Last month, during the Episcopal Diocese of the Great Lakes’ second diocesan convention, Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe was our keynote speaker and preached at our convention Eucharist service. I was asked by one of our archdeacons to serve as chaplain during this service to our assisting bishop, which for less church-nerdy folks means that I was basically the human in charge of holding her stuff for her, getting anything she needed, and being her shadow for the duration. This meant, among other things, that I spent most of the service sitting between the assisting bishop and the visiting ELCA bishop, and was assigned to vest in the sacristy space with all the bishops, deacons, and acolytes, rather than downstairs with the priests.
Sacristies and clergy vesting rooms are fascinating places. The closest facsimile I’ve encountered is communal dressing rooms backstage. They’re liminal spaces between normal life and performance, where people are actively transitioning between the roles they play elsewhere and the roles they are about to play. In these places, there’s an intimacy and a camaraderie that, even if these are people you consider colleagues and friends and interact with regularly, still feels heightened. For the most part, clergy don’t really undress to put on our vestments. Folks might take off a sweater or a jacket, but there’s no point where, unlike backstage at a theater, you may encounter someone in a state of undress. (Thanks be to God.) That said, there’s a certain emotional undressing that occurs, a willingness to share and be vulnerable with one another, born out of that sense that we’re all in this liminal space together. That doesn’t mean our conversations are especially juicy. Most of the time it’s the very same kind of small talk that might otherwise occur. It’s the openness and trust, the collegiality, that feels different. On some level, it feels like our masks come off as we pass through this space and time that is between modes of being.
After the Eucharist service, as we all made our efforts to expeditiously decamp and head over to the convention center for lunch and our business session, I took advantage of the moment alone in a crowded sacristy with Presiding Bishop Rowe (whom I’d met twice before) to thank him for offering us a good word at this point in our life as a diocese. We talked briefly about how navigating major institutional change—even if it’s change you want, can be difficult and brings with it unexpected side quests and pain points born out of all the things you don’t know that you don’t know. I remarked on how, from my perspective, as annoying as these difficulties may be, it’s to be expected that the process of becoming is going to be awkward and painful. It doesn’t mean that the process is, in itself, bad, or that the goal is not worth pursuing.
“But maybe that’s just my point of view as a trans person. My whole life feels like a process of becoming. You learn to live with it the best you can.”
“That’s a spiritual gift the Church needs.” PB Rowe replied.
If I were a competent online creator, I would not have opened with an anecdote so long. I would have used a bunch of keywords in my opening paragraph. I would have promised you that after you read this post, you will know the top five things that transgender people can teach the Church. Then I would proceed to list each of those five things in bold text followed by precisely 100-250 words explaining myself. Preferably, the first 250 characters of each of those paragraphs (including the heading) would be copy-and-paste-able tweets.
I’m not a competent online creator, and I don’t especially want to become one, even though it would certainly go a long way in both evangelizing and building a personal brand that could augment my career. It’s not that I don’t know what I should be doing (see above) or that I am unwilling to adjust my creative process to fit certain parameters. It’s not even that I don’t want this whole writing thing to become something more. (Though I’m okay if it doesn’t.) It’s that the kind of audience I want to build is, I hope, made up of the kinds of people who are at least interested enough in nuance that they don’t mind taking the long way round to an idea, perhaps pausing along the way to observe a lovely vista.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy would probably be much more effective without page after page of poetry pulling you out of the narrative action, but Tolkien wasn’t interested in writing an airport bestseller. He was writing a world into existence for languages to inhabit. When you understand what to expect in these books and come into them prepared for that experience, you’re bound to have a more enjoyable experience. You’re less likely to spend as much time going “Alright, alright, I get it. They’re singing a lovely song. Can we get on with it then?”
Part of why institutional change is so often so difficult is because we don’t do a great job really anticipating how long the process of change will take and what the lived experience of getting there will be like. Even when timelines and expectations are clearly communicated, to the extent that they’re known in the first place, if you’ve never personally experienced this level of major change, inhabiting the space in between where you were and where you’re going can be incredibly uncomfortable. We come into the change expecting the end goal, not the process of getting there. We’re sitting down with The Fellowship of the Ring having watched the movies and wondering who the heck this “Tom Bombadil” fellow is and why it’s of such import for the reader to know his boots are yellow.
Contrary to what people with certain agendas on the internet and in the New York Times may suggest, gender affirming hormone therapy and other forms of medical transition are not easy to access, can take a really long time to be effective, and have pretty low rates of regret. None of that is to suggest that regret doesn’t exist, that some people may have an easier time than others, or that changes may be swifter and more dramatic than expected or ideal. There’s also nothing to say that people may find that medical transition is not what they thought it would be or that, as people learn more about themselves, what living as an out trans person is like, or as political and societal structures change in ways that make being trans harder or more dangerous, that detransitioning is unheard of, or irrational. Neither does the mere existence of detransition somehow negate the realness of trans identities. One factor, however, in the relatively low regret rates, particularly for surgical interventions, is the extent to which, at every single step in the process of accessing care, medical professionals assiduously endeavor to make sure that the informed consent provided by the transgender patient is truly informed and purposeful. Expectations are clearly communicated, including those things that could be disappointing or discouraging to hear.
The time and effort it takes to transition, its incremental nature, and the fact that we enter the process without any guarantee of exactly what the outcome will be all mean that continuing itself requires ongoing, effortful reaffirmation. Every week, when it’s time for my testosterone shot, I must choose to continue. I must choose to put the rest of my day on pause, face my fear of needles, and self-administer the medication that has both radically transformed my life for the better and also has not yet brought about all the changes for which I’ve been hoping. What’s more, living into those changes which have been realized is its own journey.
Of course, then there are the times, all of a sudden, when those gradual changes become more apparent… looking at old photos or videos, realizing that clothes fit differently, getting gendered correctly by a stranger in a situation where you’re used to routinely getting misgendered. Those are the times when you notice the pay-off. Those are the beautiful vistas on the way to the mountaintop when you pause and go, “Alright, yeah, I am heading in the right direction.”
Transformation and growth take time and discipline and patience. Imagine planting a pumpkin seed, watering it for a week, getting terribly excited at that first new sprout, but despairing after six weeks that there aren’t any blossoms on the rapidly spreading, gangly vine, let alone any grand round pumpkins. It would be a foolish farmer indeed who declares this a failed enterprise, uproots the vine, and covers the field over with grass seeds. Big, enduring things like pumpkins take time and discipline, but they’re worth the wait.
Discipleship is the process of living into what God calls us to be. It’s a continual effort over a lifetime. There will be times when it feels like nothing is happening within us. Then, we have those beautiful vista moments…those moments of ineffable grace when we feel our hearts completely tuned into God’s presence. We need to treasure those moments when they come, because we do not know how long it will be before we enjoy them again. But they’re also a reminder: we’re moving in the right direction.
Life in the Church is like that too. It can be easy to despair at the brokenness of the institution. We must remember that the institution is not God. The institution is just the set of systems all set up and stewarded by fallible humans with personalities and weaknesses and bizarre hang-ups, to support the faith and ministry of the gathered body of the faithful, each of whom is a fallible human with a personality, weaknesses, and bizarre hang-ups. The beauty of that is that if the institution is just made up of and by humans, then it is well within human power (with God’s help) to reform. The bad news is that since it is, in fact, through human effort that that reform happens (even with God’s help) we’re probably going to mess up along the way.
If we expect that institutional change is going to be messy and take time and be marked by all the fallibility of humanity, it’s a whole lot easier to not get so anxious when things get a bit off-kilter. Spiraling and catastrophizing about things being off-kilter doesn’t actually set them right—if anything, it makes it worse. But of course, it’s normal to feel anxious when it looks like things aren’t turning out the way we thought they would. When we begin to feel that anxiety and the mounting urge to spiral, we can reset our framing of the situation by getting curious. Our anxiety has noticed that things are off-kilter. What else is going on? Are we seeing the full picture? What could be happening below the surface that we can’t see? Having a creative enough mind to catastrophize is a blessing, because it means that we also have a creative enough mind to imagine other possibilities.
I know for my part, one of the biggest sources of anxiety is not actually knowing what I’m striving towards. In the past, this would send me on catastrophic spirals where I would need to assert some kind of extreme control somewhere in my life to feel like I had agency. The extremity of that control could be really destructive. I’ve learned that, when the outcome I’m striving for isn’t clear, getting clear about my values goes a long way. I may not know what I’m striving for, but I know what kind of man I want to be, so I’m going to make choices that are in alignment with that, and when a clearer path emerges, I can move with more intention.
We may not collectively know where we’re going all the time, but we do have the ability to be clear about our values. We’ve been given amazing gifts by our ancestors, both literal and spiritual, in Holy Scripture and the Book of Common Prayer, and in our wider tradition, to help us do just that. We do not live into what God has called us to by wringing our hands and jumping from one corporate buzzword and technological craze to the next. We live into what God has called us to by studying Scripture, engaging our historical tradition, praying with one another, and using the hearts and minds that God gave us to their best ends. When we do that, we can endure hardship and discomfort. We can look at reality for what it is with curiosity and wonder. And we can trust the process and enjoy the journey for what it is.
I don’t have a clean takeaway for you this time around. I don’t think there is just one. In a sense, my “gathered thoughts” are spilling out of the basket a bit, but I hope in gathering them, like an assortment of pebbles on the beach that each drew my eye in a different but somehow congruous way, I’ve plucked something out of the ether that is meaningful for you too.
Be well, friends.