In light of this nova-burst I want to thank you for silver I want to thank you for gold I want to thank you for stardust I am truly grateful that you would check on me, earthbound here and shackled by this self-gravity.I really feel so awkward all the time Cus I look for freedom as a voracious reader of pages, of faces, of hearts and suns gone nova.
Going Nova…
that explains perfectly how disconnected I feel in my heart from all that while grasping in my mind exactly what they are saying and why they are saying it!
And feeling so goddamned guilty for even being… always, feeling so goddamned guilty for even being. Never ever had a choice in that, and untold time and tears toiling in trying to be other… Going Nova…
I guess that’s a choice I make inside my heart as I float between me and those shimmery stars that woo me so…
anyway I am trying to say sorry to you for something but I don’t even know what it is or how to say it… sorry…nova…for what I am, who I am? Charissa, trying to survive this human experience in a body and brain at constant odds…is that me and what I am?I am a girl and have always been and have no need to prove that I am (and couldn’t anyway, even if I did) God knows
patriarchal fists slam into me trying to beat the woman outta me, feminist talons slash my skin trying to tear the woman offa me… while my own nails I keep razor sharp and always ready to rip that male biology right outta such dumb DNA that’s so much less than me.Anything I say can be construed as lack of humility because I never had a chance at solidarity in biological sisterhood with you and remaining silent can be the height of arrogance because it reeks of presumption and I am neither or both or all (silent, arrogant, presumptuous)
I am Going Nova.
I try my best to be a tender soul, to be a gentle soul and do good and bring honor to woman and women by how I live, how I draw close to my God Who has been, is and always will be Mama… the Wise, the Comforter, My Helper in this time of death hiding behind Hosannas and Hail Caesars.
Please hear my heart, but if you don’t the fault is mine
in all my dark and clumsy lack, so let your eyes
do all the happy work of ears and see me in these words…
when love broke me wide open with love I surrendered my love to you, my Love.
Your eyes, limpid love your heart red, Love your touch, I love that frisson, love-chills
in my love struck love torn red heart.
“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets
“Those who love you
are not fooled by mistakes you have made
or dark images you hold about yourself.
They remember your beauty when you feel ugly;
your wholeness when you are broken;
your innocence when you feel guilty;
and your purpose when you are confused.”
Ya know how people say that before you can really be loved you have to love yourself?
Um, yeah no. No. I think this is one of those things that sorta sounds right, but is insidiously, horribly imprisoning. Loving yourself is hard, freaking hard. And I am not talking about selfishness or narcissism, both of which are symptoms of self-loathing. I mean genuine unconditional positive regard for self.
I will confess here: I don’t love myself. That is the truth. I am taking steps in the right direction to walk in unconditional positive regard for myself. But mostly no. I am told I am worthy of love and respect, and I find within myself the desire to be loved, but far too often I find no sense in this notion that I am worthy of anything.
And then, my heart hearkens, back back…back to these words in 1 John: “we love, because He first Loved”…it is an axiom, found in the Bible and it gives an axiomatic accounting for love, where it came from and why we all want it, and do it too.
I do know that They love me. They have shown this to me in many specific individual ways, as well as the universal ways we all are shown love (such as beautiful sunsets, the smell of baby’s breath, the sound of the wind in fir trees, the taste of exquisite food, the sweet sorrow of parting with a well-loved friend that you will see again)…and I am working on loving myself…learning how to abandon those who are abandoners.
houses of grey blank walls decked out in smooth rich wood
panels and pictures of picnics and parties…
banal bacchanalia, all splattered in Blood.
Beds of spikes, hidden neath down comforters,
and wool knitted afghans of colorful,
threatening sinister pattern.
Houses in neighborhoods bereft of neighbors,
each one is serving themselves and alone
in community of this alienation…and all is
destroyed by their own bloody hands…
the work of rough hands…even rougher grave throats.
Our eyes are still bloodshot from staring at visions
of genocide done that we didn’t see coming
but now we continue to watch, in foreboding
but hoping in vain that the cute lil houses
are what’s really real and not all the horror,
lurking beneath in destruction and gore.
we are really in fear and wondering…
what happens when a killer comes home,
or (gulp) even worse
if that killer had never left home?
what then?
what happens when victims
*widows orphans*
and murderers
look each other in the eyes again?
what then, and who blinks first and looks away in shame?
What are these wounds on your chest? The wounds I received in the house of my friends.
What is greater: the pain of being violated
or the bitter agony of forgiving?
a valley of dry bones cannot be forgotten
even in the face of forgiveness so costly.
This impossible for me to try to describe
or even conceive of apart from the cross of Christ.
Because forgiveness is also
it’s own rare and exquisite
form of great suffering.
And so now we get down to it:
there is no exit, no escape from the agony,
no pitstop from pain…
all we can do is exchange suffering’s form and it’s face,
from our own for the pain of another…
and us become willing to be bashed and broken
by those very ones we so desperately want
to reach out to and reconcile and leave pain behind.
This is the agony of a tortured soul wrestling
and a wrecked body there…offered in prayer
on the altar of sorrow…for the forgiveness
of torturers’ torments in this dank dark world
of violence and victims, laboring heavy
beneath weights unspeakable and even greater, the weight of the cross.
And Him? The Reproached?
The Betrayed, Who was Broken?
Him The Despised and King of All Criminals,
King of All Victims, King of All Shame?
Perhaps He knows of the path thru this valley
of broken dry bones full of dust, full of death.
Perhaps He can see those small signs of life
that are hidden from eyes filled with blood, hate and rage
and only seen by the eyes washed clean with tears
of repentance and wonder to look for our Spring
and the signs there so gentle
of a coming glad day of Resurrection…
“I was pretty sure that’s how you know you’re falling for someone—when you want the good and bad, when you want everything, regardless of how horrible, how dark. You want it all, because at the end of the day, it’s still them.”
Love comes from years
of breathing skin to skin
tangled in each other’s dreams
until each night weaves
another thread in the same
web of blood and sleep and I
have only passed through quickly like
light and you have only surrounded me
suddenly like flame
Come close, up here, on the porch and draw near where I sit, hunkered down, clinging close, pressed with all I am
against this barrier thin, austere, and yet impermeable
thru which I see, and speak, and yearn but over cannot cross.
I get naked, bare and slick and covered in Her Oil
and hurl myself hard, fearless, face first pounding in wild flails
until the fists of my heart break and bloody grow within this cage
and sorrow rises right alongside all my heartsick rage
at being born here in this place so richly furnished wrong
at hearing music so distinct but dissonant from my song
Maybe we together can make a crack in this stark mass
and relieve my long days spent here, on the wrong side of the glass.
Constance…most of you who are public followers of Grace Notes are cis-gender humans. Some of you are trans (thanks for the support, family!! 🙂 ), and as transgender humans you are intimately acquainted with the entity that dysphoria is, and you know that thoughts of suicide or talk of it is often our most noble and courageous act of the day, because we are speaking about it rather than…
But I want to talk to you Constance (and you lurkers, too…yes, you are there), you cis-gender humans, so blessed to be non-itchy in your skin and of limber-lung to draw in draughts of refreshing air…you live in a homogenous world…a world that sniks together and is of a piece. And where it doesn’t, it doesn’t in the same places as other humans and so you find an identity and community in that.
You don’t understand how alienation from yourself puts you at a distance from everyone else and everything else…always.
Because dysphoria is like missing pieces in a mosaic of being.
You say to yourself that you are shattered too, and you are…but your pieces are present, and as you glue them back together they form a sort of whole once again…whereas the dysphoric person diligently and urgently works daily to reassemble the shattered image into a whole, only to discover that the crucial core is absent…and the middle is void.
We are separated from you always…as if you are on the shore of the sea and we across on the opposite shore and lacking the voices of whales to sing to you across the leagues and the deep.
So there is that.
This morning I am mindful of dysphoria and the gulf that it is around me, alas, and the challenge that it presents me in my quest to be a yielded vessel yielding blessing…I am mindful that there is also, somewhere packed in all of this, an opportunity to know and understand Their perspective and methods as Gulf-Breechers and Core-Restorers…perhaps this is my destiny, to be a restorer of the breach and a crosser of the gulf.
But in this mindful place, I have been remembering the words that a man spoke to me last summer, upon being let into my secret world of confusion and horror, that world of the transgender person caught between body and brain. He is a man who has in the past been very open in expressing admiration for me, as a child of God, as a communicator of Grace, and as a caretaker of my children. He has said toweringly complimentary things to me, things that I felt were far too idealized and simply did not adequately assess how flawed I am, what a failure I am…
…but he had said them, spoken of my impact on himself and those around me.
On that soft and lazy August Saturday, by the waters of a small man-made lake (which seems appropriate), we spoke, and I shared with him the struggle of dysphoria and how suicide is as constant companion as the sensation of choking is to the asthmatic.
He burst out in a fit of passion “Don’t you dare off yourself! It would falsify everything you taught me, and all you stand for!” And he went on to talk about how negatively it would affect him, and how he would lose heart and likely not have belief anymore that what I taught meant anything worth trusting.
That is what I am thinking about this morning…how easily and how often my situation is somehow twisted around and becomes all about the other person. It was like another situation where I had been accosted by a long standing acquaintance (whom I would have called a friend, but now realize that was me putting my view of what a friend is on someone who sees it vastly different) who demanded an explanation for “why you have been seen around town dressed as a woman!!” (quelle horreur!!)…and since he had that place in my heart of “friend”, I gave the full account, but only half-way. He cut me off because “he was overwhelmed and couldn’t take anymore of this”. And then he looked at me in sheer misery and said “What am I going to tell my children??!!”
See? All about him. His place, and his burden…as if that question needed any other answer than tell them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and begin to study these things together to help out a people in chains.
Well…that is a very similar response this other man by the lake had, regarding discovering my daily battle with dark thoughts. His burden placed on me was that if I were to ever choose to not be here any longer then I would be the cause of his faith being weakened and diminished and his life harmed.
Since that time, I have spoken to this man two times, once a day or two after a big crisis that was brewing, and then again at the end of October 2014.
Twice.
And since then, nothing…and I get that there are complicating reasons for that, not the least of which is my transition and he is a man. Very few men have been “man enough” to handle my transition with anything other than rejection at best, and murderous, venomous looks at worst (and those looks threaten far worse is coming).
Constance…is this not something close to suicide? Friendshipicide? Is not this towering silence some sort of death? Does it not underline and highlight the gulf between us, because really all that changed was his understanding that he was interacting with a woman?
And those words ring in my heart, part of the voices that circle me like wolves and nip and slash and bleed me out…
“…it would falsify everything you taught me…”
Well, I don’t know if it would or wouldn’t. Things are true and worthy of living regardless of the source one receives them from. But I know that this staggering abandonment does indeed make me mindful of how those words are true from my perspective. Apparently, I am no longer those “three C’s” to him…Child, Communicator, Caretaker. Now, I am simply “It which must be avoided, lest whatever ails it somehow infect me”.
As to the other man…that was the last time we spoke, in September, with a terse letter being the final salvo and manifesto of that declaration of war religion has filed on me…and sadly, I have reason to know the sense of duty fulfilled and integrity maintained, and sweet sadness at doing the “hard but right thing” which follows the writing and delivering of such a letter…
…it is such an awful feedback loop of legalism and lies and lack of life (death).
It is difficult being the friend or relative of a transgender person. You get caught up in the punishments they are meted for their gender-crimes. You get branded with the Scarlet TL to match their Scarlet T (“tranny-lover” and “tranny”)…
…and you get confronted again and again and again with that gulf uncrossable, that breech unbridgeable, and the dysphoric human’s many-sided and alienated existence when you yourself live in a world where such concepts as sides and incongruency are understood in the brain alone and denied in the bones, those non-dysphoric congruent bones.
I am watching “Romeo and Juliet” right now, the 1954 version directed by Renato Castellani (huge giggles here, ddh)…this play has long been my very favorite Shakespearean play (followed closely by Henry the 5th). It is tragically striking, how I am in one being a Montague and Capulet, and both Romeo and Juliet…it is in a sense a tableau of dysphoria and the solution is inferred in the tragic ending…only loving acceptance and dogged commitment can validate a life and overcome abandonment.
And there is a timeless line (distinct from the rest of that genius’s timeless lines):
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
I am still whatever Rose I was…and still stink of whatever stench emanated from me under the old costume I sported. I still live in the dysphoric House of Mirrors, and sides all around me with everyone else there and me here…I am still “Fortune’s Fool”.
…and as to men? “Friends”…well, there is this, from the mouth of Juliet’s Nurse:
There’s no trust,
No faith, no honesty in men. All perjured,
All forsworn, all naught, all dissemblers.
Ah, where’s my man?—Give me some aqua vitae.—
These griefs, these woes, these sorrows make me old.
“It’s not ‘natural’ to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting articulate way.
People living in groups, families, communes say little—have few verbal means.
Eloquence—thinking in words—is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality.”
—
Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh, Journals & Notebooks
Constance, this may be so? But I will tell you what is not “natural” to me…it is not natural to not speak. It is not natural to open the heart and tell of its deepest places, and then shut it again and starve someone. It is not natural to draw someone into a place of intimacy and then stone them. It is not natural to tell someone how towering their significance is in one’s life, and then allow an event of life to tower so greatly that they never talk to the other person of “significance” ever again.
It is not natural to take the secrets of someone’s openness and then harbor them if they are your own and then not respond in kind and thus hold that person in your debt.
It is not natural to make a person feel like they are a burden for breathing, a weight for wanting, a dead body for desiring.
There are people I miss so badly, that I guess it is not natural to be separated from the ones you love.
I wish this wasn’t so. I wish that I wasn’t some chore to check off a list. I wish I wasn’t some shade to whisper of around campfires. I wish I wasn’t judged dead because an understanding of who and what I am was in error and must die and be reborn in a truer way.
I wish I was treasured more than memory.
I wish someone wanted to talk to me everyday instead of toss some Alpo in the dish and disappear until my ribs show thru.
I wish…I wish.
I wish I could forget the words a man told me of undying friendship and what I meant to him and how he is changed forever because of me…because his actions tell the truth that his words lied.
I wish I could forget the words a woman said to me that are undermined by her actions like the ocean undermines a glacier until it falls into the sea and is melted and gone…
I wish I wasn’t me…but who then would I be? Who should I be?
Well…I will be the person I wish these others were, and strive to not be the person who is like them.
I will try to be there, always. I will try to speak, and then do and do with all I have.
I will try to make a life that is full and not hollow, present and not absent, flexible and changing as time births new understandings of history.
I will try to forgive and remember, but remember in redemption and grace.
But we shouldn’t be pressuring people to come out. Instead, we should be challenging the expectation that others are entitled to our identities.
No one should be demanding that people take on the risks of coming out. No one except you can make that decision. Your identity is yours, and no one else owns it.
You don’t owe anyone anything – especially not people who are ignoring your personal autonomy and safety by demanding that you come out.
Constance…I face a lot of challenges in life that are in addition to the ones faced by all people simply as a condition of being in this world. If you have read here for awhile, you are acquainted with the gamut of these, and if you are new, well have a gander at the other posts ;-)…giggle.
My point is that it is the additional ones that kill. They are like the difference between running a marathon, and running one chased by dogs, and running one when you aren’t fast enough to keep from getting nipped numerous times on the run. And it is the nips that bleed, get infected, and drain…of vitality, of energy, and eventually of hope.
Right now the hardest of these challenges for me is that of making myself known to other people that are of utmost importance to me. They are mourning what they perceive as the loss of the person they knew, rather than perceiving it as the loss of the explanatory narrative that stitched together our common history.
For a whole host of reasons, some of them spiritual, some of them developmental, and most of them cultural/paradigm related, the onus and burden falls squarely on me in this process…to be the bigger person…to walk the second mile, or the third or the fourth, or however many miles must be walked…to turn the other cheek again and again and again…
My own identity is in need of justification, of proving, of validating, and the ways I respond either contribute to or detract from my right to be.
Judgement is passed on the narrative that I have, as it compares to the narrative that was.
Again…I get it. Fairness is not the operative determinant. But I want it to be understood: this is a costly gift, and gift I do think it is. It is not something that I owe…to anyone except myself whom I owe the debt of authenticity inner and outward. I think that my perspective on things is equally valid, is equally valuable and to be treasured. The “things I have lost” or the sense that “what I thought I had never existed” is just as real, as vibrant and legitimate for me as it is for anyone else who feels like they are being robbed.
Let me state it baldly: anything they are “robbed of” wasn’t real in the first place.
How about this: instead of the point of view that “a father I thought I had is now dead and replaced by you”, how about this: “I have a father who just happens to be a woman, and the idea I held that my father was also a male was an incorrect one. I am fortunate to be able to have this inaccurate understanding corrected while there is still time and life remaining to know this person that I valued and treasured as a father!”
Because this is my story…my history. I fathered four people…as a woman who inhabits a body that is biologically male. And as far as I am aware, my children always felt that I was a good dad to them, valuable in the love, acceptance and counsel that I offered them. And I am still here! The same person with the same ideas and same truths (and some newly understood ones too).
Perhaps instead of me saying over and over again I am sorry I am sorry…I am sorry for being…I am sorry for wanting to be, needing to be…maybe it could be thought about that a different sorry could be said…I am sorry that I held onto my own belief and insistence that a father has to be spiritually and biologically male and only that…I am sorry that I invalidated the lives and efforts of the millions of women who “fathered” young boys into men because there was no one else there.
I am posting this link, because it gets to a lot of the reasons why there is so much gravity behind the other narrative, the one that requires me to justify my right to exist, my right to pursue congruency, my right to be free from suicidal ideation, my right to feel okay about the truth that I did the best I could and while not a perfect parent did a pretty adequate job even compared to a cis-male…and as a transgender woman serving in the role of father and not knowing, well maybe I did an admirable job.
and maybe I suck. but I suck based on what I did and didn’t do, not based on whether I identfy as male or female…others who are insisting with actions that the actual measure of my being is in that identification are the ones who must grapple with the suckitude they frolic in!
Read the article…acquaint yourself with the myths…and then divest yourself of them for some clearer, more objective standards that we will all, together, be held accountable to…how we love one another, how we forgive one another, whether we divorce and separate ourselves or remain connected…those are things that will endure long after gender identification falls away as not needed.
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 think I have posted about this previously, but I think this layout here is succinct, accessible, and easy to digest. Ya know, I have been thinking about the backflips that some people do, the contortions they knot themselves in so that they can preserve a way of thinking about a topic and not have to deal with changing a point of view…
…sadly, they place that point of view over a person far too often, and end up contributing to a tragedy.
It really is the ultimate in idolatry…a human life slain on the altar of the idol of their point of view.
Thank God there are parents like these, who understand the appropriate reaction to the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance.
Ryland’s story is real for people all over the globe. Please listen to your children. Be understanding and accepting. If only Leelah Alcorn could have known such understanding parents. Stop trans discrimination.
Messy houses filled with secret staircases
leading neither up nor down and built of starved excuses
stellar and extending to the past and to the future
as a hedge to make secure our souls against their cold inflation.Idols stand resplendent in their regal good deed rags atop secure safe mantels stolid, still in false security within these homes of disarray and all the forlorn deeds of our own self-besotted hands.
No corner is untouched or deemed untouchable,
no conclusion inescapable, for we did soon discover, no–we were shown–these messes low and broken,
jangly jagged in the pieces of our ruined hostile hovels.This is that tableau displayed of our lost searéd conscience, disembodied, floating room to room and deeply mourning what’s been lost, and worse, abandoned in the losing of idealism’s living throbbing shine.
And our hearts, once lifted up and strong
are finally unadorned and brought down low,
so broken, so contrite and finally open to this Living Invitation
to be drawn at last into a bigger Story…to be remade and molded, gripped and filled, to be enfolded in the new creation by a Mercy Stark and so unyielding, by a Love Severe and so unwieldy in our messy rooms and serial sin-stained walls and monstrous ways of utter horror.
It takes a broken body and it takes a different stain,
one indelible and permanent, scarlet red and bloody glowing
in the darkness of our tragedy’s pretentious phony triumph…
see the Hand that rips our masks away to make us whole again!Eat and drink, remember! Then forget the past and rest within those ruins at last cleansed and emptied of their wreck, delivered of the dreck and durm und strang of fallen souls, set free of weights unbearable, interminable, mighty, proud and fell and flawed and haughty.
And then, look…out there, thru yon window broken, there!
Behind that dingy jagged pane of brittle separation,
see the Cross so Stark, transcendent, final ever resting place
of all our sin and wrong, and also Final ever new beginning
of this race, we human butterflies set free from chrysalises left behind,
discarded casually forever…yet never left for death to feed upon or to devour,
for they will someday be raised again to catch up with us and to be made one again…to be made whole… again…at last…again… amen, again… amen.
Underneath the make-up, powders, paints, colors bright
there beneath the pretty words and funny sayings light
the blood pools red, the bruises throb beneath my cheery grin
and ruin overflows, and spreads its pain and hurt within
Mama heals, but often heals with pain’s sweet overthrow
She will let the woundings come to deepen healing’s glow
Still, it really breaks my heart to walk alone so long
I must dig still deeper, be brave, and just sing my song.
Constance…make a distinction with me? Let’s look at the point below as a mirror. Miley Cyrus is absolutely right in what she says…at least in terms of the double standard that is applied to males and females. Soo many of our issues culturally in our society stem from this disconnect. But catch my thoughts down below, after:
“No one ever talked about Robin Thicke after the VMAs of 2013. It was all my fault and I was the one who was acting like a ‘slut’. And that isn’t the only example of a woman being put in a box. I’m just speaking out for women to be yourself and I think I’m doing something to break the double standard that has been created over the years.”
whether you like her as a person/an artist or not, one just HAS TO admit that she’s absolutely right about this.
***** ***** ***** ***** *****
Okay Constance…now that I have agreed with her, I want to ask:
Why?
What happened to us, these Glorious Ruins Divine, who used to glow with the God-Light so fierce that clothing was not something any mind considered, for we were clothed in Eternity Resplendent…and now we compete to see who has more “freedom” and right to rip the mystery away and put it all on display?
It is as if it wasn’t enough for the God-Light to go out…now that it has we, all of us, want to wallow in our Unclothed-ness.
Please resist the temptation to write me off as a sexual prude, or sexually repressed, or any of those things. My arguments are similar in outward appearance only to the moralists and repressive people who seek to bind up and punish and rob humanity of the incredible wonder and power and gift that our sexuality is.
If you are unfamiliar with my point of view, just use the search field, and search sexuality and you will find just a few posts about sexuality, the most comprehensive being this one: Love in a Sexual World.
I am all about restoring the Image…I am all about the huge and significant metamorphosis humanity is in the throes of…from death to life, from empty to Full…from piles of sensient animated clay to the very incarnation of Divine.
I think this is why Mama made me transgender, so I would experience this in such a personal tangible way so as to be bent and marked forever, dedicated to this transition of all the lost “trans” humans with eternity encased in bodies bound by time and decay.
Yes, Miley…you are indeed right. I pray that someday you will take the next step and understand the secret mystery of sacred sexuality.
C’est pas grave…
Si j’ai le cœur en lambeaux
Les yeux en sanglot
Les joues chamallow
Et la voix lamento
Presqu’une épave…
C’est pas grave…
Si l’amour s’enfuit
Si le jour se prend pour la nuit
Si l’hiver encore me poursuit
Si le diable me séduit
Je ne serai pas son esclave…
C’est pas grave…
Quand le ciel me tombe sur les pieds
Que je me sens abandonnée
Que ma plume perd sa volupté
Que mes mains sont désarmées
Je continuerai à jouer les braves…
a bed of fresh-washed sheets
and smells of fresh baked bread
waft yellow down my hall
into my twitching nose.I find more nakedness in those comforts
than in the brothels of the Romans.
They strip away my cloaks of fear,
they dissolve my masks so carefully applied
and let my face lay fallow and unharrowed
while I am carried off across the gulfs of time…
Another me, both proud and vulnerable
and peeking thru my fingers at my stomach
and those fine glistening hairs white
in the morning sun beams refracted
thru the window pane
while birds sing lazy and slow trilling
on the outside.My bedside table has you there in memento and framed, still but straining at the edges with that unrestrained smile.
My thighs are creamy white
like fresh bread broken
and awaiting new churned butter
still wet with milk and clotted cream.
That red affection and connection
and there like butter yeasty bread
and crusty breakfast wait
with a warm and singular
latte on my swelling hips.I let go in strength, and feel weak and without grip and without need to grip because my core is not containable or needing a container because it is me, and home… every curve and crevice, every speck and scar.
The tinkling jangle of
forks and dishwasher racks
jettisons that lovely past
and I am here again
in that bed of sheets
and baking bread
and serrated knife
that goes right thru that loaf
like it’s butter beneath
burnished bronze edges
and steady fingers.
Those scents will not flash forward,
but I dream of a day
that I might be unmade,
fresh sheets shown beneath,
yeasty bread laid bare
beneath a faithful blade.
Je suis belle d’amour quand d’envie tu me prends
Touchant ma nudité d’une voix sensuelle
À bout de souffle encore avec tes yeux brillants
Comme l’or du champagne aux saveurs éternelles.
Sans tabou, ni motion, tu feints la raie cardiaque
Jouant la partition d’un violoncelle hors pair
L’adrénaline monte aux vertus volcaniques
À mon sein tu te pends, goûtant aux mœurs de chair
Je suis tendre ingénue à mon cou tu respires
Un rêve intemporel éveillant l’appétit
Corps et âmes liés , tu deviens mon empire
Parsemant de cailloux le soleil de mes nuits.
Au point de non retour, dépassant les limites
J’élève l’émotion au rang d’accord parfait
Au secret des lèvres sur nous la mort subite
Déclenche lover dose aux multiples effets.
Je suis énigmatique au sourire angélique
Joconde provisoire étayant ton exploit
Mon cœur est de velours quand tu me peins mystique
Allégeant les heures me séparant de toi.
Un opéra de chambre éclabousse l’extase
Vibrato contre peau, tu te lies à mes reins
Dans un fougueux désir d’accéder à l’emphase
De ma gestuelle qui défie tes sacro saints.
Je suis belle d’amour quand d’envie tu me prends
Touchant ma nudité d’une voix sensuelle
À bout de souffle encore avec tes yeux brillants
Comme l’or du champagne aux saveurs éternelles.
Due to harsh circumstances both in my own life and in the life of my truest friend, I have been thinking a lot about death…
…what is death?
Is death the loss of animation, the exit of that ineffable spark undefinable? Is it the fleeing of warmth and movement?
Or is it something more, something deeper and more final, more tragic and fatal?
Back up, waaaay back to when I was around 25 years old and torn asunder from myself and tromping all over me with the jackboots of performance and despair…at that time I considered that the days I had on this earth were a prison sentence that I had to serve before I was finally released through death and reunited with God.
I was living to die.
And in a very real and primal sense, I was already dead and just didn’t have the good grace to realize it and lay down somewhere.
But now? Oh Constance, these days I endure “death” in so many ways…but it is in my deepest desire to live at last, so I am dying to live. I have “died” in the workplace. I have died to ever being able to go back and get a do-over.
And I have “died” to people…this is what grieves me most deeply as it is now that I am finally and fully alive and awake!
So I ask you: does the declaration of others make me dead? People who have not talked to me in forever? People who resent me because in their hearts, I Charissa have killed their friend, their relative…
And yet they refuse to really know me, to taste my life and see that the Lord is good, good to me and thru me…
When someone doesn’t care deeply enough to experience my life, why are they so driven to declare me dead?
Honestly, it feels to me like they are the ones who are dead…they are dead to their responsibilities to the living. They are dead in their hearts which should be tender and lively and rejoicing in good…at least it feels like that.
My very best dearest friend is facing death right now, stark and real. Not some romanticised falsely tragic vision of death placed in service of a world view that is dedicated to self, but real, ugly, stinky, terrifying death carrying with it all of the ultimate and final separation that is the true horror called death.
I am sure she would get my heart cry: dying to live rather than living to die.
I am thinking of her, as I was struggling with these ideas, and sending her all my love, and every single molecule of life I can channel from the Life Giver Themself!
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)?
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.’
M’aimeras-tu toujours quand je serai trop vieille
Avec plein de rides, que mes seins tomberont
Sous mon corps sage et que mes mains trembleront
Dis me chanteras-tu encore des merveilles.
M’aimeras-tu toujours quand fanera ma fleur
Que ma vue baissera à l’ardeur des étoiles
Et que l’hiver sur moi aura mis son grand voile
Dis feras-tu encore une fois battre mon cœur.
M’aimeras-tu toujours quand ma peau fripera
Que mes cheveux seront aussi blancs que la neige
Que sur mes yeux l’automne aura mis son cortège
Dis pourrais-je à jamais me poser sur tes pas.
M’aimeras-tu toujours quand l’ombre sera fébrile
Que le temps signera de noir mes insomnies
Que l’ocre de ma plume obscurcira ma vie
Dis voudras-tu de moi même si je suis fragile.
M’aimeras-tu toujours quand faiblira ma voix
Et que mes oreilles seront dans le silence
Que le jour et la nuit n’auront plus de nuance
Dis mon amour voudras-tu encore de moi ?
So my baby just told me “Baby, there are times when you are so a teen-age girl!” Wait, whaaa??? Giggles…she is right, of course.
I saw this thing I am posting below, and sooo relate to it, from a gender perspective. The act of solidarity and love is profound and lasting…the phase will likely pass as an aspect of growing.
Constance…be sure your actions strengthen what remains rather than what is transitory.
“THIS IS THE BEST COMMERCIAL EVER
I’ve reblogged this so many times because I truly think every parent should involve themselves with what their child enjoys.
Not to mention this is an act of solidarity. He’s saying “even if the entire world is against you, I’m on your side.” Which I think is important for a kid to know. He’s refusing to be a bully to his child, even if he doesn’t understand.
I work at Hot Topic and we had a white suburban dad in who was buying matching heavy metal/screamo band shirts for him and his teenage daughter and said “To be honest, I think this stuff sounds like garbage, but she likes it so we listen to it together and we’re going to the concert for Christmas.” And it was just really heartwarming to see him so involved in his child’s life and validating her interests.”
Wow…Constance, this is the way that we all ought to treat one another. I have been treated this way by some people…and I go home, and shed tears of joy and happiness. It feels so good to be accepted for me…just lil me.
You can all imagine the opposite…because you have all experienced it.
Ever wonder why that is? Why is it that we have all been othered, policed, and ostracized over something? Even the so-called “cool kids” who are usually the worst open graves of horror inside their own hearts…
Let’s follow this wonderful child, this avatar of our God’s Goodness and Love.
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.
People are as different as river-washed stones,
the ones that roll in the rapids
down the scoured bed, banging together
with gurgly shouts while dodging the trout
and getting their edges knocked off.
Some just keep moving, they gather no moss
and stay perky slick and quite single
and slide through the water like weighty round silver fish
or lurking submarines silent.
But others twirl tightly in riverdance spins
and catch eddies to the brown bank
to sink there in shallows where the water’s warm
and plantlife caresses their surfaces hard
there to cling tight in dear loving life.
I think I’m the latter, sinking in shallows warm
with tender plants, because I want you near,
to be clingy with me, to call me and talk funny
just to hear my giggle laugh.
I want you holding my hand when we go out to coffee,
to kiss my cheek when we meet & when we depart.
I like the shallows of
relational fussing and fun.
But then again,
I feel that tendril, a thrill and tickle
of deep water trickle passing by me
smelling of slatey grey and cool purple promises,
I hear a faint “clak-clik” echoing from the deeps
where the smooth stones clash and grow ever smoother.
That’s when I think I’m a rolling stone,
gath’ring no moss, and plumbing depths like
some lost kingfisher who learned how to breathe underwater…
and I like that you trust me enough
to leave me alone, to know I am utterly
and always only yours,
end of story
full stop.
I like the depths of relational mystery
I like the depths of you, you so different,
ever the same and always so well loved.
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…
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?
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.
“Make sure you tell the people you love that you love them.
Loudly and often. You never know when it might be too late.”
Too late…what is that?
I think that the sentiment behind this statement is one that is commonly grasped, and yet it is not commonly embraced…because if it was, then there wouldn’t be so much casual, callous disregard for one another as human beings.
Our eyes caress these words…while our hearts just glance right off like stones skipping along the surface of a lake…
again……………again…………again………again……again…and sink.
for good.
I think about the situations of my own life…I poured my heart into a group of individuals for over 10 years, and since I openly transitioned, I have had interactions with two of them during which I was told that I was under the influence of a demonic spirit, that I was not “submitted” to other christian people, and that I was rebellious towards God. None of these things are true, but hey, at least there was some conversation there, some acknowledgement of me as a person. And the rest…nothing.
It is as if I never was, as if we never lived, never had those one on one conversations. It is as if I am not the repository of their secrets that I am, as if I had not prayed for them, loved them. No…our connection was based strictly on what it was I could do for them…and that seems surreal to me in light of the sentiment above.
Here is the deal: we read the quotes like the one I quoted and we think “yeah, I gotta be sure I am remembering that it could be too late someday”…and then it is…too late.
Just like that.
I don’t know if there are any people that would think “too late” when I die. I cannot control that. But I do know what I can control: saying I love you to the people I do love and care for…and telling every person I meet that they are important, valuable, and lovely.
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
In the dusky rose glow of a summer evening
She held my heart in her hand
and held my hand in her heart
and held my eyes in her forever.
I had placed my heart so tender there
and given it free in moonlight shining on her hair
while all around us silence sang of lovers in the night
And we alone were there and swimming in Love’s magic light
She looked at me as solemn as the owl standing guard
Her breath upon my cheek a sonnet of gravest import
And it did shine there shielding me within its towering fort
My heart safe in her hand, my heart so broken, torn and scarred.
She smiled, she took my heart into her mouth like bread
She swallowed without chewing it to keep it safe from harm
It moved and then it snikked in place so perfect and she said
She’d keep it safe within her as Love’s everlasting charm
Oh Love, to keep my broken heart safe you have shadowed me
Within your care and kindness always underneath your tree
As summer became autumn, autumn winter, then comes spring
It’s in the endless summer of your love I always sing.
In the dusky rose glow of a summer evening
She held my heart in her hand
and held my hand in her heart
and held my eyes in her forever.
‘it’s like a roller coaster!” she said.
her eyes caught the dim light, dark light
that swam in that murky place
awash in muddy music
and clattery chattery din,
they reflected it back
changed and amplified,
pure and clarified
and charged with
that thrill of being alive,
that thrill of being.“ya gotta let go!” she went on. my heart was stirred by her words, like a drink sitting and then a straw just hops into the drink and rattles and revolves and churns the spirits and icecubes until it refreshes and is spritely and cries out for lips on its rim…and sips…yeah…
my heart was ready to be sipped.
“just raise your arms
while you drop and scream
your fool head off
in joyful terror midst the fall!”
and her smile, so lovely to us all
sitting entranced and inspired
must have been so fell, so grim
so terrifying to the forces of hell
that lurked nibbling at the edges
and stealing bites of hearts and souls
with electric metered music teeth
and measured shot-glass jaws.
“cus you’re gonna be held in place
and when you’re done you’ll be
so glad you did…raise your arms!”
and then she tossed her head back
just a couple inches
but whole tides turned on that sweep
like the moon across benighted skies
tugs whole oceans below in some
heavenly waltz or dosie-do!
her name was Terri
her name is Terri
and i was forever encouraged
in the meeting…and for me the word
terrify
will ever have layers and connotations
because of her,
towering red and turning
the dim to shiny from the inside out
her there across from me
and shiny red and clear all at once
amidst the dim and the dark and the din.
she leaned forward and laughed
a brilliant smile into my soul
and I felt Mama kiss the world
and rested in the moment
a little bit more whole.
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.
Time running in streaming ribbons behind laughing children
twisting in a holiday blur of color, movement flowing
Time swimming sinister, sleek in the silent night
hungry to devour the Child there before it quiet
and in that cattle trough.
Snuffling with snout insistent, inhaling fragrances
of common birth and bearing…and something else
coming…the smell of death overlaid in incense
but underneath…the smell of…what?
The smell of other.
And then those guileless eyes flash open,
dark and endless but not with perpetuity
no! Endless in the Moment never ceasing!
Endless in a present never moving but never still either,
And time found itself hooked and billeted and beached.
Time is just a boat, no…a moat…a mote in eternity’s eye
Time is but a note in Wonder’s Symphony!
And with the Baby’s birth inside of Time
Eternal bells of joy ring out the chime
Olly Olly Oxen FREE!
The season of eternity is nigh,
when God gives Their response to our hurt cry
and renders youth and age trite matters moot
and blows away the ashes and the soot
revealing hearts like stars still shine beneath.
Kneel where you are, for that is where it is,
that lowly manger unseen by the great
and in that manger, there inside of you
your face upturned and wet with Heaven’s dew
the Christ Child comes to make all things brand new.
I remember
last Christmas,
lingering in my mind
midst memory’s fogs
and memories
…just grey mists now,
swirling and coiling
back on themselves,
roiling forward
from the past
and boiling over
into this morning,
this day…
this time sitting
in the midst of ashes
dead and flat remaining
from that cold conflagration
of becoming thru the fires
of that season.
Friends, job,
name, family,
reputation,
all consumed
by fire,
all revealed as
morsels of the moment
(that lasted 55 years and still just a moment)…
last year,
I had it all
at least in the eyes
of those who don’t matter,
I had it all…especially
the awful yawning
void of nothing
gaping inside
me, most real
inside me,
I remember
the day after Christmas
reduced me to a place
in the hills adjacent
to the place a woman
took her own life
this year,
reduced me
to screaming incoherence
because I had run out
of words to scream and
I had just begun
to scratch the surface
of what there was
to scream about,
that awful
substantial black
nothing.
that day,
it was a close matter
a razor’s edge tumble
into red greedy flames
burning long and low
all year until
they blazed in fury fanned
when smothering shrouds
were snatched away sudden
in torn and tattered strips
to consume the bribes
and chains of nothing
clothed in costumes.
This Christmas,
nothing has been exposed,
revealed as the imposter
it still masquerades as.
I am empty of screams
but full of me and
ready to receive
the Promise of words
to give voice to
what’s unspeakable, unnameable,
to dress that wound
infected with nothing
and salve it with
the scratchy tickle of truth
and set free we
shadowbound to be
our shining selves,
casting shadows
instead of being flat
and cast by them.
It is the season of emptiness, and places
prepared by pain are hungry
for the Presence
and the Promise
that only emptiness contains.
I really feel so awkward all the time
Going Nova…
I am a girl and have always been and have no need to prove that I am 
Anything I say can be construed as lack of humility because
But there are ashes from the desperate fires
We built frail fires from those brittle branches
And it is only at this place, in ashes
And we must choose the place that we will walk:
Regardless of the gods you say you follow,
Idols stand resplendent in their regal good deed rags
This is that tableau displayed of our lost searéd conscience,
to be remade and molded, gripped and filled, to be enfolded
Eat and drink, remember! Then forget the past and rest within those ruins
to be made whole…
I find more nakedness in those comforts
My bedside table has you there
I let go in strength, and feel
“ya gotta let go!” she went on.
Charissa's Grace Notes 
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