The Wonderment

You Are Loved: A Prayer For Transgender People

You are loved and precious. Yes, even though the world so often says not. Even though there are people standing behind masks called G-d, telling you G-d hates you, I'm a Universalist. That's not the the G-d I know. The G-d I know loves all of G-d's creation. Yes, every one.

Reading Andy LC's blog, once again my heart cries at the iniquity we perpetrate on each other, the cruelties that divide us and separate us from knowing the Beloved who is here with us. "Are transgender people allowed to pray?"

Yes. Of course, yes. No one is barred from prayer. There are places some of us aren't accepted or permitted to pray. I keep a prayer open for those places and peoples that G-d will show them something new, something wonderful that will change the way they live faithfully. But in the Universalist tradition, no one is barred from prayer. No one can be barred from prayer. G-d can't be kept in a box or imprisoned. G-d's in the box and G-d's in prison because G-d is everywhere, with all of us, already. We just often get turned away from and alienated from knowing that the Beloved is here with us, loving us in our so many ways of being, in our paths of change and in our rootedness.

Andy's asking for prayers. Please join me.

God of Justice and God of Wonder, God of Mystery and God of Holy Delight, here I am, just as I am. Creator and ever-changing abiding Love, sit here with me in my anger and my fear, in my yearning and in my emptiness, in my grief and in my becoming. God, how is it that people stand behind paper cutouts of You and shake their fists and scream their own fear and confusion to try and make me what and who I am not, to take away what you've given me that cannot to be taken away: this me that is. Am I not precious also in your sight? In your heart? In your hands? I have wandered through the nights and through the days seeking a place to grow, to flower, to love and be loved among people, to live and to create a life of love, of justice, of wonder, of healing laughter, of all kinds of goodness. I wander and I come to this place, God, my Beloved, in the garden of troubles and in the city of sorrow and in the fields of loneliness. Beloved, still here you are with me. Beloved, give me refuge when the world expects me to be what I am not, when masks are presented and people insist I stop being difficult and just go along with what makes them comfortable and destroys my heart. Beloved, let me just lean my head a while on your knee, hear your song in my spirit, and know that I am with you and you are with me, from the beginning and always, worthy of your love and loved and called to this place and this time to share all I have to give. Alleluia. Amen.

 

Thankful for Wow

Each and every day I breathe into a space of wonder and give thanks for a chance to be part of the whole today. Driven by distractions and as a person who lives with chronic high pain levels, I know there are other stories offering an illusion of control or of worth that disregards or derogates the simple transformative practice of spending time attending to the holy. On my spiritual journey, I’ve increasingly sought embracing and accepting my weaknesses, imperfections, failures, mistakes, and illnesses not as signs that I’m living wrong or that I’m cursed, but as part of the wondrous whole and the mystery of this life.

 

What lead me to that embrace? Reading that wonderful library, the Bible, day in and day out, and meeting again and again the same confusions, trials, and troubles inside and out that I found in my own life. What perplexed me most though in the low and difficult times is how so many of the psalms begin and end in affirmation of G-d’s goodness, of holy joy and of gratitude for the blessing of life. Even the psalm prayed in the worst states – the twenty-third – speaks of being anointed with oil, of the overflowing cup, of the bountiful table set before one’s adversaries. Given the narrative common to dealing with disease in many hospitals and support groups, those of us living with diseases and chronic conditions, with disabilities and with addictions live with adversaries every day, in every cell and every bone. Our adversaries need not be outside of ourselves; they can be stories that hold us in captivity, attitudes that work against resilience, suffering of some kind. 

 

When I’m focused on how much my bones hurt, I easily loose track of wonder. Intense pain is marvelously clear and directive. Changing what I do and how I live will not diminish that pain – just part of my particular grace and way of living (and I’d not say it is grace for someone else because the same condition might not be for someone else). But opening the gates of wonder and thanks that pain closes and bars shut is something I can do, not sending the pain away, but learning how to be where pain and trying not to be in pain doesn’t in fact dominate my existence. Given the common larger story that if we’re living right, we won’t have pain, how might our world change if we increase the amount of spaciousness each of us can hold when in pain? How many more blessings and how much more joy would there be, how much more energy for love and for justice?

 

Each and every day, many times a day, I pause to find that sense of wonder – the moment of ahh! or wow! – and thanksgiving. I give thanks for breath and for that wow! and for the spreading joy that travels with wonderment. Then, I give thanks then too for the psalmists who showed me the way. I pause to pray, then, like the psalmist of the 121^st , who prayed:

 

I lift up my eyes to the holy hills –

where does my help come from?

My help comes from G-d,

The Maker of heaven and earth.

 

She will not let your foot slip –

he who watches over you will not slumber;

indeed, the watcher over Israel

will neither slumber nor sleep.

 

The One watches over you –

the Holy is your shade at your right hand;

the sun will not harm you by day,

nor the moon by night.

 

The Holy will keep your from all harm –

and will watch over your life;

G-d will watch over your coming and going

both now and forevermore.

 

May you be thankful for wow! today.

Seeking Signs

Road trips remind me of how deeply we human beings love to see patterns and tell a story in relationship to our lives. As a minister, it is true that I am predisposed to that kind of pattern making. For years, I’ve played a game where people will name three things in a room and I will find a theological connection between them. The point isn’t that everything is interconnected. We are part and parcel of the whole no matter how alienated and apart we feel. The point of that game is to show how easy it is to make a story and a pattern from three things we may not have paid attention to in relationship before. That’s part of why we need to be careful about the stories we tell and check them with others, because we also tell the stories we know best.

 

One of the stories I’ve told and learned about myself is that I can’t drive my way out of a paper bag. A compass and a map are great, but have me follow driving instructions and I struggle. I feel easily lost. Even though I prize being timely, I am rarely on the minutes of my printed directions, in part because I drive the posted speed limits, and so I feel late. Imagine the pattern I saw when, running 2 hours behind what my printed directions said I should be, I stopped at a rest area and met this sign:

 

 

Rationally, I know that the number is there because it is easier to refer to a number when calling in a request for assistance when the equipment malfunctions. But what’s the pattern I saw?

 

Uniforms are another sign for us - the uniform of a police officer or of a mechanic or of chef or of a nurse tells me different stories. I wear my uniform, clericals, when I’m on the road. Why? Because I never fail to encounter someone who says to me, “I was waiting for a sign from G-d and here you are!” I am grabbed by G-d all the time wearing that collar. Yet lots of us are looking for signs all the time, for assistance and directions that make sense to us, that reorient us to the story we’re trying to live into, and that reassure us on our journeys.

 

That’s where spiritual practice and spiritual friends come into our life maps. The practices of pausing to pray, or breathe, or chant, or read a holy text all act like these little rest stops along our journeys. They let us check ourselves, our values, our actions, and our intended travel against this bigger story we’re living. Sometimes we might find we’re rather lost; sometimes we might laugh at the twists and turns of the road. And that’s where being and having spiritual friends comes in: they’re the people who laugh with us, pray with us, meditate with us, hold us in care and attention, and also can check the maps with us and be confused right alongside us, so we truly know we’re not alone.

 

What a blessing!