Nov 14 | Update and Gender Piece

Hi, everybody!

I do DO apologize for being away so long! My writing time has been taken up with laziness, writing papers, and tweaking old pieces to submit to my friend Mathew’s blog here. It’s been a really fun thing to get started, and we’re hoping to have some other submitters post stuff soon!

In the meantime, I did meet with the Examining Chaplains on Halloween. I really have no idea how to answer the question I keep getting: “How did it go?” None of them gave me any clue as to how they were reacting to my answers, so I really won’t know until I get their go-ahead or stay-behind, which might not come until the end of the year. I am glad that it’s over and done, and my anxiety level about the process is way down now that it’s over. ACPO isn’t until May, so there’s plenty of time to prepare myself either way. I just really pray that if I do go to ACPO it’s to ACPO 2014 because I want to go with my friend Lucy.

I hope to add some more pieces, but in the meantime, here are some of the ones I submitted to Mathew’s blog. I’m not going to post all of them so if you’re interested in the others go and check out his blog. Also check it out for his work too, because it’s great!

 

On the Outside, Looking In: Gender from the margins

I’m in a strange space right now with regards to gender. The news coming out of the United States during 2012’s “war on women” galvanized me in a way that nothing had ever done before. Suddenly, I could count myself as an armchair feminist: someone who knows some of the lingo but is only vaguely familiar with broad strokes of the movement as it has evolved over time. I am learning more every day. Now, I probably classify as a third-wave feminist who has begun to explore the trappings of patriarchy (especially in regard to rape culture and misogyny) very critically.

All that being said, I am also an outsider. I am neither straight nor gay and I do not explicitly identify as solely female. The closest term I can think of to describe the state of my gender would be “two-spirited”, and yet I am hesitant to co-opt such a term because it is from a culture that is not my own. I have no problems with my biological self as I am, yet there is clearly an inner part of me that is male. I recognize that this part of me is not at all new. It is something I can trace back to very early memories, right around the time I began to really notice the difference between boys and girls.

I write all of this because it informed the work in my major exegesis, which was about the gender-fluid Christ in the Gospel of John, highlighted not only in actions but even down to the very words of the Prologue. This, in turn, inspired me to further my research in order to take my understanding of ancient ideas of gender to the next level. The more research I do, the more I begin to think that today’s increasingly fluid ideas of gender are not the innovation that many people think they are. I do believe that it is a reaction against the binarism of the Enlightenment, but less of a new development and more a swinging back of the pendulum. I would like to explore this idea further because it has given me some amazing insights into the many different facets of Divinity.

One of the most beautiful revelations I have had regarding this multi-faceted view was first born out of my discovery of St. John of the Cross and his beautiful poem The Dark Night of the Soul, wherein the soul is characterized as female and stealing away to lie in bliss with the Godhead. It was amazing to encounter this portrait of God—one which I certainly had not come into contact with in Sunday school! As I grew older, I encountered Jesus as the (male) Beloved in this way in several moving prayer experiences. As I began to explore the feminine aspects of Jesus as the Sophia figure, I suddenly realized that my male “spirit” could likewise be entranced by a Beloved that was female; the motivations that I have felt go along with that spirit—protection, masculine strength, and the desire to empower (rather than to enjoy empowerment)—can be directed toward this Beloved.