I’ve worked with the Transgender community for a number of years, and have often been called upon to speak from the point of view as a therapist, and most recently as a clergy person working with this community.
I was asked to speak, as part of a panel of three clergy from various traditions, at CU Boulder at the TRANSforming Gender conference this weekend. I’ve not spoken in public in recent times, so it was a wonderful thing to be asked, as we Pagans are often left out, because we haven’t always been seen as a “valid religion”.
Many years ago, I remember my coven at the time and I went to see “The Last Temptation of Christ” at the local Unitarian Church in Colorado Springs. We were all, at that time, fairly new to the Pagan path, and as we know of developmentally, touchy about how were viewed and spoken of. I remember clearly, before going into the movie, being confronted with a local man who was known for his life-size cross on wheels that he took to any number of events and places around Colorado Springs–the Gay Pride parade, abortion clinics, and any other event where his version of Christianity and his beliefs were, as he thought, being maligned.
What I remember was at some point in the verbal confrontation, he said, “well, your Goddess is a Whore!”. We were all righteously angry, and he was then met with a barrage of words from the rest of us, until eventually, it was time for the movie, and we left he and his small band of followers out in the street, while we went in to see the movie.
As I think back on that day, I now find myself chuckling as I think about how there are indeed some of the various Goddesses who wouldn’t necessarily be insulted by that title, and who might even be laughing along with me, as I thought about it.
Spiritually/Developmentally, I guess I’ve come along. Over time, and hopefully, as we grow on our spiritual path, I like to think we become more open minded. We get to branch out, learn more, be interconnected with people on our own path whose beliefs might be vastly different than our own. If we get to those later stages of spiritual development, we can then be around, welcome, accept, have interesting dialog with people of other spiritual paths who have themselves worked at being open minded, and even find common ground together.
Today, I found myself speaking with a sense of deeper understanding. I have no need to argue prophesy or philosophy with my fellow clergy, as we have hopefully gone beyond that place of needing to convince one another of the “rightness” of our beliefs, and hopefully, we can be open and honest about the journey we have each taken that has led us to where we are now. The anger is gone, the self-righteousness is gone, the fear of retribution or retaliation are gone. We are, hopefully, truly being “spiritual people having a human experience”.
So, there I was rambling along, speaking about my years as a “bright young Christian” girl, who truly and deeply wanted to understand the “faith” I had been raised in as a child. I spoke about some of the thoughts I had as a kid, and later as a young person who came to the realization that I wasn’t on a spiritual path that could feed me and I, quite literally, felt starved. I remember sitting there in church, most especially on or around Easter, when the pictures and statues of Christ on the cross were thrust before us as the symbol of our religion. I never did understand what we were supposed to take from this. As a child, I found it horrifying, the poor man hanging there on the cross, a crown of thorns thrust upon his head, bleeding from the various wounds he’d been given by the Roman soldiers, etc. As a much older person, looking back, I realized that the most pervasive thought I had as a young person was quite frankly and literally, why doesn’t someone take him down? Oh my God! Please take him down!
It never did make sense to me that this symbol was the take away. Were we to strive to be hung on a cross? Were we to strive to live a life of suffering and ultimately to be hung up to die? As I grew up a young, and later as an older African American woman, I learned in more than a few ways what suffering looked like. I learned how it felt to be ridiculed as Christ was, but to be hung on a cross? Did I want to continue along those lines? NO! Just no.
Coming to my spiritual path as I did, I came to understand that our symbols–our many various symbols are pictures of beauty, and pictures of the goodness, and the bounty of Mother Earth. I came to see that to continue to follow a religion that had its roots far away in the Middle East did not reflect me or who I am, or wanted to become. When I saw in my hands for the first time, the little round, brown Venus of Willendorf, I was stunned. Could it be that the divine could indeed be in a form that I could relate to? Could it be that the Divine was a form that was simply about being, not about some horrifying specter I’d been taught to worship.
When I studied at Naropa–the Buddhist “Inspired” University in Boulder, I was given yet another take on suffering. Their take on it was that life was indeed about suffering, but that we get to choose whether or not we wanted to, or felt the need to suffer.
As I have become an elder woman, I am now dealing with a new body that has at times become unknown to me, and I have had to learn to see myself in different ways. I also get to decide how I will walk on my path for the next years until my eventual demise. Will I be a straining fearful closed up old woman? Or could I choose to just get out in the world as I am, free to see the world as I wish, free to interact with it as I will, free to say and share my truth and experience?
I choose to have as my symbols, tiny creatures who eat at my feeder, bright yellow flowers who fill my heart and eyes with wonder, sunsets that are a thing of awe in their colors and expanse across a horizon. And death…I’d like to not suffer as I’m going out–in fact, I don’t think I will choose to.
I like to think that we who want to be seen as spiritual paths that are open and welcoming to people of all cultural groups have grown up, and can see with clear eyes what is most important that we put forward as our wisdom to the world. I like to think that in our maturity on our various paths, we can laugh at ourselves. If our paths are not about joy and about not taking ourselves so seriously, then why are we there? If we take ourselves so seriously that we cannot look through the eyes of a child and see what a child sees, then what truly, are we then seeing?