I hadn’t known it was possible.
I start to shed my skin. I slough off layers of bad dates and rejection, guys who never called back or physically recoiled from me when I uttered the word “pastor.” I shed expectations about how pretty I need to be. I shed the idea that no one will want me if I don’t pluck my eyebrows, fit into a size six, or laugh and smile and look through my lashes when he explains things to me I already understand. In a town where I know just a handful of friends of friends, I let the layers fall away.
I don’t think I ever put on a dress again.
* * *
—
Right in the middle of the biblical library is the Song of Songs: the great love poem of our sacred texts. It tells a story about sexuality different from what most folks are taught in their junior high confirmation classes. Reading it, you might notice that the voice that opens and concludes the song is the voice of a woman, and her voice and perspective are dominant throughout the poem.1 Second, this woman speaks clearly of her own desire, and openly communicates her plans to gratify it. In fact, scholar Cheryl Exum writes that “there is no other female character in the Bible whom we get to know so well through her intimate and innermost thoughts and feelings.”2 Third, we notice that the woman in this poem calls herself “black and beautiful,” a fact that she says draws derision from other women. Fourth, this love poem is not about marriage. It’s fairly clear that the lovers involved are not married,3 and it is never mentioned that they desire to be so.
“I sat in his shadow,” the lover sings, “and his fruit was sweet to my taste.”
* * *
—
On a clear-skied evening in Asheville, a blue-eyed mountain man comes and sits next to me at a country bar near the river where I’m reading a book and sipping whiskey.
“What are you reading?” he asks me, simple as can be. I smile and tell him. And later, as the sun sinks down, he fixes his blue eyes on mine and leans in to kiss me.
* * *
—
This is how you take a photograph of joy: stand just above the cloud line with a man you’ll never see again but who made you tremble as the sun rose through the blue hills and the birds began to sound their first alarm. He’s kinder to me than anyone has been in a long while, scraping up a batch of sausage and eggs in a cast-iron skillet as I sit on the steps and watch. Later that morning we sleep curled together in a heap, my head on his chest. In his truck on the way home I sit back with one foot on the dash and watch the meadows roll by as Rose, his dog, pants with her head out the window.
I have memorized this photograph. It is a picture of freedom after years of striving. I am wearing a shirt stolen from his closet, walking toward him as the sky behind me hurtles toward an afternoon thunderstorm. My head is cast to the side, caught mid-laugh. Rose looks up at me, panting, ready to run.
No one can tell me this isn’t some kind of love. There are no bands on our fingers, no promises made, no need to call tomorrow or the next day. I don’t know his last name, and I won’t ever know it, and tomorrow he’ll drive away and I won’t see him or the dog named Rose again. Though two thousand years of church teachings imply that what we’ve done is wrong, I know in the deepest hollow of my gut, the place from which God so often speaks to me, that it is good.
I have this photograph, of a woman unburdened by fear or commitment, transcendent with joy. She has hastened to the mountain and touched the holiness of God.
* * *
Back home in Brooklyn, I find my revulsion toward dresses unchanged. My closet is stuffed with flared skirts and flowery prints. I liked them well enough. But now, when I hold them to my body in the mirror, they feel like costumes.
Every day I burrow through my closet to find something that doesn’t have a ruffled sleeve. I usually end up in jeans and a fitted blazer. I find myself searching for men’s shoes in smaller sizes on the Web, and order a pair of blue oxfords with bright laces. When they arrive, I take them straight out of the box and change into them. Standing up and looking in the mirror, I break into a smile. For the first time, maybe ever, everything feels exactly right.
* * *
—
The morning of the New York Pride Parade, I’m rummaging through my clothes again, this time looking for anything rainbow colored. I snag an apron my mom sent me from the kitchen—thick fabric with vertical rainbow stripes—and try to fold it into something awesome. In the end, I wear it backward over my clergy collar, like a cape, then bobby pin a handful of feathers in red, yellow, green, and blue into my short hair. A pair of tight jean shorts, red low-heeled cowboy boots, and a rainbow heart pinned to my chest like a Care Bear, and I am ready.
I stride down the block in this getup, giddy with excitement. This is the first time St. Lydia’s has marched in the Pride Parade, and I can’t wait. I still feel loose and free from my time on sabbatical. My joy goes unnoticed by my fellow passengers as I board the subway. New Yorkers have a miraculous, cultivated ability to sit next to a woman wearing a backward apron-turned-superhero Pride cape on the F train and never lift their eyes from Candy Crush.
Emerging from the subway near the New York Public Library, I revel in the chance to roam down the broad avenue, which has been blocked off from traffic. It feels strange and exciting to stride down the yellow lane markers with no fear of being hit. Everything is broken open. There is space that wasn’t there before.
I find our little crew of fifteen or so congregants taking refuge in the shade. Alicia and her girlfriend, Liz, who organized us to march, are unrolling vinyl banners. Leah’s wearing a very un-British cowboy hat and a rainbow feather boa. Hannah’s there in a swirly skirt and sandals, and Omar is scantily clad and covered in glitter.
“I sooooo wish my old pastors could see this,” Omar says to me, elated.
* * *
—
The Pride March in New York City is a strange irony. The first one took place in 1970, a year after the Stonewall riots. Up until then, the primary actor on the stage for gay rights was the Mattachine Society, which organized silent, dignified vigils. Seeking to be accepted by the dominant culture, they disallowed hand-holding or kissing, and required men to wear suits and lesbians to don skirts or dresses.
In 1970, it was against the law to “solicit men for the purpose of committing a crime against nature.” You could lose your job if you were gay. You could get booted out of your apartment. You could get thrown in jail for “cross-dressing” or beat up by the cops. It was illegal for men to dance with other men. Gay bars were all underground, and the Stonewall was raided, all the time. Then, in June 1969, the street kids fought back.
A year later, gay people marched out in the open. Titled the Christopher Street Liberation March, this was a new kind of movement. After Stonewall, New York Queers weren’t so interested in being respectable. They just wanted to be who they were. They carried plain cardboard signs attached to mailing tubes that said, simply, “Gay Pride.” There were no floats, balloons, or music. There was only the empty expanse of Sixth Avenue (the march had received a permit) and a line of cops with their backs turned.4
Today’s march seems different, at least on the surface. Activists point out that what began as a protest march has turned into something more akin to a parade. Giant floats are poised waiting in the streets, sponsored by cellphone companies and vodka brands. And the cops who entrapped and roughed up Queer kids? The cops who turned a blind eye to the deaths of trans people and raided Stonewall? They now line the streets, waving. Getting arrested is still dangerous when you’re trans or Black. But at this particular moment, under the summer sun, the cops are smiling, rainbow flags pinned to their lapels.
Our little band of churchgoers assembles on the pavement in front of a float for SAGE, an advocacy group for LGBTQ elders, who are perched high above us. They gaze down, wrapped in rainbow flags and waving hand fans to keep cool. They
saw things we didn’t see, fought fights so we won’t have to.
There is what seems like an interminable wait in the shadow of the SAGE float, and then, at once, we are off. We march, the Empire State Building piercing the sky behind us. The streets are ours. Alongside the Lydians, I dance my way down Sixth Avenue. I ride the explosive energy of the crowd, cheering and waving their flags to the pulse of the music. We wave energetically toward the sidelines, a celebration of bodies, glistening with sweat and glitter in hot shorts.
* * *
—
What does it mean to live fully in your body, unfurling yourself like a banner, releasing your soul to flutter toward joy? In the book of Exodus, Moses stands before Pharaoh, who has enslaved his people, and demands their freedom. When the Israelites flee, God parts the sea and brings them safely through to the other side. There, a woman named Miriam takes up her tambourine and whirls and dances, skirt flying and feet pounding, head thrown back in full-throated joy.
You have to travel through deep waters to find yourself, finally, on the other side. Like Miriam, I don’t know yet what freedom means. I’ve never lived in this land before. But I know for sure that I am there now. I can taste it on my tongue and it’s like sweet honey. On Sixth Avenue I find that I can’t stop dancing. I’ve shed something that needed to go, and seen a glimpse of how to be whole. I don’t understand it yet, but I know I am on the cusp of a delicious and explosive integration. I know that I can be a woman and a pastor, alive and free, unfettered and whole.
The word “Queer” has not yet crossed my tongue, and won’t for a few years. But it’s coming. Today a liberation that started decades ago has reached me through wordless ecstasy. It is the inhale before sound or speech, the moment before the rising of the sun. The dawn is here and the day is coming.
So I dance.
* * *
In March of the following year, I announce my departure from St. Lydia’s. It’s been a long discernment. A long time sifting through my own needs and the congregation’s, my own call and questions about what should come next. I know that God is drawing me away. I pour out my heart in a letter to the congregation, edit it and fine-tune it over weeks. After hitting send, I sit in my apartment, stunned. Sunday night, a congregant takes me aside and says, “We’re going to miss you. I wasn’t expecting this—that you were going to leave. But when I read your letter I thought, Yes, that makes sense. It feels right.”
At the end of April we celebrate my final Easter Vigil with the people of St. Lydia’s. Saturday night we light the new fire out on the sidewalk, then process inside, each holding a lit candle, and sit in the darkness of a still room. In that holy, quiet space, we tell the story of “salvation history,” as it is called. After a year of hearing bits and pieces of stories from the Bible, fragments of poetry, song, and shreds of gospel, we sit back and start at the beginning. Omar tells the first story tonight: of how God created the heavens and the earth from nothingness, and brought light and life.
Charlotte tells the story of Noah and the ark, how the chaotic waters came and covered everything he knew, lapping at the boat until it was carried up and away into a new and unknown world, where a bow hung in the sky. She’s made a great boat out of cardboard and given us all yards of blue fabric to wave up and down like the sea.
We tell the story of Jonah, who tries to run from God but is swallowed by a fish and brought to the bottom of the ocean, because that’s what life feels like when you fight like hell to avoid your calling. Ezra and his two daughters tell that one, with a blue construction paper fish and the tiny figure of Jonah, and we all laugh big belly laughs.
We tell these stories of how God was with us at the beginning of creation, and how God brought us through: the Red Sea, the great flood, the belly of the fish, the dryness of bones, of the bread that is offered though we may have no money, and finally, of the teacher and healer and agitator God sent to be by our side, who would show that love is more powerful than death.
The story does not belong to me. It is held by these people, who stand around this table. I yearned to draw them together; now they are here.
* * *
—
In recent days, I have started crying in unexpected moments. Finishing up a batch of emails, I shed my clothes and jump in the shower, only to find myself overtaken by sobs. These crying jags come and find me, like wolves stalking prey. I cannot predict their arrival. Sometimes on the subway, holding a paperback open with one hand, tears will start streaming down my cheeks.
My body knew of my departure before I spoke it out loud. Years ago, when Rachel told me she was leaving St. Lydia’s, she said it felt like a breakup. Now I know what she meant. Something is happening to me I’m not quite in control of. It is less a choice than a birth, and the sobs are contractions. I’ve learned that God doesn’t only call us to places, God also calls us away. If I cling to this church, I’ll end up like Jonah in the belly of a construction paper fish, at the bottom of the sea.
This Easter Saturday night, we dance with everything we have. We dance like Miriam crossing into the land of liberation. We dance because together we have tasted freedom.
“Christ is risen,” I call to the congregation.
“He is risen indeed,” the Lydians shout back to me. When we say it, remember it, shout it, we can affirm with our whole souls that death is not final, and that in the midst of all of it, we have found life. Julia flicks on the lights, and we sing our way to the table.
“Holy food for holy people,” I say, and break the bread. We are holy not because we are good but because we are loved. We are loved not because we deserve it but because we are of God.
We raise our glasses and lean on one another’s shoulders, dancing around the table in a whirl, the communion bread at the center. Baked into the bread are dyed Easter eggs, symbols of life contained but waiting to erupt. We get tipsy and laugh. We stomp our feet. We are a church.
* * *
I have told you this story. A story is different from the truth. The truth has rough edges and loose threads. The truth has days that are messy or boring, where nothing works and everything’s wrong. I could tell you about the day when our payroll processing situation was so hopelessly muddled, I buried my head in my elbow and really thought I was going to cry while waiting on hold for customer service. But it wouldn’t be a very good story.
I could tell you about the fight Rachel and I had that was so bad we thought everything might actually be broken beyond repair. But that fight is not the most important thing about who we were to each other.
This is not a perfect story and I was not a perfect pastor, and it’s interesting that I wish I was, or wanted to be, because the whole point of St. Lydia’s was to be not perfect, together. Did I miss my faults? Did I make myself better than I was? Are we too hard on ourselves, or too easy? What do we do with the distance between the two?
But stories are also the way we make sense of the world. They’re the center of our sacred texts. Stories of things that Jesus said and did, people he touched and places he went that everyone remembers, but everyone remembers them just a bit differently.
Stories are not true. But stories are truth.
There is a story in the Gospel of Luke about two disciples who we’ve never met before. One of them is named Cleopas, and the other one never gets a name. These disciples are walking on a road, and as they walk, Jesus comes and walks with them. But they don’t realize it’s him. They think it’s just a stranger. The stranger asks them questions about the unbelievable things that have happened in Jerusalem. The infamous teacher and prophet and rabble-rouser who was demonstrating in the temple and inciting violence among the people—he’s been executed by the state, they tell him. But now these women from their group are saying that they saw him again and he’s not really dead.
Jesus walks alongside the men, smiling to himself a little and listening as his fr
iends spill out their story. They are in that stage where something so unreal and shocking has happened, and you can’t understand it until you have told it over and over.
Cleopas and his nameless friend don’t know this man walking alongside them, but there is something about him that feels sure and safe. Whoever he is, they need more of him, and they plead with him to share dinner with them. He does. There is a loaf of bread, and the stranger takes it and blesses it and breaks it, and in that instant they understand: this stranger is God and he is sitting beside them.
Then he is gone.
It’s a story about transcendence. In Latin, trans means “across,” and scandere means “to climb.” Transcendence happens in moments when a boundary is crossed and we defy the limits that usually define our lives—when something sacred happens in an ordinary place. For these two men, transcendence comes when the stranger they met on the road blesses the bread and then breaks it. In an instant, they realize that their hearts have been burning. A boundary disintegrates, and they see things for what they are: God in the face of a stranger, sitting with them and sharing a meal.
But the thing about transcendent moments is they don’t last for long. Christ vanishes, and we are left with only longing, and broken bread.
A remarkable amount of the Gospels takes place in the wake of trauma. Jesus meets and heals people whose lives have left them with few choices. People who can’t escape their demons. Women who can’t escape what everyone says about them. People who are so sick they’ve lost hope. People who are grieving after losing the person they love. Jesus meets these people in the midst of lives that are not what anyone would have hoped for. When he leaves, they don’t have much to hold on to: just these few moments of transcendence when Jesus came and walked alongside them on the road and their hearts burned with longing.
For All Who Hunger Page 16