes before our hearts,
the One who walks the Via Dolorosa
the One who, living, there lays down His Life,
the One who shows the way of self-denial
the way of sacrifice, relinquishment
entirely unnatural, the opposite
of every longing of our liquid hearts
that wants to feast upon self-preservation
and turn from bitter cups of self-denial…
And we must choose the place that we will walk:
the ceaseless shores of our naked ambition
and never finding ending place, or home?
Or…walk the path of ashes with this Shepherd
and lose our lives completely to His care
and thus spring from the ashes like a phoenix
leaps from the golden flames to live anew!
See, ashes are the opposite of owning
the mirror image of self-preservation,
the sign-post of the way of life He offers,
the insignia of the lifestyle that He models,
the mark He makes forever on His own
writ large in His own blood mixed with the ashes
of hopes consumed and dreams become dry dust!
This is the downward journey to the highest place victorious,
the deeps of Sabbath Rest and Victory Won.
Regardless of the gods you say you follow,
we all share in a common destiny:
“From dust you’ve come, to dust you shall return”.
Like Him, we too shall die, Life’s pressing question
becomes…how shall we live? How shall our lives
this day respond to death’s reality,
and answer to Life’s strident invitation
to leave all of our privilege and status,
and turn from lives marked for success and promise,
and turn from some potential undefined,
and turn from false things that we think are true,
and let go of wealth, power and consumption,
and deny that false god: accomplishment
and dare to love our enemies with candor
and dare embrace the heady risk of peace
without one stray thought of self-preservation,
take courage to live for the sake of others
and for the sake of Him who shows this way,
the way thru death, the way of blood and ashes,
will we walk in valiant hope in dust and ashes?
We can sing our songs
of life in dust and ashes
and thus return to God
our dust redeemed.
Constance, I am adopting this quote as part of my credo…not as a replacement for my relationship with God, oh God no! How could that even happen? That is like thinking that I can replace my blood type with a different one and still live.
But there is room for growing, evolving…learning…and this is a good addition.
Caveat: This will be difficult for a lot of people who have known me in the past…they will think I am being a jerk, but I am not. I simply decided that there are things that are not my fault or responsibility and I am not going to eat those plates of Sh*t on a Shingle anymore. I am just setting good and righteous boundaries that are actually far more humble than the lack of boundaries I was previously dogged by (which were a function of poor self-image which is just a mask for pride).
I choose to choose how I spend my precious. I will teach, and learn in the process.
Oh…and those of you who just now me now? You will scratch your head and wonder what’s different! Lol…it will just be the blossoming and blooming of the flower you have known.
Do Justice. Love Mercy. Walk Humbly.
Charissa
Constance, I ran across this account from a blog aggregate site. I am going to post it here without much comment, other than to say yes, I am aware of the scatalogical vocabulary, and urge you to overlook it in order to access the deeper truth.
It is towering to me that there is more of the gospel expressed in the lives of hearts that are simply oriented to love, regardless of dogma, orthodoxy or persuasion.
I wonder what would happen if we all practiced this sort of love, and left the judging and convicting and convincing to the One Person in the Entire Universe Whose job it is to do those things (Mama)?
Hmmmm…
***** ***** ***** ***** *****
Fuck i’m crying now
So my mother was up to her usual shit; calling me useless and entitled. Saying that I’m no longer allowed in the bathroom with a shower and I need to clean the other one by noon tomorrow morning or else keep in mind it hasn’t worked in 3 years.
I was hiding in my bedroom while my parents argued over who’s fault I was when my sister came in. She walked up to me and opened up her fist revealing a rainbow popsicle ‘best friends’ necklace. She thrust it into my hand and whispered that she wanted me to have it.
“because it’s a popsicle?” I asked
“no silly because it’s a rainbow. I know- I mean- I thought you’d like it.”
She then winked and told me that I no longer needed to worry about cleaning the bathroom because she had spent the past hour doing it for me.
This seems so petty and small until you realize that for the past two years my parents have been doing their darnest to get rid of me. My sister will admit that I’ve always been the scapegoat but since I came out it seems their attacks are more pointed.
My sister is 11. She has grown up in a homophobic home and listened to my parents bitch about “those damn gays” her entire life. A couple months ago I came out to her and told her the reason our parents have been threatening to kick me out or send me away. I explained that sometimes gay girls and gay boys are even beaten up by people, just because of who they love.
I cannot express how much her support means to me; perhaps I am not the one who’s wrong. If an 11 year old who has been taught nothing but hate, perhaps there is hope for the future.
***** ***** ***** ***** *****
Then the King will say to those on His right hand, ‘Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.’
“Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink? When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You? Or when did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?’ And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.’
“When Side B is the New Ex-Gay”.
Oh Constance…what a poignant and well written post awaits you behind the above link! Please head over and read it, and while you do, keep in mind something:
As John Pavlovitz says, it is no longer possible for you to bury your head in the sand of platitudes and assumptions about what it means to be gay or lesbian or transgender and be in love with God all at once.
Let me be clear with you all: my gender journey is not like the one that gay and lesbian christians are on, in that my journey is not about who I feel sexual attraction to, but rather it is an adventure that involves living out my female being in this body that is biologically male…okay? It is important you know that.
I also want to again reiterate and confess something: much to my great sorrow, before I was personally confronted by Mama about my gender identity, in inescapable ways, before that incredible and sacred day? Well, I really didn’t do a whole lot more than mouth platitudes myself. I didn’t really think about it much. Oh, I have talked with many gay men who have sought me out to confide in me…but while I was kind and loving to them? I really had nothing to offer other than the same old junk that I had been taught myself.
I was not capable of walking in their shoes! I had no true empathy with their plight and path. And thus I had no true motivation to really discover what their life is!
We made friends with a lesbian couple who have become very dear friends…in fact, they were the first people I came out to…but even in that friendship, I still didn’t know.
Well, I do now.
I do…cus I get it now, I get the same discrimination. I get the same hatred. I get the same rejection. I get judged the same way with virtually the same judgments. I pay some of the same prices, and I pay additional different ones.
But besides that? What I got was a huge dose of Humble Pie from Them…because it was so absolutely clear to me that I had not been truly like Jesus when I thought I was being like Him. I was so blinded by my own arrogant preening righteousness. I was so certain that the people that I talked to were just trying “to justify their sin”…as if every single other f***king christian in history hasn’t done the same g*dd*m thing!!
Every. Single. One.
Friend…you who “prays for me, that I will be delivered from this deception”, you should rend your own hearts and pray for yourself, that God would send you to Damascus and perhaps knock you off your ass and the scales from your eyes.
You just don’t know. You think you do…but you don’t.
People deal with all matters of interaction with God in all manner of ways…and you aren’t qualified to pass muster on them. But you are qualified to lay down your weapons, lay down your platitudes and easy caricature-arguments, and simply love…lift…and laugh.
Point to Jesus, not at sin. Point to the Cross and not to anything else. And then actually spend some time with people. Go to the Gay Christian Network Conference…Go to a Reconciling in Christ Meeting…Go to a welcoming of LGTBQ church…talk to the clergy…talk to the congregants…listen…listen.
And when done listening…well, listen some more.
Do Justice. Love Mercy. Walk Humbly.
Charissa Grace
Good Morning Constance! 🙂
Lately I have been waking and finding myself more rested…spiritually, emotionally, and physically. There are a lot of ways that dysphoria burdened me…a lot of ways. For years I didn’t know what dysphoria was and thus attributed so much of the trauma I lived as just being a function of being me.
It was the primary thing that drove me…straight past religion and into the arms of the God behind the curtain of religion that humans have erected. If it were not for Them, Their love, acceptance, and encouragement, I would have long ago despaired and taken my own life.
Then I began to face my gender issues, get educated on what they were (and weren’t), and the relationship between me and Them blossomed and flourished even more…depths and heights I had no idea of…and the sense of destiny and mission and purpose began to take shape and form! No longer was I here merely to serve out a life sentence in the penitentiary of this flesh, just slogging thru until release. No. I had been formed and fashioned in just such a precise and intricate way so as to be in this place at this time to help set other captives free, to break down walls of oppression and to be part of that rolling river of justice, that mighty stream of righteousness to all peoples.
So that was cool.
But these mornings…finding this new place of peace, liberty…I think it is a deeper connection to God that is derived from congruence and alignment of brain and body due to the HRT that I have been doing…there are fewer filters and a wider open field to run in. And for the last few years, the Person of God I have been encountering most is the Blessed Holy Spirit, the One I affectionately call Mama.
*Oh, and to you, prisoner of patriarchy, who rebuked me for “feminizing God and reducing His Divinity”? To you I say don’t go away mad, just go away…you who “masculinize God, and reduce Their Divinity” The Bible teaches that God created man in Their Image, male and female, and it is very broad in how this is worded, indicating that not only are there some humans assigned to biologically female bodies, and some humans assigned to biologically male bodies, but also that each human being made is both male and female in their creation…because each one is in the Image of God. This would by inference prove that God Themselves transcend gender, as the origin and agency of the creation of human beings! So again…just go away. I don’t receive your judgment and your fear. Perhaps if you just stop, exhale yourself out of yourself so you are at last empty, you may find a humble path to repentance for doing the very things you judge me guilty of. Then inhale the God…who made you…and me…and owns us both.*
Mama…I have written poems about Her, and I urge you to search the blog for the word Mama, and check them out. I rather like them. Mama is so incredible and, well, I am not gonna try to describe Her.
The reason for this post is because a lot of you have been in contact with me and have indicated you would actually show interest in and desire to be in relationship with a God like Mama…but that She is different than the god they were taught of as children when they attended church. That god they want nothing to do with! And who could blame them?
Well, I want to invite you to try out something: I would like to invite you to talk to Her. She was telling me in my heart that She will talk to anyone who approaches Her with an open heart and humble spirit (that means a spirit that knows that it doesn’t know but would love to be taught). And She said to suggest this to you:
If you would like to know Mama…then talk to Her and simply say “Mama, the One that Charissa talks about…I would like to start a dialogue with You. I will show up everyday at the time and place that is established, and I will literally talk with You just as I would my bestie when we go out to coffee.”
If you do this…She will not disappoint, though She will indeed surprise and confound, often times will bring things to you that may make you uncomfortable or downright angry! I know this for a fact from experience. But hang in there, stay present, and above all, be honest. If you get mad, tell Her. Speak from your innermost core…hey, She is God and already knows what is there anyway, so you might as well. I have said literally the worst things I have ever said to anyone to my Mama in those moments…but I didn’t stop there, for She talks back, yeah? She will bring thoughts, new understandings, revelations…
…and awakenings. Spiritual awakenings.
Spiritual awakenings are such a crucial component of being in this life, and they are common to nearly every religious experience and cultural expression. They share a lot of common factors in spite of the various trails that people walk to arrive in them. Here are some components of them:
☾Increased tendency to let things happen rather than making them happen
☾Feelings of being connected to others and nature
☾Overwhelming episodes of appreciation
☾A tendency to think and act spontaneously rather than from fears of past experience
☾A loss of the ability to worry
☾A loss of interest in conflict
☾A loss of interest in interpreting the actions of others
☾A loss of interest in judging others
☾A loss of interest in judging self
☾Gaining the ability to love without expecting anything in return
☾To be so strong that nothing disturbs your peace of mind.
I saw that list this morning, and I wanted to share it with you, but with the Charissa-twist that comes with my connection to Mama:
☾When I am in relationship with Mama, I have an increased tendency to let things happen rather than making them happen.
☾When I am in relationship with Mama, I have feelings of being connected to others and creation
☾When I am in relationship with Mama, I experience overwhelming episodes of appreciation
☾When I am in relationship with Mama, I have a tendency to think and act spontaneously rather than from fears of past experience
☾When I am in relationship with Mama, I have a loss of the ability to worry
☾When I am in relationship with Mama, I have a loss of interest in conflict
☾When I am in relationship with Mama, I have a loss of interest in interpreting the actions of others
☾When I am in relationship with Mama, I have a loss of interest in judging others
☾When I am in relationship with Mama, I have a loss of interest in judging self
☾When I am in relationship with Mama, I am gaining the ability to love without expecting anything in return
☾When I am in relationship with Mama, I am so strong that nothing disturbs your peace of mind
(I was trying to make a rainbow, by the way lol!!)
My point is this: Spiritual Awakening is not an experience…it is a state of being that can be entered into through relationship with a Person…through Mama.
Oh no…you don’t have to enter into connection with Her…there are many beings out there to connect to and not all of them good…but I am in relationship with Her, and I can testify of Her goodness, Her faithfulness, Her steadfast unending love and acceptance, Her humor and fierce sense of Justice, Her unending Tender Mercies…
Mama.
I Love You, Mama
Your girl, Charissa Grace
7 Reasons the Church Should Be Afraid NOT to Affirm LGBTQ.
Okay, so this post is startling in its implications. The author relates a Q she was asked by a friend, who was fearful for her. Her friend asked the author “What if you’re wrong affirming LGTBQ people as loved of God and worthy of being received as part of Christ’s Body”…
She turns that Q on its head in her post, and asks “What if you are wrong in fearing and rejecting LGTBQ human beings?” And then she goes on to list 7 potential consequences of that wrongness.
Her plea? Just love. Since you really aren’t the Holy Spirit, you are off the hook in correcting anyone and you are free to just love and trust that God is big enough to get the message across.
I mean…hey, They got it across to you, didn’t They? If They are powerful enough to get it across to you, well then They can get it across to anyone! Right?
Right!
To a Church That Dehumanizes Gays.
This letter.
Read.
Constance…pure and simple, the church simply must search its heart and come up with a better response than it currently has towards LGTBQ people.
I fear that it may never but for the same reason that so many cis-gender people may never grapple with the discrimination and hatred that is exuded towards transgender people: if it doesn’t affect you, you generally fail to really let it impinge upon your comfort.
When you are impacted by either of these issues, or really any issue, then it changes your heart and opens your eyes.
Blessed are those who would humble themselves and ask for a heart like Jesus and eyes like Mama.
It falls, from Your clay-smeared hands.
Casual, elegant and of a piece, unassuming yet so present.
The door swings open and music
swirls out of the depths of symphonies
not yet written but already played.
Beauty tears at my heart, wanting to drink
its tax of tears and collect its
payment of my pounding pulse
and my nose red with glory
and unruly, running to beat the band.
Oh Mama, that delicate wonder
that traboccant thunder, clapping
for Your willowy way so lithe
and lean, spare but not stingy
and always sticky with goodness!
You make me ache so, inside!
How is it that You can tear me open
and I don’t even know, until I am
bleeding moonlight and bathing
in velvet night?
Alas, for my wounded heart!
Pincushion for Your Arrows of Light
so precise and knowing, and each one
tipped with Deep Desire
so strong, so sweet, so savory!
I wanna be like You when I grow up, Mama!
I wanna inhabit my self as You do Yours,
I wanna see around corners and behind curtains
without going there or raising them
and giving up the game!
Sink into my bones, infiltrate them!
Permeate me with You, every pore
a thirsty throat to drink You in and then
becoming places which pour You out
on thirsty ground and suffering hearts so poor.
Let me know Your rhythms,
Let me hear Your yearns!
Let me be disciplined, but unrestrained!
And above all, let me know Your heart
and this knowing shape my own forever.
Amen.
Loving LGBT People Well, 12 Suggestions for Traditional Churches | A Queer Calling.
Good Morning Constance! 🙂 Once again I want to thank you for being here, on Charissa’s Grace Notes with me, and journeying in your own ways from works and death to Grace and Life…your presence here, your comments, your shared humanity brings me hope and adds ammunition for those lonely times in the night when all are sleeping, all is still, and I watch…awake on the walls. ❤ Thank you ❤
So the link above is from an interesting blog that is worth perusing. It lists several suggestions for Christian people to love and serve in ways consistent with the gospel, and likely far more congruent with the heart of Jesus Himself, the Great Friend of Sinners.
We have all heard the old saw “love the sinner and hate the sin”…heck, prolly a whole lot of people who read here have even said that. I have before…much to my great regret…I have indeed. When I did, I didn’t really realize what that said and implied about the person I was speaking to…and even worse what it said and implied about my own heart and self evaluation.
Alas…what I and others were usually saying is we think the loving thing to do is make sure the person knows they are a sinner. And quite simply, this is just not the way that Jesus did things…oh wait! There were times that He outright called people out on their sins! I forgot about those!
Yeah…it was to the Pharisees! Ya know those folks of that day who were the ones who loved to point out how everyone else was a sinner! He ripped them a new one over and over and over again because who they were in their own eyes was more important than who their neighbor is in God’s eyes…and that is fatal.
Of course I am not advocating “loving sin” by opposing the use of that phrase! Don’t be ridiculous! What I am saying is you ought to major in people, and minor in sin management. After all, your skills at sin management must suck, or Jesus would not have felt the need to descend from His state in Heaven, take on human flesh, and then suffer and die for you (ya know, a sinner). Right? If you were capable of managing sin, well then He would have just encouraged and taught you until you got it right!
Jesus never said “love the sinner but hate the sin”, and no one believes that meant that Jesus was compromising, prevaricating, or condoning anything evil. No…Jesus understands one crucial thing:
Saying Yes to Love is far more effective and powerful than saying No to sin.
The true YES renders the no moot.
And that brings me to why I link to this article, because if we are going to discard futile harmful platitudes, then how to we pick up effective and edifying alternatives?
They list a dozen, and they are “process oriented” and not items that you can check off on your daily righteousness list.
They demand that you see the people in your life as your moral equals.
They demand that you give the people in your life the same standing as worthy of God’s love as you have.
They demand that you understand that your perspective is extremely limited and insufficient by definition, as you are a very finite, very imperfect, and very limited being.
As you go, take with you my lil motto that I have pulled from Micah 6. It is a superb guide for keeping it simple and loving. And it has an order of listing for a reason.
Do Justice. Love Mercy. Walk Humbly.
Love, Charissa
the kind of love
that breaks your heart
in a way that somehow
makes it feel more whole,
that’s my Mama,
loving, breaking,
healing, asking.
She is always longing
for what I value dearest
and wants to be gifted
with my heart throb center
and bloody core.
Because then no more shells
no more shields
no more protective masks
just gentle yields.
Can I give up the thing
I most want to hold onto?
Can I turn from these things
(house, clothes, ease)?
It’s not a bargain, really…
this heart She drives for!
From either of our points of view
it seems we each stand to…what?
Really, what? Do we gain?
Do we lose? Or do we
dance here, and choose
one another forever?
And if I do…give
houseclothesease
(and everything else)
but hold myself still
what is that gift
but the gift of lies
and the withholding
of the only truth I am?
Yes, Mama, Yes
security, love, reputation
no…me…I give You me (again)
and all I am most fiercely
Dear Constance…
Nights are not good.
Almost every night of my life since I was around 4 I wake up in the night, and I am petrified. Skert stiff, and I mean that literally. I don’t know why. And inner voices that say horrible things that crush…flat, inflectionless, as if I am so worthless that those voices will not even waste their powers on one as meritless as I. No need to tell you what they say.
In 1966 I was exposed to a horror movie that really hooked into my dysphoria and an extremely traumatic event that had taken place a few months earlier, and since then, I have bad dreams, too.
That’s a lot of years.
That’s a lot of fears.
That’s a lot of tears.
As I grew, I discovered that talking with God helped…some. And after I had grown some more, I learned to recognize Their voice back to me…each one distinct and each one full of Love.
Well, if you have been reading here lately you know that I have been in a rough patch. A bit challenging in fact. And those voices? The ones that say crushing and horrible things? They have utilized the raw materials in my life of trial, betrayal, abandonment, loss, and sorrow, and added that weight and depth and breadth to their curses…and I could not escape their toxin. I had to just listen…and endure.
Until last night…after waking, freezing, cramping, clenching, crying…and ripping apart again…
I heard my Mama’s voice quiet and sure, certain underneath the Mordor doom-drums and orc snarls…and we talked. A long time.
At the end, She exhorted me to write some of what She told me…here on Grace Notes…as a faith step and an exercise…an attempt to call myself into fullness and being, because I have languished for so many years encased in roles, expectations and binary bondages. I have even torn myself in two in my desperate attempt to perform and thus be worthy of love and acceptance…and so all those voices whispering all those years are like a gravitational pull to be overcome.
So here is a bit of what Mama told me…translated from spirit/soul/heart talk to written words:
I am Charissa Grace, and I am not the person everyone thought me to be (including myself). 
I am made sensitive and tender…so I feel the pains and sorrows and hurts and worries of everything and everyone around me…in the same way that a tuning fork hit with vibrations will itself vibrate in frequency, or a crystal goblet will sound when it is circled with a finger.
It is not a function of something wrong in me when I feel all of that…it is a function of how my Mama created me, and so I am to stop calling myself names and blaming myself for things that are not my fault…they are simply the things that I feel because of how I am made by Her.
I am made to drink cups and drain dregs…many of them bitter and some sweet.
I am made to transform things…to catalyze their becoming into who and what they are destined to be, but I myself am not made a part of that…rather I remain apart…alone, and in my Mama’s Hands.
I am precious to Her, and She watches over me in such Joyous Jealousy, having purposed to allow me to experience pain in order for Her good riches to be birthed into this world.
I am Mama’s womb of Life…having no womb of my own and born so barren and lonely. She intentionally formed me intricate, delicate and robust, so easily woken but desperately determined to hang on…hang on…hang on.
I am Her Instrument and She delights in my unique and utterly singular voice, and so She tunes me…constantly…to be sure I am in tune to Her song, Her heart…She tightens me, She loosens me.
Above all…I am not evil. I am not “wrong” or “null” or “nothing” or a “monster” or a “freak”. What I endure is a function of Her goodness and intention and not a function of my flawed-ness and failures, and there are many of those by the way…flaws and failures. But to Her they are akin to the chiseled away wood or stone…they are like the clay She pushes away as She makes me into Her Own.
I am the daughter of Holy Spirit, Great Lady Grace…my Big Mama…and I am good. She has said it and my Precious Merciful Jesus has made it true in His own Love dripped completely over me and washing totally thru me cleansing me and making me Their Righteousness.
I will live, and still pine and long…grieve and mourn…but I will also see the Dawn morning by morning and I will keen under Her loving caresses to my hair and cheeks as She wipes away travail and gives…
…gives me Beauty for ashes…and the Oil of Joy for mourning…and She clothes me in Songs of Praise glorious and radiant and She disappears the spirits of heaviness…as She plants me in Her Own Orchards of Righteousness and calls me Her Very Own…and I will indeed day by day glorify Her Name and call Her good and only good as She brings me to the Father of Lights from Whom every good and perfect gift comes.
I am a prophetic declaration to a world that is spiritually cross-borned, just as I am physically thus. Yes, each and everyone of us is “transgender”…walking around with this knowing inside us that we were not destined for death and dissolution and destruction, knowing that we are victims of time, knowing that who we are in our hearts is somehow choked down and held down and thrown down by something that ought not be…
…and so as I live and love, as I trust and talk, as I weep and write, I am becoming a living word of love to whoever will listen, and let their own hearts awaken the dawn.
These things I say in faith…believe me, they are not said in boast, or even really anything that I think about myself. But I do know that I have heard from my Mama…and these sorts of things, the things I have written here? They aren’t even remotely like anything the voices have ever cursed at me, and like nothing I tell myself…wait, correction: told myself…so I know that they must be Her.
Mama said She was so thrilled when I picked out the name double-grace…She promises She will make good on it.
I am Charissa Grace, and I am in my Mama’s Hands. May my song ever be sweet and my tune ever triumphal, even in tears.
believe in a virgin birth?
implausible, absurd, immature!
a miracle problematic and troubling!!
inconvenient, that! disruptive!
Why, I don’t prefer it!
go walk on water, or multiply yeasty slices!
but inside…my body…my body…MY body!?!?
Nay! Do as You please with Yours but
git Yer greezy paws offn mine!
(it’s my precious!)
what’s that? why not?
Why not this birth inconvenient and impractical?
Why…because there is no mystery about this whole mess!!
Simply:
somehow, somewhere, sometime, someway
there was a soup
(not mine, I assure you, and whose?
well that ain’t my department!!)
a group of molecules
(from somewhere, sometime, someplace)
got together without knowing
(because: before knowing, ya ken?)
they just got together and became self-replicating
(i don’t know about that…
but we have that problem yet today:
self replication…ah self, you cursed demon!)
Hmmm…this sounds ummm,
well, I don’t want to be a smart ass
but I will risk becoming a talking donkey
and ask you:
If there was a Virgin Birth, what happened?
Molecules insensate unknowing
tasting soup without primordial tastebuds
and becoming out of nowhere
the Bread of Life?
And that’s different…how?
(except it excludes Love, oh such Love contained therein!)
Our smartest blindest tell us this:
‘…the universe can and will create itself from nothing.
Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something
rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.’
(ima duck my head now and giggle!
and the tome called The Grand Design…
design…
by a not-Who
in a not-Where
for a not-Reason
but Grand.
and Design.
lol…molecules just laffed out loud)
Look: this never happens, not anywhere.
So, accepting that mystery, well then
we’re all the same and somewhere we leap
in faith.
‘Cept I leap at Mama…not molecules.
I eat of Miracles, not primal soup,
but I will dunk such Living Bread
as given to me
into the cup of suffering
for the sake of Love
and a Baby
born of a virgin
and my Mama dancing.
Dear Constace…any of you struggle with self-loathing? Oh I know, we all at times don’t like ourselves, but that is different. I struggle with self-loathing…a lot. Self-Loathing is when you know better cognitively, you recognize that the feelings you have about yourself are inaccurate and not true in any external objective sense, but the feelings themselves just don’t care! They exist anyway, no matter what you tell them or believe.
Usually the best I can get by myself is a compromise: I will ignore you (the feelings) and you (the feelings) will hate me and we will just walk thru the day that way. And silence…well silence is like gasoline to self-loathing because it feeds the feelings and the feelings get control and feed the wrong thoughts which feed the feelings and before you know it I am in internal 5 alarm fire and human emotional conflagration.
But there is a wild card: Love. Love can break the back of the feelings and make them go away, whether it be the words of my baby or my bestie or even a stray compliment from a total stranger.
And Mama…She has saved the day so often.
Well, I saw this lil quote and it made me smile, cus yeah…this works too! Thanks Darling!!!
please
tell me which part of yourself
you hate the most
so I know exactly where to plant my lips
every time I see you
Oh Constance…here is the faith of a father who is walking into a short term future informed by a long term past expressed in his love-filled present.
And the world didn’t end. Thank God.
For all too often, parents so wrong-heartedly put forth a defense of what they sincerely believe is God’s total and current heart towards people like this man’s son, and people like this man…and that is when the world does end! For the one who has been gut punched, heart-hammered by smashes and blows rendered by them that have been given and appointed to love the ones in their life no matter what is or isn’t…too often the world does indeed end, tragically, as they bereft of love and hope take their own life…
…and that is the end of the world. At least for them…not to mention the trauma to every single soul connected to them.
Listen: Trust Lady Grace (the Holy Spirit). She is mighty, and persuasive and good at Her job. If She could draw to Herself the rascals She has, She can rescue anyone. In due time, all things come round.
And as you trust Her, you just might be surprised! Perhaps it is you who is changed. Perhaps it is you whose heart is transformed, and made large like the Grinch on Christmas Eve. And perhaps there is someone in your life that your kindness and gentle loving acceptance has granted the courage and strength to go on.
In my own ways, I am wrestling with issues as a person and a parent too. I was so struck by the feelings the man had as he tried to share his loving heart and felt so clumsy and awkward, and how he felt a bit rebuffed and yet stayed the course…and love won out. I was encouraged.
So…in the mean time. Just. Love. Let the Holy Spirit comment, if comment is needed. It is going to be a lot more effective than anything any of us could say anyway!
Love, Charissa.
***** ***** *****
Reddit user HeMeYou was left “overwhelmed” by advice from online strangers after accidentally discovering his son might be gay.
The 38-year-old father posed the question to Reddit after finding Google searches on his son’s iPad suggesting he wanted to come out.
He said: “I found out my 13 y/o son is gay… He hasn’t told me, but I want to support him. What can I do?”
I’m 38, and a single dad to my 13 year old son, 14 in four months. The other day I asked my son if I could borrow his iPad and he gave it to me.
After my first attempt at Google searching something I noticed that he forgot to delete his history as a lot of the search terms were along the lines of “I’m gay what now?” etc…
I love him regardless of which gender he loves, in fact when I was slightly older than him I had a few flings with guys, which he doesn’t know about, so I am 100% supportive.
He has seemed slightly down recently, as in, he isn’t as cheerful as he once was, and I desperately want to tell him that I love him regardless of which sexuality he is.
What are my options? Should I wait for him to tell me? Or should I make a few hints at it?
I’m worried that if I don’t hint at it, that he will be worried about something that he really doesn’t have to be worried about… if that makes sense.
Thanks.Shortly after, he received a flood of supportive messages, with many users offering advice based on their own experiences.
One user posted: “Google ‘how to tell my son I will love and support him no matter what’ and leave it in his search history.”
Another said: “Let him come out on his own terms, just make sure he knows that you’ll support him and you don’t have a problem with it.”
The father, who wished to remain anonymous, told Buzzfeed the response to his post was “overwhelmingly helpful and kind.”
A few days later, HeMeYou posted an update on what he ended up doing:
I started off with talking about general media with him, for instance I mentioned how awesome it was that Tim Cook (CEO of Apple) came out as being gay and I asked him what he thought about it and I was completely expecting him to give a typical teenager response like “yeah.. its good” or something like that but he actually gave me a detailed response which I absolutely loved because for the first time in a good while I’ve actually held a conversation with my son that felt really… rewarding.
I also wanted to talk to him about how I’ve noticed that he’s not been acting as cheerful as he usually has and I sort of gave the cliche spiel of “I love you no matter what and I just want to see you be happy” but I didn’t get much of a response that time apart from “yeah I know..”
The next day as I picked him up from school I thought I’d ask him about any crushes he has, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t say a gender when I asked him, so instead of ‘he’ or ‘she’ I used ‘they’ etc.. Here is that conversation as I remember it…
Me: So, do you have a crush on anyone?
Son: Uhm… no..m..maybe..
Me: Ohhh so who is the lucky person?
At this point he sort of looked at me slightly confused, I’m not 100% sure why, but I’m assuming it is because I said “lucky person” rather than “lucky girl”.
Son: Just someone from my french class…
Me: Oh yeah… so what do you like about them?
Son: Just.. stuff..
Me: Okay.. but.. like what?
Son: I donno they’re just kinda funny I guess…At this point I dropped the conversation but just before I did I told him “Well, whoever it is, they should be so lucky to have you as a boyfriend..” and while I didn’t see it, I certainly felt as though he was rolling his eyes at my cheesy comments.
At the dinner table the same day, while we were eating we had a couple minutes of silence, not much was heard apart from the cutlery and my son finally said “I actually wanted to tell you something in the car, but I was afraid you’d get in an accident..”
I looked up from my plate and looked at him straight in the eyes… I could see he was thinking about something and all I could think of was “OMG this is it…”
He said “Dad..” with a couple seconds of silence “..I’m gay”.
I looked at him and couldn’t help myself from smiling, and I told him “____, you know I love you so much… right?” and I got up and gave him a huge hug.
He even started to cry on my shoulder and because of that I couldn’t help myself but shed a couple tears.
Concluding his post, he said: “After dinner and after he finished his homework we both lay in our pyjamas on the sofa, while I was watching the Cooking Channel and he was playing on his iPad.
“I had my arm around him and he was leaning his head on my chest, and all I could think of was that I’m the happiest father on earth right now.”
-cries-
BEST F**KING FATHER
hi.
wanna know how you are,
cus who you are,
ya know?
oh.
me? well, I been well
but still and always how I am
cus who I am.
you know.
sometimes I think how you flutter inside
your heart and your breath there, racing the moon
around the night sky ablaze in fiery contest
between her jewels and her sable coat
sometimes I get a glimpse of that goblet
there on your nightstand
after you’ve been in your cups
and I ken the vintage and varietal
cus you do drain what is opened to you
(a bit too much, darling, a bit too earnest and compelled)
and when it is joyous red I sip too and laugh in your rest
but when it is dull brown and rust and no diamonds
well, then I sit beside you as you sleep, those miles away
and you there still torn open and seeping your value priceless
and that goblet stinky, forceful, insisting on being drained
but only sipped from and then denied unbearable…but present still lurking.
sigh.
you toss, and then I see your shuttered eyes glimmer
and then your loss leaks, wells up and thru limpid lids
squeezed tightly against remembering ever but driven and compelled
by memory’s tortured brew…alas, that goblet…and you
I snatch up that cup (this cup is passed to me, dear)
and to my tender lips I raise it up and press it hard against them
(ah, it burns so hot, it aches so frozen and immobile)
and down I drink the bitter draughts so tragic for you, so tragic in you…
but inside me they find a resting place
to be changed and sweetened, then expelled
out thru my eyes so tender and so kind
and filled with teary balm of sorrows healed
I catch them, the tears, one by one, in that rank glass
that goblet graveolent and grim, musty and mephitic
and loathsome in its unwashed remembers and never can forgets
and while you sleep my tears work a washing wonder
and then the cup do I return and place beside your bed
and just in time, for whimpering you thrash about and grope
wanting to forget, needing to remember, your heart stuck in December
another drink to drug you, goad your hurt and to falsely sustain you
but to your lips my tears transformed within the cup
into a sleepy healing vintage of AD 33
and hale and healthy once again
my tears…my heart…
and your eyes flutter in relief,
and your chest heaves, and sighs
and fall at long last do you from that cliff
and into Her soft stark healing embrace
and as I look, I see your face grow placid
peace in rivers breathed and mercy streaming
and then you rest and restoration reaching
to touch your troubled brow and make you whole again.
so.
you got broke, yes? torn.
cus that’s just how this world…yeah.
you know.
love.
just one heart torn willingly and glad
cus that’s just Love and constant
ya know?
sleep now, you will awake, and breath so lightly
and know that all is Love Redeemed and Lifted,
scars are left as medals, evil works are sifted
and what remains becomes
the makings of many poems
of Life Divinely Gifted.
Constance…I am in tears right now (I know, I know, I can hear you sigh and hear your eyes roll and say “What’s new, Charissa!!” giggle…always in tears)…
but it is true, I am. Because this devotion by Margaret Manning is about grace. And as you know, I picked that for my real name. Charissa…grace. Grace…grace.
Grace for me has always been about the power to do what God requires. It is the power given freely to us, and it is given to us regardless of what we “deserve”. And this power has two vital expressions: the power to overcome the challenges we face in our lives, and the power to be forgiven for the ways we fall short morally and spiritually, for the times we hide and cower in fear instead of walking with our heads high and our eyes clear, for the times we are petty and cruel, or mean and insensitive, or dull and totally unaware of our blundering tromping of toes and hurting of hearts…
Grace. A golden coin with a Heads and a Tails, spent as needed, and replaced as soon as it is spent.
Wanna hear something amazing about Grace? A writer long ago was inspired by Mama to tell us this: everywhere sin is and triumphs, Grace is as well, and is there in quantities and amounts that increase in availability exponentially relative to the presence of sin in those moments and places! If there are 10 “sin units”, then there are 10 x 10 Grace units! If there are a hundred sin, there is a hundred times hundred grace…and so on! The more sin there is, the more grace there is too…but not just coin by coin, but gold mine of grace for farthing of sin and diamond mine of grace for shilling of sin!!!
It’s just like light: the greater the darkness, the more power even one tiny light has!
But Margaret brought out something that was soo salient to me right now, right here…in the midst of extreme anxiety and distress and inner turmoil that really pushes hard against me to give up and leave forever…she spoke of Grace as a way of life! OH! How my spirit BURNS with those words!!!!
Grace…as a way of life. The way of Grace.
And that is why I am crying. In the midst of all the absolute falling apart of everything (except for me and my darling, ddh, and a few friends who know who they are cus I told them), I found myself looking at the betrayal, the accusation, the defamation, abandonment, judgement and malicious savage written and verbal attacks…looking at all that I “once had” disappear and in its place piles of pain and heaps of hatred…I had fixed my eyes on that.
But Constance…am I not gifted with opportunity most miraculous and glorious? Seriously: for one who has prayed for decades to be a person of grace and mercy, how can this come to pass without opportunity? And thus the onslaught…yes?
Grace as a way of life…the way of Grace. Because of her article, my eyes are lifted up again and onto the source of Grace, the one who’s Name is Grace.
Here is the takeaway for me, to whet your appetite:
If the grace-full life of Christ is the intended goal for those who claim to follow him, each day presents the opportunity to practice—to grow in the very grace Christ embodies. Instead of fear, there is empathy and hope. Instead of pride, there is humility and hospitality. Instead of bitterness and resentment, there is forgiveness and laying down one’s life. There is always a choice. And thankfully, there is always one who extends flawlessly the very grace we need ourselves.
I am in the oven.
Baking in the heat.
But I am also becoming a loaf of the bread of Grace.
May Grace ever abound in me and thru me and add to the superabounding of grace wherever wrong is present.
Charissa Grace
Constance, I am posting here a speech given by Debi Jackson…it speaks for itself very well. Debi is a woman who loves God, loves people, and has a transgender daughter whom she is championing in a way that I am totally certain makes Mama proud.
Please check it out and let your heart be encouraged that hate can never ever conquer.
Debi…from me my deepest thank you’s and admirations for making a way for your child.
If only…if only…
Love, Charissa
Transgender Children – Transgender Stories – Woman’s Day.
Okay, I just bawled my way thru this story…Oh Mama, please bless this woman for her faithful love of her son and of you. Please honor her for praying that prayer “Change my heart”, instead of wreaking havoc by climbing up on the throne and trying to change everything and everyone else!
Love, Charissa
Constance, I like this quote. Read it carefully…
On it’s face, it is tempting to view it as a relativistic statement, which, if you have read here much, you know that I have issues with that approach. Oh it is not that I think that I have the market cornered on truth…it is just that I cannot wrap my mind around an approach that says all things are relative and there are no absolutes…or there is no absolute truth and each person’s choice is absolute truth for them…
BECAUSE..these statements both have an absolute premise as their pre-supposition.
Do you see it there? Yes? Good.
No? Well, let me help: the first statement that there are no absolutes can be rejected, because it in and of itself logically is an absolute statement…and the same with the second!
So philosophically I don’t give serious weight to anyone who says or thinks in such short cut ways…for that is what they are: short cuts to deeper and more prescient observations and the potential for wisdom gained.
I do think that what this quote is saying is far closer to where we want to go. It is basically exhorting you to understand that you are not God, the all-knowing all-encompassing author of all things and thus the only One qualified to discern ultimately, decide ultimately, and judge/rule ultimately.
And here is the kicker: as beings created in Their Image, we have a “Junior G-Man” version of this authority! It is an honor, a wonder, and a responsibility! In all ways we must emulate Them…all ways that is, but one: humbly accepting that our view is limited by the scope of our enlightened awareness and consciousness combined with what Grace They have given to each of us to be Their ambassador in our space and our time.
So that’s why I love the quote below…it saves us from hurting a lot of people…it saves us from hurting ourselves.
Blessings, Charissa
“You don’t get to decide the truth. Other people have their own experiences, just as valid. This is easy to forget. Your slice of life seems so large and unmistakeable, like a mirage of wholeness from where you stand. But it is your job to know better and not confuse your small piece for the whole, even if you sometimes forget. Life is big—much bigger than just yours. This is the only note to self: other people are real. That’s all there is to learn.”
— Frank Chimero – The Only Note To Self
“I do believe in an everyday sort of magic—the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we’re alone.”
— Charles de Lint
Constance…what a great quote.
NOW: here is Charissa’s lil pea brain whirling round and round: there is a sweet and awe inspiring privilege in being caught up in this mystery, awake. And there is no loss, is there, if that is all we have…that connectedness inexplicable and synchronicitous. If there is only that, when we die we will be glad for it and made the richer as we found courage to dive in to the Mystery, the Mystic, the Hidden and the Made Known Without Words.
But my Q: Why is there such resistance to the idea that there would be a Personal God, Infinite in power and presence and horribly wonderfully finite in its involvement with us…and that God is so personal that it chooses to manifest itself in 3 persons, so as to be available to everyone of us…and then in that availability and pursuit, in that Quest for communion with us more arduous than lovers, why cannot They be the magic, the connectedness, the whispered voice, the presence?
I have never met anyone with a problem with the God who talks to me…literally. Either they love Her-Him-Him, or they think my God is just part of me, but a creative and wonderful and fairy-tale ought to be sort of “Charissa Imagination”.
Every person I have met who has a problem with God has been raped and abused and dehumanized by a god presented by evil people wearing masks and a name that their heart violently murders in each beat.
Constance…would you do a favor for me? Would you read the quote, and then imagine, what if God was just like that, and would talk with you, dialogue with you, listen to you, and then connect you with magic?
What if….
….well, then you would have met my Mama…my beautiful and wonderful blessed Mama Holy Spirit.
Deepest love, and written in tender crushed pain right now but bleeding gratefulness to Mama, who loves me
Charissa
Coming Out – Yes, it still does matter – LGBTQ Nation.
Constance…how ironic that it is “Coming Out Day” today…I post a really great article about it and while it deals with the topic of sexual orientation and being public about that, it translates perfectly over to gender orientation as well.
Salient words for me here (I substituted transgender for gay):
“Truthfully, most people believe that just saying the words “I’m transgender” means you’ve come out. In a sense it does, however, the real coming out, in my opinion, is when you look at that reflection you see in the mirror and say “I’m Transgender” and you don’t look away in shame – that’s when you’ve come out.
When you can accept yourself and love who you are and understand that the world can be cold and lonely and ignorant and intolerant – and you can still smile at your own reflection – you’ve come out.”
I have a long road ahead of me, God willing…one that I have just begun to scratch the surface of the joys and sorrows waiting.
But something is different: joys and sorrows are old acquaintences, especially the sorrows, and I walked with them in hollowness and null, void. Oh yes, They were there, are there…but:
What is different is me. Me. I am here now, and perhaps that will tip the balance in my favor at last.
“I’m skert Mama!!”
“I got this too, Baby…I got this too.”
Dear Constance…I have a heavy heart today, and my eyes are red and throbbing from weeping.
The second wave of “loving wounds from friends” is occurring. I got a letter in the mail from a man I spoke with several weeks ago, one whom I have known for years and had thought was open and interested in my fate.
Well, the letter showed that while he thinks of himself as a friend (and make no mistake, he truly thinks he is “doing the right thing”), he does not believe that I am of my right mind and walking properly with the Lord. He makes this clear.
And I am so conflicted! Because on the one hand I know that it is not man who grants righteousness or will be able to ultimately label me, but God who has given me righteousness as a free gift and my beloved Advocate the Holy Spirit (whom I adore and love to call Mama…a poetic, intimate and informal expression of heart connection that is underlaid by foundational theological teaching and underpinnings)…and yet on the other hand to be told by someone that I have known for over 35 years, lived with for a few of those, and then worked with for our entire working career, someone who has not been intimately involved in my life for the last 25, has rarely come to the house, did not check in when Dad died, failed to notice my rampant and extreme despair, to be told that I am under a spirit of deception and not rightly choosing for life…
…well it is shattering in a lot of ways.
I am going to post the letter here with my reply…and my comments to you all here, not anywhere else (My comments are indented and in blue). I am deeply convicted that Mama does not want me to argue about this with people. If they are open to learning what being transgender is and is not, then I will spend whatever time it takes…but if they want to “a priori” judge me as wrong and in sin simply for choosing transition, then it is pointless to argue, for the evidences that I have biblically and scientifically and philosophically are moot to them! They have already made up their minds based on feelings, cultural traditions, and a few verses wrenched from context to bolster their weak arguments.
I think what breaks me most…shakes me most…is the awareness that this same process is going to keep happening. And it is painful.
I could take the easy road…simply post “No Trespassing” and let them talk…but then again, how does that potentially educate? How does that maintain openness to relationship on my part? How does that lend any legitimacy to gender transition as a Christian?
I think that I am called to a higher purpose than just transition, and “fixing myself”…I think that I am called to speak for those who cannot speak, to run for those who cannot walk, and to stand for those who would shatter in the wind. So many individuals who are trans are so very broken, outcast, alienated…and I…true child of blessing and privilege even though I suffered as trans…I am relatively whole, and gifted with writing skills and speaking abilities.
No…I do think Mama has a different road for me, a road that will end up on the mountain top, but only via the lowly and lonesome valleys of the shadow of death. I hear Her singing to me “You gotta walk that lonesome valley…”
As you read below, I am going to add in comments of things I would have said, could have said but chose not to. Perhaps this intimate look into the life of a transgender Christian woman who is in the trench warfare that only Christians seem to be able to wage with such exquisitely kind cruelty will illuminate to you ways in which you may have failed to truly love your neighbor…or barring that will inspire you to simply “not go there”…to the correcting stool…at least not until you have walked side by side with someone for at least a hundred hours for every minute you plan to correct.
Interesting how Jesus spent very little time correcting anyone…oh wait! Except for the religious leaders and power mongers who corrected everyone else and were the final arbiters of who was holy and who was not!
I am still Charissa Grace. I am still seeking to do justice, and now in particular I am with all my being hungry to love mercy…but I am so sorrowful, how do I know if I am walking humbly? Well…Mama knows, She knows…so Ima stay close to Her always.
*****Handwritten letter to me dated October 4th, 2014*****
I want to write this to you in order to respond to our conversation that we had on your front porch on Sunday afternoon three weeks ago. My thoughts have taken awhile to distill within me but I believe that they have settled into an understandable form.
My heart is heavy as I write this and just as it has been since I was made aware of your public display of being transgender on a Monday morning as I was (Charissa comments: insert work activity here). From that shock I have been praying and have arrived at these few points that I hope you will be able to receive not as arrows of judgement or religious diatribe but as my response and call to Truth.
Interesting to see here that the very first things he communicates to me put the onus on me to “receive”…rather than the onus on him to speak edifying and encouragingly. He has done no study since we talked, asked no questions, or really even interacted with me at all.
An arrow of judgment is when we infer a heart condition based on an outward manifestation of behavior. You have judged someone when you think you know who they are based on what you have seen them do, or fail to do, with no other evidence. Jesus called it taking a speck out of someone’s eye when the speck remover’s eyes were full of logs.
A religious diatribe is when a deeply held belief is held over or against someone who is seen as violating that belief or invalidating that belief, and the said diatribe will not have any authoritative teaching accompanying it…it will simply be an emotionally laden coercion moment. Sometimes religious diatribes will be accompanied by some form of authority, but nearly every time they will be things taken out of context or twisted to serve the purpose of the one making it.
The goal of both of these forms of interaction is to control another person.
For me personally, you have crossed over a river which I will not be crossing.
This comment was confusing to me…is he telling me that he will not be transitioning beside me? Um, duh? Who would want to transition if they were fully themself? Or, is he telling me that we will no longer be friends, associates? And also, why will he not cross? Because he is happy as the gender he is? (again, duh)…or because I am in sin and he does not want to be sullied? Which is antithetical to the example that we have in Jesus by the way, who came in the flesh when we were yet dead in our sins and active enemies of God.
And now I am aware that you made that decision some time ago and I was not aware of it. And I have not ever been aware of your struggle with gender. My shock and surprise indicates a weakness of relationship and lack of transparency and openness that I assumed had existed in the past and present between us. Neither of us am I blaming for the weakness but I am sharing a feeling of loss because of the way I ended up finding out about your life change.
I simply must explain here…this man has not been a true part of my life on any consistent basis that would earn him any authority to speak like this to me. He was not there when my dad suffered…he was not there when my children went thru various trials…he was not there when I wanted to kill myself…he didn’t hear me when at work I tried to talk to him about the despair that overwhelmed me…
…and of course, he was not there when I at last admitted what I am. Because how could I dare talking to anyone about it? Seriously…look at the response he is having. Tell me how that makes him a safe place to pour out my heart and make my very core vulnerable at the most defenseless time of my life?
Weakness of relationship…lack of transparency and openness…assumed existed in the past and currently present.
Hmmm…first off, notice the assumption there, that everyone be all up in everyone else’s business. Somehow either he or I owed the other one this “transparency” simply because we had history and were both Christians. There is a devious and poison doctrine that got loose in the church in the 70s, and it assumes a heavy authoritarian leader to whom all others are “submitted to” and demands an accountability to that leader, or group of leaders. This was most clearly seen in the Shepherding Movement and in the teachings of a man named Bob Mumford among other men. As time passed, it was repudiated but managed to metastasize and mutate and the authority figure became something seemingly more benign called various things like “accountability partner” or other similar names.
While there is definite wisdom and benefit in having someone close that you trust who is there for you and who knows all about you, this practice usually devolves into various forms of bondage and control in its best forms and flat out spiritual abuse in its worst. Deep study of New Testament behavioral codes place about 99.9999% of the emphasis on removing specks from ones’ own eyes, and looking for ways to defer to others with them being more important than one’s self.
If you had shared your struggle and the reality of what you were dealing with in your heart with me or someone, perhaps things would be different. I am hoping that I would have cared enough to pray and help carry that burden to the Lord.
As I made clear when we talked, during the time he knew me most, I had no conscious idea that the source of my despair was gender dysphoria…and yes, as a victim of that Christian culture during those years, I had “accountability partners” who knew that I wrestled fiercely with depression and despair, and they had affirmed the nobility of this struggle.
I also had one friend in particular that I was open about gender feelings with, though we did not know at the time what the dealio was.
He ignores the presence of my amazing spouse and her complete sharing of my horror, her encouragement…and then he says he is currently hoping he would have cared enough to pray and help carry that burden to the Lord…WHAAAAAaaaa???????????
Did I read that right? Let me see if I am tracking: so far I have been warned that there are arrows coming and words that may be resembling religious diatribe…I have been told that I am across a river that he will not be crossing…he has implied that I have been secretive and dissembling over the years and has flat out stated that I had not shared my struggle…
…and then turns around to say that he is currently hoping that he would have cared enough…
Here is an idea: how about caring enough now, enough to be around me and see for himself that I am still the very same person I always was but more whole and healthy? How about getting over the fear that I am perishing, and getting over himself that he is somehow the knight riding in on the charger to save the day, and simply coming along side me as a friend with no agenda but to love me?
I have a few things to ask you to consider and to see my understanding of things.
OOoohh…his understanding…okay, I thought, here is where I will see some information, indication that he studied a bit on this…alas I was sadly disappointed. His understanding is just that: what he thinks in himself, and for reasons either explained poorly, weakly, or not at all.
First I am concerned that you have made these life changing decisions without any submitted relationship and dialogue with the people in the Body of Christ closest to you and who have known you. Any one of us becomes vulnerable without being in submitted relationships that are mutually held in open and honest accountable communication. Is there anyone you trust that could say “(Charissa comments: he used my deathname here) don’t go this way your (sic) making a mistake” and you would wait and not keep going? Left to ourselves we are alone.
Where do I start on that? See, the term “submitted relationship”…that is code, and means that anytime you want to do something you have to run it by other people, especially if it is something unusual. It is not enough to be submitted to God, and daily seeking Them, daily being in the word looking for guidance…it is not enough to be submitted to one’s spouse, and together daily seeking God in prayer together. No…there is a different dynamic, one in which someone else…a human being(s)…serves as an intermediary between you and God.
Hear me…there is nothing inherently wrong with doing just that…but neither is there anything inherently wrong in not doing that. A Christian who considers God’s word authoritative would search scripture for any broad stroke parameters that would include or preclude the considered direction, and if it was not prohibited would then pray and ask for guidance and insight regarding a looming decision. They would also consult with the people any such decision would directly affect, so as to defer to them humbly and understand the impact a chosen course may have on them. Then they would consider any science, technology, teachings etc that would further illuminate the possible outcomes of a choice…special attention would be given to any testimony of people who had experienced similar things.
Ideally, if one wanted to, they would share this with the people who are rooted and woven into their hearts and souls, just out of friendship. There is wisdom in counsel, and counsel from those who truly know you is priceless.
If the considered action was clearly prohibited by scripture, the counselours would be sure to point that out…but if it wasn’t…if it was a matter of choice…free will…then the preferred course of action might or might not be received, and it might or might not end up profitable…but it would not a priori be a matter of sin or rebellion or deception!!
It would simply be a choice, one if made foolishly would result in a bad end, but a bad end not due to inherent sinful action simply because it was different than the “submitted relationship” people want.
In my own case, by the time I actually confronted my being transgender, I had also pretty much divested myself of all controlling relationships and was seeking to draw close to God everyday. In fact, as depression tore at me, and dysphoria grew worse, there was not really anyone I trusted who would not immediately say I was under demonic attack or try to “buck me up”. It was insulting and hurtful that they would think that I had not already recited every encouraging verse in the bible…I know them all, literally…it was painful that they would think me vulnerable to demonic influence given that I was daily interacting with God and crying out desperately for help.
Besides, I do think there are quite a few theological issues involved with another modern doctrine that I find specious (the notion that a believer can be demonized after they have been united with the Spirit of God) a doctrine built on a few instances from the days of Jesus in the flesh. New Testament teaching regarding who controls one’s body, and who lives in that body when relationship with God is sought is full and pretty directive so as to infer that wrongs and sins would be the responsibility of an individual free will choice to deviate from clearly stated scriptural exhortations which are properly understood contextually and culturally.
I was deeply saddened when I read his rhetoric, that were I to confide my journey in someone trusted their immediate response would be to warn me of error and then I would be bound to cease and desist. It revealed that he considers transition to be wrong and a mistake and sinful in and of itself…but without any biblical edict whatsoever, no scriptural authority at all, and absolutely zero examination of the science side of things to see if my decision is sound medically and practically.
Tragically, such an attitude does indeed preclude him as a potential consultant for life matters, for in taking the next steps after examining God’s word, I discovered that there are a plethora of wise reasons to embrace transition…and in light of no forbidding authoritative bible teaching, and nothing checking me in daily prayer, and nothing checking my spouse, and the presence of positive affirmation of this course via wholeness and health and a more robust and joyful life experience, transition seems to me to very much be an answer to prayer.
There are three things that are alarm bells to me that I have been considering since our conversation that day.
One is the feminizing of the Holy Spirit. As we talked you referenced the Holy Spirit as “She” and “Her”. And you mentioned that you were now most often talking with Her (the Holy Spirit) and not the Father or the Lord Jesus. I do not see this sexual gender in the persons of the Godhead. Feminine attributes yes but not the exclusivity of specific sexual gender. I believe even our personal dialogue with God should be in accord with God’s word about Himself in scripture.
Okay…stop right there. First off, I did make it clear to him that I use those words for the Holy Spirit as part of my own personal relationship with the Holy Spirit…but I want to make a stronger point:
There is an assumed perverting of who God is by “feminizing” the Holy Spirit! Do you see that? As if calling the Holy Spirit the feminine expression of the Godhead to us somehow dirties God, and that only masculine descriptions are legitimate descriptions of God! What if over the years we have lost touch with the overall richness of the expression of God, and that restoring feminine pronouns to talking about God is needed and in order? I won’t bore you with the specifics, but just for example, one of God’s best names in the Old Testament is “El Shaddai” which means among other things “many breasted God”.
Really?? So we are to imagine a masculine god with many breasts? Or are we directed to instead consider a nursing mother dog, who has multiple food sources for multiple puppies, and the message is that God will nurture you and care for you like a mama dog her puppies! What is so bad about God having feminine attributes? And talking to God using feminine names? Is God that small and small hearted that God would shut His ears to avoid being besmirched?
I see arguments regularly which assure us that God is beyond and/or above gender…and thus saying “She” is inappropriate…
but the fact remains that “He” is still considered “appropriate” and correct!!! What a freaking contradiction!! If God is “beyond gender”, then logic tells us that either ANY pronoun is inappropriate, OR that God is big enough to not be offended by ANY pronoun one uses.
Frankly, I find anyone getting offended at the use of She for God is simply manifesting the internalized misogyny bequeathed them by the evils of the patriarchal paradigm that has imprisoned us all.
Also, notice how he characterizes gender as “sexual gender”…and that is one of the huge issues is that people reflexively associate sexuality and gender. It was telling to me that he did not have the wherewithal to simply say “gender”.
Here is the kicker: God made humans in Their Image: male and female, which means that God is possessing qualities that we see revealed in male and female humans (and countless other ones I am certain)…but we are only permitted to use the male ones to talk about or to God, or God will get offended and smite us? Or somehow if I talk with the Holy Spirit and use “Mama” and “Her” as I do, then I will be ignored and even worse turned over to evil spirits and deceived? That simply doesn’t make any sense at all, either logically or theologically…and it certainly assumes a very mean view of the Nature of God.
“God’s word about Himself in Scripture…”
I dare you to make a study of divine gender terms in the old testament…
Secondly I cannot agree with what you are doing with the body God gave you. I know you know 1 Corinthians 6 well but it does make clear that our bodies are not our own to do with as we please. They are made for God and belong to Him. Making such severe changes as you feel compelled to do and are doing certainly muddies the waters if not plain challenging the Lordship of Christ and His ownership of you.
*Charissa face-palms here* Constance, you can explore that chapter for your ownself. Volumes are written that explain proper exegesis of it…in a nutshell, it is addressing visiting harlots for sexual contact, and even more specifically as a carry over from the kind of religious practice of that day which involved sympathetic magic, and sex in temples with priests and priestesses as acts of worship of the gods of the various cultures who required such activity.
The apostle is teaching that you belong to a collective spiritual entity called the Body of Christ if you are a Christian, and as such you are not to unite yourself with anyone or anything that would lay claim to that allegiance.
It also easily generalizes over to sexual conduct and the use of the body…but to say that these verses prohibit anything specifically other than sexual acts deemed to be illicit and out of bounds is ludicrous!
Can you see how one could use this verse by itself as an arrow to seek to enforce control of anyone for doing or being anything? It could apply to those who seek to keep others from piercing, or getting tattoos, it could apply to those who seek to enforce eating rules, or activities deemed harmful to the body such as professional football, it could be used to prohibit someone from getting surgery on a cleft palate, or on a leaky heart valve, or the removal of cancer-ridden breasts, and it goes on and on and on…(as an aside, I do indeed view my unwanted and wrong genitalia as a sort of “cancer to my soul, to my heart”).
No, Constance…we can be guided by what is specifically addressed, whether to do or to not do…and then we are in the wonderful arena of maturing in relationship, sharpening our ears, and growing in wisdom as we walk, doing our best to be kind, listen to Mama (Holy Spirit…just listen!), and apply the wisdom we have gleaned. At the end of the day, the one and only measure of the success of that is how much our heart looks like Jesus at the end of the quest.
The third alarm for me is your decision to change your own name. This is very troubling to me and I am feeling strongly that this will be a point of departure from which any return will be most difficult. The authority to name belongs to God and our parents not to ourselves. To rename yourself seems to me to be a very serious thing to consider doing.
*Double face palm* First of all, I do believe that I was directed by the Holy Spirit to take this step, both in the name I settled on and the process of doing it.
Having said that, I would again encourage you to read every instance of a name change, and you will see that my friend has revealed his own belief and preference, but has not given any evidence to back that up. I would give my evidence, but I am sure I would bore you more than I have already!
The last thing I have to share is one I know personally very well. It is that it is definitely possible to be displaying the “fruits of the Spirit” and yet at the same time be deceived and strongly influenced by a spirit of the enemy. This was me and my life for quite a few years.
Classic double bind here. My only defense is that the fruits of the Spirit are in my life and growingly so…and Jesus said that we would know them by their fruits…I deny that I am deceived. The fruits of deception are not there. There is no teaching that I would be distorting or seeking a way around regarding transition! This is just an agenda driven double bind, and leaves me no way to “prove” I am not deceived.
I lead (sic) worship, was kind gentle, loving, patient, and joyful in varying degrees. Yet I was being deceived and influenced by a spirit that held me addicted and subject to pornography and the selfishness of sexual sin. It was not until the day I repented and confessed with as complete a transparency as I knew that Jesus delivered me through His Spirit. That spirit left and never returned. But in retrospect, I was deceived even while displaying some good spiritual fruit.
Ok, Constance…I was privy to this time. I can tell you that there is a very different take on these events, but in the interest of confidentiality, I am remaining silent on that.
I do want to point out an obvious issue, though: Sexual sin, sexual immorality, and pornography by extension are all things that are directly addressed with biblical teaching. As such, it would not be up to any one individual to decide for themselves what was right and what was not if they wanted to remain true to the core of what being a Christian is…
This is a huge difference between what and how the bible speaks in these areas, and what and how the bible is silent in transgender areas in general and transition issues in specific.
I can also assure you, that if one is capable of reading the bible, practicing the things being practiced, and having a “clear conscience”, that this is far more a signal of a so called spirit of deception.
I tend to view it far more practically…anything we feel bad about that we keep doing will eventually de-sensitize us to its harmful impact. It is not so much a spirit, as it is a habit of our heart and thus a tremendous bondage that we soon are in thrall to. In this case, there was never a pretense that such activity was okay or sanctioned. There was no open display of this unashamedly, such as when I dress as myself freely and without sin, but rather it was hidden behavior, with great planning and scheming and sneaking around at work to keep it hidden and thus available for indulgence. There was no knowledge by other people who had a stake in the relational implications…
In short, there was nothing whatsoever in common with his situation and my situation. I find no scriptural prohibition or direction, on either gender change or transition. I have been open completely with my spouse, from the first day of our marriage til now, and she has been fully in the know and walking united with me in love. We have studied out every bit of information we can find for over 18 months. I have a fabulous therapist, to pursue all avenues. I have not “consulted” people from my past…frankly what happened this time was exactly what I thought would happen if I tried to.
At every turn, doors opened…this was after we started asking for doors to either open or shut as a partial way to receive guidance…
Classic double bind again, right? 
Now I am praying for you.
(Now? NOW??? How does one take this?)
I would love to see you take time to get a second opinion.
What he is referring to is the counseling approach called reparative therapy. Basically this is a belief that all issues we have are due to experiential wounds we have endured. The assumption here is that I am transgender due to things that happened to me after I was born, and if I got healed of those wounds, my issues would resolve and disappear.
As a former counselour, uncertified but very active and informed and pretty good one, I can assure you that all the techniques there are to be healed of past wounds I have embraced…inner healing, deliverance, inviting the presence of the Holy Spirit to heal…what ever you have, I have tried it…and while there has been wonderful healing from wounds, and true growth and health, my dysphoria was never addressed, and since I had no idea there was such a thing as dysphoria, I was left feeling abandoned and condemned, not good enough.
The general literature regarding the reparative therapy approach is mixed at best and fruitless at worse. It has no great success rate, any more so than any therapeutic approach.
What does have a solid track record is transition. The results of transition are measurable improvements in mental health, quality of life, and general well being. If you wish, do a google search and discover on your won.
I am sure your counselor is caring and inciteful (sic) but without the presence of the Holy Spirit in prayer even she is unable to bring the depth of healing that is needed. Relief possibly but probably not wholeness.
Again…notice the assumption? That healing is what is needed (does a cleft palate need “healing”, or surgery?), that I am broken and not whole, and if I was whole I would not be transgender.
I don’t accept this. I say that as I get the hormones my brain and mind need I am growing into wholeness like any other woman. Any one of you, Constance, if you began to have your body flooded with hormones that contradicted your own internal sense of gender and self, why you would find yourself dysphoric. It is that simple!
And the clear inference that I am seeking relief…oh Constance, while I am so blessedly becoming right, there is no sense of relief when people that have known me for over 35 years begin to speak this way to me. And the prospect of more looms…
Lastly, the assumption that my counselor isn’t a christian and that the Holy Spirit is not big enough to use any means and/or tool to accomplish the will of God…
Your childhood stories are hurtful and I know the wounds are real. I just can’t see the path you are choosing as leading to real true restoration for these woundings. There is a dissonance that is unavoidable and hard to make peace with in this gender switch.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I want to restate that “real true restoration” is good, necessary to every human being, and unless accompanied by the proper sex hormones needed for that person is powerless to address gender dysphoria.
Evidence? Buehler? Buehler? Dissonance with what? Unavoidable where?
Get this: I AM NOT MAKING A GENDER SWITCH!!!!!!!
I am embracing the miracle of modern technology that allows my body to grow into my already innate sense of who I am, what I am…Charissa, a woman, and lover of God and people.
You have in so many ways been a faithful and generous friend. There is a scripture stating “faithful are the wounds of a friend”.
I could enumerate them, the ways that I have been a faithful and generous friend…I won’t. Rather, I want to take a look at how in the midst of all the verses about friendship he chose to talk about that one which discusses wounding. I agree with the verse…the wounds of a friend are faithful…but now we must establish what a friend is, does, looks like, acts like, etc. Sadly, it is my far more common experience to be a good friend to others than have them be a good friend to me…that is changing, thanks DDH!!!
If my writing has caused any more “wounding” please forgive me and know I am speaking from a heart that loves you and truth too much to remain silent.
You will take note of his assertion that he loves me and loves truth too much to remain silent…so let’s look at a few things there…first of all truth. What truth has he shown that he loves that I am not also loving? What truth has he laid out there as true truth that is authoritative and I am bound as a professing Christian to embrace? I contend he has not done this.
Thus, the truth he loves is his own truth. And wowsa do we all love our own truth, yes?
Next, I want to mention that he says that he cannot remain silent because of loving truth too much to do so. Quite simply this is an inversion of New Testament behavior in situations where there is no authoritative guide from scripture to give specific help…in those causes we are exhorted to put our sister, our brother and their own needs and wants over our own. Philippians 2 speaks well about this, and many other places do too…it is the habit of “Preferring others over ourselves”
Lastly, he claims he loves me too much to be silent. I am not rhetorical here. Where is the love again? Where has it been? What does it look like? Since we spoke last, where is the evidence of such deep love? And what will be the path going forward?
In faith.
Always your friend,
XXXX
Wow…just wow. So now comes my response. I kept it short and sweet. You will notice that I did not include a word of what I have written to you, as I truly think it would be fighting a tar baby. His mind is made up, and his heart is closed up…
…but I have written to you, Constance, because you just might read this, and get it in a new way, and be kind to someone and save their life…you just might be that cup of cold water to that one person who needs it or dies. And you just might find that I am speaking truth regarding the absolute certainty that God loves transgender people and is far more interested in their heart and character than They are their gender!
Dear XXXX…
Thank you for taking the time to write your letter. I appreciated how you characterized my “public display of being transgender”…that statement is accurate in each respect: display, and being.
Please know I receive your intention and desire for my best. Your arguments are very familiar to me, things I have asked myself and worked through until I was at peace in a biblical sense. I spent sleepless nights in thought and prayer. I counted the cost of gender transition, such as I understood it to be. I am capable of engaging on these matters with eloquence in depth, detail and evidence.
However, I disagree with your conclusions, and I think the most fruitful option is to refrain from defending myself in a debate that is not likely to touch the heart. I do not think there is anything I can say that would cause you to feel better or rest easy in knowing that I am still okay with God and God okay with me.
I choose to be silent because I believe this best sets the stage for the possibility of continued whole relationship. I have found the courage and the grace to simply stand in the face of charges and accusations. Those things say more about the ones who make them than they do about me…as time passes, God will be shown true.
I know my hope lies in a life exonerated in choosing eternal transition from works to Grace and death to Life…my gender transition is very much a subset of that. I walk unashamed and covered in the precious blood of Jesus which is my birthright as God’s offspring…for I know Whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep what I have committed to Him until That Day.
I want to state for the record that I am submitted to God, to Jane, and to trusted friends. To the very best of my knowledge I am not in rebellion and I utterly reject the assertion from both you and George that I am under a spirit of deception. I stand with a clean heart and conscience before God and man, and daily welcome the Holy Spirit in all of the Holy Spirit’s Divine Wisdom, counsel, conviction, and comfort.
I do want to say I am sorry to you for being so informal, poetic and intimate regarding what you called the feminizing of the Holy Spirit. This verbiage is to me in my heart and soul a prayer and relational “shortcut”. I was open with you that way in the spirit of our history together. I assumed you would recall my being a student of the word, committed to fidelity, one who has sought to be a workman approved…in these areas of my life, along with the bedrock areas of Christian Faith and Dogma, nothing has changed!
Our conversation was about the issues of being, gender and me, not about the nature of God, the use of gender referencing God and what we should or should not call Them. It was sloppy of me to add the burden to your heart of unnecessarily using feminine pronouns for the Holy Spirit and unwittingly placing a stumbling block before you. Please forgive me that unwise conflating of 2 things, either of which would be “an issue” by itself.
I will close by saying thank you for your letter, and that I will always do my best to be myself with you, open hearted and grateful to know you. It is my prayer that the Holy Spirit will manifest the will of the Father for us and bear the fruit in us and through us commensurate with that Life.
Remaining silent in Hope, refraining from speech on most of these things in Faith, and deferring to the Holy Spirit in all of them in Love…especially Love…
Charissa Grace White
*********************
If you are still here after all this, you are diehard indeed!! Thank you for reading.
Charissa Grace, who is heavy hearted, mourning, and still not ashamed of myself, of the Gospel, or of God in whom I put my Hope.
UPDATE: 2 years later…this individual has not had any contact with me whatsoever…has not spoken one word to me.
This man who claimed to be a friend, and a follower of Jesus, whose professed life mission is to seek and save “the lost” has not even seen me since then or in any way, shape, or form even sought me out.
This says less about him as a person and MORE about the horrible lies and bondages he lives under inside his evangelical ghetto.
It has been painful escaping…I rejoice for the pain…and the gain.
UPDATE: 3 years later…still not one word from the dude. What a Christlike witness…HAH!!
after your dead leaves magnetic and alchemal
drew from you those vapours and fumes
our Mama gathered each bitter sprout one and all
burned them in fiery plumes
i cried for you, with you, sharing your sorrow
and burden inside of my heart
and then found a leaf from the tree of tomorrow
and wrote there with tears a fresh start
i give it to you, now, here, wet and made clean
and waiting the touch of your pen
that will write of promises aquamarine
Made by Mama, kissed with Her Amen.
and worry not that your inkwell might run dry
for I will my tears shed for thee
and there you may dip your quill, write, and then fly
to your Mama-promised destiny
and i? i will walk in the forests and trees
in fall, i’ll catch every fallen leaf
and i’ll gather them precious, add my tears as keys
and i’ll Sister-stand there, stark relief
so write on these leaves with your heart and your soul
and when they are filled up, write some more
and our Mama will faithfully there make you whole
from your leaves to your pen to your core.
i love you, dear sister and friend,
me, your ever faithful bringer of tear-washed leaves
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…
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…
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…
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!)…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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
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…
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.
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
words.
swallowed in medicine times
but found to be only poison
slow half-life killers
just in time spat out
in relief,
in apprehension,
in hope…
i am jacob’s half-sister
confessing her sin of being…
her…
“guilty of wasting a perfectly good man”
say those words that lay writhing
in a painful pile of self-loathing
at my feet, finally, and not
at my throat, those words
with their acrid foul smelling stench
befouling my legs and
the air around me.
i am expiated.
and my Mama is well pleased
and readying me.
the stone under my head grows soft
and i think about my long ago
half-brother, and his ladder.
i search the brooding night sky
for mine, my eyes
pleading like puppies
hungry for milk
but my ladder is my heart.
i know that, finally,
and the skies will open
only as my heart pries open
to spit the pearls formed
within this shell-shocked soul
the stone under my head becomes flesh
and i think about how jacob named
that stone, that ebenezer memory
of open skies and accessible heavens…
bethel…and it echoes in the dark,
rings midst the stars and
chimes in cloudy choruses.
that stone,
that living stone had legs
to wander, God’s house sojourning
from place to place and time to time
ever wandering…
the stone of Scone
stone of destiny
stone of coronation
old, red, sandstone
the stone under my head becomes red
and throbs and thrums and thrills
my soul open and searching the skies,
and i sense it will speak
as it spoke so long ago
and whisper my name,
my new name from heaven.
but it pushes me to listen elsewhere,
my answers not from
rock and sand and ruin
but from the Cornerstone Rock
and its bloody open hand
red and throbbing and thrumming
my half-brother was grasper
and then God Persists…
and me…
i was messenger,
herald blood bought
price paid
white as snow
washed.
but now,
named now…
the stone under my head becomes blue
and then becomes wind,
and disappears to run
in trees and mountains and back to me
from Mama singing Her sweet answer
to my bitter long palaver…
singing my name’s song,
yes, my stone singing
the singing stone
the wind stone singing
my name-song on my face,
singing Love on my face
and my name, my name
echoes ever in me singing
charissa grace
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.
“I believe that
your soul
and
my soul
are
very
old friends.”
— Mandeq Ahmed
“Mates” 
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.
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!
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.
I was talking to Mama early this morning…
…and as I was talking with her, I ran across this:
thanks, Mama…forever…for Your Love…
Thanks even more for sustaining me, and renewing my courage!
*Charissa draws a deep breath, sets her jaw, squares her shoulders and jumps back into the river!*
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
It’s interesting to me…as I have written about before (Words Echo For Eternity)…the power of words. They are alive, words, and the power of life and death is in them.
Well, actually in us, as we are the author and originator of our words, especially those spoken impulsively or without censor as they just speak out of the overflow of the heart…we are the ones who have the power of life and death.
I have allus been so intrigued that in the garden of Gethsemane, when they came to provide Jesus with the opportunity to yield to their summons…Peter was there with a sword…and he got so incensed that he attacked one of the mob!
In fact, he attacked Malcus, a servant of the high priest {one of the villains of the crucifiction}. Jesus was horrified by Peter’s actions, and made a point to heal Malcus before He was taken, and then speak the famous words that if you take the sword you will perish by it as well. Jesus wanted us to know that when we take our words (swords) and try to bring about justice or righteousness by force, we end up rendering the very ones we seek to influence deaf to our efforts by cutting off their ears!
(I recognize that the commonly held understanding of this passage is that Jesus was making a comment about the morality of war, and I think that misses the deepest most salient point…far greater is the number of humans slaughtered and murdered in the death camps of the Dictator Tongue than every war in history combined…except that these casualties become zombies, shambling and staggering thru life biting and infecting anything that looks like life to them.
I suspect that is why Zombie themed “entertainment” is so popular…cus it tells us these truths in ways we can receive it and not do anything about it.)
And, we sow the seeds of our own destruction as well…we spread our evil heart’s “wild oats” into the hearts of others, and those stricken and misshapen bastards return with hatred to us…their progenitor…and demand the birthright of blood, and hurt…and death. Certainly I have experienced this over years…and I know you each have as well.
One last point about Malcus: his name in Hebrew means “my king, kingdom, or counselor”. Contemplate the possible significance there…you divide yourself from counsel when you attack with words…you separate yourself from your sovereign and all the power behind the throne when you use your words in battle…you lose your very place of authority and fruitfulness (your kingdom).
See, Malcus was a servant of a villain, a bad one. And he quite likely was acting upon the authority of the high priest, and thus appeared to Peter to be one who needed to be corrected, stopped, and perhaps even punished for his heinous acts. But God’s economy is upside down to us…usually we find those whom They have designated as our help and source of counsel in quite unexpected places.
Take a look into your life right now. Just for a moment, lay down your sword (words, convictions, passions)…and look around. See any Malcuses around? (and remember, Malcus was likely a slave, so he may have had no choice in his actions on the high priest’s behalf).
Back to me…I confess I had my sword in hand, and had waved it a few times…savoring its whistly threat and silvery shimmer and wooopy cry. I imagined the great war, me as Joan of Arc at the fore attacking the injustice and the blindness and the fat bloated privileged attitudes…and saw nothing but ears laying around me, and Jesus and Mama hustling around trying to match up ears and wounds, looking at me in consternation and disappointment!
So…I sighed and laid it down…
My heart is happy this morning, and overflowing with a good theme…and my tongue is the pen of a ready writer…
So how ’bout it…do ya want a sword outta yer mouth, which makes you a pretender to Jesus’ throne…or do you want the pen of a ready writer, recording good themes overflowing from a heart content and joyful?
Love, Charissa Grace
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
Constance…many of you may relate to me at times, and maybe more often not understand why or how things are so heightened, amplified.
Well, I don’t understand it either. I have never.
Understood.
I used to hide these things behind a stoic mask and teeth clenched so tight that my dentist is furious with me for ruining my teeth. She wanted me to wear a mouth guard…but c’mon: for someone who wakes up and feels like they are being smothered already, something in your mouth all nite?? No way.
But I am trying to find courage, posting my fears here, forcing them into poems (sorry, poems!!!!), trying to master them and if not them then master my own will.
I am done with being Pinocchio…I want to be a real person, of flesh and blood and not wood…not frozen ice.
Later today? This time, this place, this feeling will be puzzling to me, mystifying to me (as you most likely are mystified by me then as well), and distant, like it happened to me in a play I was in long ago. It might return tomorrow at 3 AM, it might not…I can never tell, and that in and of itself is sometimes as bad as its presence…its possibility.
Mama is here. She reminds me that She never promised me reprieve from this world and its weight…but She did promise Her Presence…always.
Even when I cannot feel Her.
ESPECIALLY when I cannot feel Her.
So I will take hold, be thankful and hunker down.
Vulnerable…naked…seen…and choosing to be, here with my Mama.
Trembling but talking,
Charissa
When I was sparkly fire and glow, and scintillating with insight
I heard from you.
I wanted to hear from you.
When I was prescient and perfect, precise and plenary
I heard from you.
I wanted to hear from you.
When I was funny and tickling and a madly capering jester
I heard from you.
I wanted to hear from you.
When I was torn and teary inside, and still like lakes at midnite
I didn’t hear from you,
I wanted to hear from you.
When I was thrumming stiff and stark, helpless in fear’s talons
I didn’t hear from you,
I wanted to hear from you.
When I was mute from sorrow and deaf from grief
I didn’t hear from you,
I wanted to hear from you.
I face unknown guillotines,
strange purveyor of power
whose lifted finger could be life
or the executioner’s twitch.
Does it mean life, or
death to my dreams and me?
Your words uncork my heart
unlocks my jaw
undeafs my ear
pour wine and set table
they calm, gentle me
I wanted to hear from you
I wanted to hear from you
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
The poem I just posted…“Her Door, Her Red Door” …
Dedicated to and written for a helpful person who disappeared…
to me
mother teacher
warrior sister
friend
Lady Grace Be Upon You
Lady Grace Ward You
Lady Grace Sustain You
Lady Grace Succor You
Lady Grace Challenge You
Feminine Images for God: What Does the Bible Say?
Constance, I am so thrilled with this discovery! While I was aware of these ideas, and as you know, I love Lady Grace, “my Mama” the Holy Spirit, and openly refer to Her as She…I mean think about it…besides the overall biblical evidence that this is not only not heretical it is accurate, ask yourself the real question:
Why is referring to someone, God or created being, as She demeaning…diminishing? Hmmm?
What does that tell you about how being female is viewed in our culture, in our world?
Riiiiigggghhhht…now you begin to get a flavour for the kind of hostility I face daily and the reason why: I am leaving behind my assignment as a biological male and all its attenant power and privilege, and receiving fully the truth about how amazing and fearfully wonderful I am made as a woman in all aspects and facets except my body.
Listen: God is the source of gender, and thus Transcends it!
This article shows how wonderfully God reveals Themself female and thus affirms and sanctifies half the human race that has been attacked, demeaned, and ultimately under demonic assault in so many ways, ever since God told satan that the Deliverer would come from a woman, and that Deliverer would crush satan’s head.
Let your mind flex, and your heart open, and truth be a beacon comforting and stark.
Love, Charissa Grace
Good morning Constance…rather than excerpt, I am reposting this article in its entirety…some of the ads that were on the site where it was had potential to be offensive to some? So, Ima just make it easy to read here. If you want the original link, I will provide it to you.
I will add one thing: I have a more robust view of grace than most. One of the greek word for Grace’s meanings is Power (the word is Charis…the root of my chosen name! 🙂 ). Allow me to relate a small vision?
In the vision, Jesus held out a silver coin to me and bade me receive it, which I did. His image was graven into the top or heads of it…like a founding father of spiritual money! giggle!! But on the bottom, was graven the cross and the dove…signifying His powerful act of sacrificial deliverance, and the release of Lady Grace into creation as a result.
Jesus then told me that I could buy whatever I wanted with this coin…I could spend it in banks, one of two! If I decided, I could spend it in the bank of overcoming…temptation, despair, fear, anxiety, gluttony, (fill in the blank)…simply picture the lil bank (mine are in the shape of a loaf of bread with a slot in the center) and slide the coin in! Talk to Him while you do it, and then walk away. Period. And if 5 minutes later, fear is back knocking, or that ice cream calls your name, spend another coin!
You can have as many as you will receive!! Literally!
However…let’s say you decide to not spend that coin, you hold onto it, and end up failing in your desire to overcome. What does one do then? ‘Cus now, I am not only failed, but also ashamed of that failure! Jesus told me just take the coin to that other bank…the bank of forgiveness, and drop it in…and then walk away, ready to receive another coin to spend as I chose, as my faith measured…
Each side of the coin represents power: power over sin, and power to forgive. Each one needs to be spent, regularly!
But the best part is that it is all right there, within your simple and direct choice to either over come or be forgiven.
Grace: The gift of power to do that which God requires, a gift given free and on the merit that you have asked. Period.
And that is why I call myself Charissa Grace: double grace…grace to be forgiven, and grace to over come.
May I be a kajillionaire in each one, and not a miser!
Love, Charissa Grace
I have a news flash for you. The Christian church is made up of flawed humans. Big surprise right? I know. I am stating the obvious. But when it comes to understanding the issues that separate the Christian church and the transgender community, this is something that is forgotten on each side of the divide.
The church is often quick to close ranks and the doors to many in the trans community. Many within the church refuse to even sit down and listen to a new point of view and they fall back on human interpretations of age old scriptures.
The hurt that the church, as a whole, has caused the trans community is not something I need to rehash. I’m sure that many of us have wounds that run deep and many may not have yet healed. But how are we to react to the prejudice and close minded attitudes that we perceive within the church? That is the greater question.
We flawed humans like to point fingers, assess blame and often place unkind labels on others. When we do, we live counter to the lives God has called us to live. God does not access blame or hold a grudge. God gave us grace by dying on the cross and loving each and everyone of us — not for who we are, but in spite of who we are. He has given us something not one person on this earth ever deserved.
Grace is all to often a forgotten aspect of living life true to what God has intended for us. Grace is a conscious act. It is an unmerited act of kindness, giving someone a gift that is undeserved.
Grace certainly doesn’t come naturally. We humans like to hold on to the hurt, the wrongs against us and dwell on the negative. By doing so, the constant rehashing of the pain only gets in the way of showing grace to those that we may not agree with or those that have hurt us. Grace goes beyond just forgiving.
Grace is not just what God has given us, but through the Holy Spirit we can show a form of grace to all those around us. Grace is an act of kindness or clemency we show not only to our friends that occasionally wronged us, but also to all those that speak out against us.
I understand completely what it feels like and what it does to your soul when a group of people turns against you when they are supposed to embody the love of Christ. I understand the emotions that run through you when people turn their backs on you.
Forgiving prejudice and all the acts that go along with it is difficult. Forgiveness alone can be difficult enough, but when someone speaks or acts against your very being, sometimes forgiveness is just too unthinkable, too difficult for us humans to comprehend.
But by living a life of grace; forgiveness and showing love to those that hurt you becomes easier. By living a life true to God’s plan, not society’s or the church’s, we can live as an example of Christ to those around us.
For far too long now the church has become known for only what it is against. It’s time to stop the hurt. It is time to bridge the gap. It is time to stand up and be the light in a darkness. Instead of creating outcasts, the church should be a place of open doors.
We can complain and point fingers all we want and accuse the church of prejudice, discrimination and outright transmisogyny. But complaining about a problem is not a solution. It only adds to the divide. We are the answer.
If the Church will not show grace to us, then we are called to be the examples of grace to the church. We are to live our lives visibly and openly, true to the voice of the Holy Spirit in us.
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.
Still, unseen but felt, lurking, looming
pressing against my bubble pushing hard
against my present center fading spinning wobbly.
You off balance me with your certainty, your finality
and you insinuate your monstrous purr vibrating
into my mindful choice to be…
…as you wait there, blacker on black, darker in dark,
shadow become substance as you steal essence and draw form
from eating my tentative, furtive choice to chance it
and be.
You snarl, silent, unheard except for those who cannot sleep
and you creep, forward-sideways-higher until your breath
fetid and cold punches my face with the death of stars and galaxies
and little creatures too, like me.
I turn away, and think of Her, and remind myself that
you choked one time…once…and took a beating, a hiding
as He tattooed you inside and out with His victory dance
you got greedy, thought you could swallow a god,
having dined on Their image like river runnings.
Your razor teeth ugly and crooning are close
but no cigar.
I slide my hand in Hers and pull me close
nose pressed firmly into Her garments of
sandalwood sashes and cedar cloaks jet blue and brilliant warm…
and turn away again from your awful there-ness
Charissa's Grace Notes 
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