Hidden

I want to give some context for this piece (apparently I am more concerned about being misunderstood than I used to be). This is a work of creative writing that began (about 90% of it) in the late summer of 2017, the year I had realized that I am trans and also decided that I was "not going to do anything about it" which is to say I had decided to know/admit/acknowledge my gender identity to myself but not to come out, not to identify publicly as trans, and certainly not to transition. Of course that is not how things turned out (and you can read about that process HERE).

I decided to share this piece (once I had edited it, cleaned it up, powdered its nose and corrected the typos) for a couple of reasons: First I hope that this might be helpful to other people who are struggling to figure out whether or not they are trans. Second I think it gives some insight into what figuring out who we are can look like for some trans people and I have a hope that if more cis people have a better understanding of us, that will contribute to a better and more beautiful world for all of us. And third, I am rather proud of it as a piece of creative writing and I want to share it with the world.

And now some important caveats: In this piece I am using a very specific conceit to explore the process of coming to know myself more fully. That conceit involves splitting my self into two sperate personas. Doing that is fraught for a number of reasons. For one thing it risks giving the impression that I (or even worse, trans people in general) suffer from some from of dissociative identity disorder. That is not the case, and I do not at all want to give the impression that it is. I want to point out that this conceit has been used numerous times by cis authors and artists to explore the relationship between the conscious and the sub-conscious or between two strong desires which happen to be in tension, or to explore any number of ways in which we humans experience internal conflict or dawning awareness. And I am certainly not the only, much less first, trans person to use it. A few years after I had written the core of this and while it was still sitting in a journal folder, I ran across this terrific series from Mae Dean at Real Life Comics and more recently Robin Brooks gave a charming treatment of it for similar ends. For another, this conceit risks giving the impression that I do not consider myself the same person as who I was for 39 years. This one is a little more tricky because there are trans people who prefer to establish a hard distinction between their past and current selves and that is certainly reasonable and works well for those it works well for. In my own case the experience has been much more one of continuity. I have always been me but up until last year I was me-with-constraints now that I am out I am still very much myself but I no longer am limited by the restrain of false-male-ness. Put another way, I have always been my true self, but now I get to be my full self; and that is glorious.

Also I dealt with some pretty significant internalized transphobia so if that isn't something you are comfortable reading you might want to skip this piece.

So with all of that having been said, here is Hidden:

Hidden

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together

I am told, and I believe, that most people were created by God. I imagine it must be really nice. There must be a comforting solidity to it, being created by God. I mean... God, the Fundament of all Being. There is God and then God makes stars, galaxies, water, sunsets and you. You are right up there with galaxies. Do you ever stop and just stand there feeling solid, and grounded, and real?

I'm not really like you in that way. In a lot of ways I am a lot more like Frodo. I guess that is pretty cool too on some level—Frodo is the hero after all—but it has its drawbacks. J.R.R. Tolkien thought that one of the glories of humans was the work of sub-creation, that humans get the dignity of being creators and creatures at the same time; humans create within the scope of the everything that is already made by God. And that is great and all but did you ever stop to think how Frodo might have felt about it? Sure he gets to be the hero, he lives something like forever beyond the sea, but all of that is because he was created by a geeky philologist who had a hankering for writing British mythology. There must have been something a little unsettling about all of that for him.

You were probably made by God so maybe you don't understand. I was made by a confused little girl living in North America in the 80s and I really feel for Frodo. I don't think the little girl really even knew what she was doing at the time. And from my creation forward I probably grew and developed in a way that is a lot like the way you did. Things came at me and in response I developed, I changed, I grew. A personality emerged; it has preferences, ticks, tastes, little things that drive it up the wall, and stories, songs, poems, and dreams that make it weep—or at least they used to have that effect, it hasn't been crying much anymore. It longs—I long—for home. But what is home, what does "home" mean when the mind you sprang from belongs to a little girl who forgot her own self? What is "return" for a derivative being, the product of a self-forgetting sub-creator?

I think she was happy for a while—before she made me. I remember that she was a tomboy with a couple of boy best friends before gender and "ways of being in the world" complicated existence. She can't have been perfect and there is no way I can be avoiding some fairly monstrous hagiography here (is it really "hagiography" when you are talking about your own creator?) but I don't remember her being sad at first—well, not before the anguish—not before me. I don't think she knew she was a girl back then, she didn't really think of herself as a boy either or if she did I don't think she had much of an idea what that meant. Her friends were boys, her life was fun, her parents loved her, she could do pretty much whatever she wanted. At least that is how I remember it.

Then came the anguish. I don't really know what brought it on—I know she didn't have the foggiest idea. One minute she was sitting at a little desk working on her school work and the next she was sobbing having what I can only retroactively diagnose as an acute panic attack. In one arbitrary moment her whole world had suddenly skewed wrong.

Everything felt wrong. She felt wrong—profoundly wrong. Her hands were wrong, her hair was wrong, her stupid clothes were stupid wrong. Her face was wrong. I remember that the wrongness was a very physical thing. For a while I described the whole thing as a sense of being irredeemably dorky. Imagine that you woke up tomorrow to find that, in your sleep, an enormous purple and orange flower had grown out of the side of your head. Imagine knowing that it could never be removed, and that for the rest of your life people would see you as "that person with the ridiculous flower"; no outfit will ever look right, you will never achieve a "look" at all because everything will always clash with the flower, everyone will always notice the flower.

The little girl's parents (and they are lovely and loving people) were, of course, concerned. They didn't know what she was crying about and she didn’t really know how to tell them (six year old children do not, as a rule, have particularly well developed psychological or social vocabulary). All she could say was that she felt like nobody would ever like her.

Her parents tried to comfort her. They promised that people would like her, they reminded her about all of her friends and her loving family. She knew they weren't wrong, but they were barely communicating. It wasn't about being liked, not really, that was just the closest language she had, it was about being right; it was about the stupid giant purple and orange flower growing out of the side of her head that no one else could see and was also all anyone could see of her. All that her parent's managed was to calm her down a bit and convince her that she was perfectly like-able just the way she was. But by doing that, they cut the cord binding her grief to her language. The anguish didn't go away, only her ability to talk about it.

She accepted the comfort (she had already learned enough to know how to comfort the people trying to comfort her) then retreated to her bed for a while and lay there with the agony. It was a real thing. She knew, she just knew, that the wrongness would not be going away. And so she did the only thing she could. Drowning in the wrongness she clutched at the only life-line she could reach. Combining her pain with her determination to live, she created me. My creation didn't feel magical to her. I was not her inspiration; my birth was hardly spiritual or transcendent. No, I began to exist as she chose to make peace with her anguish. She took all of the wrongness and she accepted it; she took it into her own self. She made a boy for whom all of that wrongness could be rightness. Taking everything she liked about herself, she cut and shaped a boy who could hold as much of it as possible. He couldn't hold it all of course, but she managed to fit a lot of it into me—at least I think she did. This boy—me—was still raw and only barely formed; he, I, was nothing more than a person who could comfortably wear the weight of her wrongness and preserve as much as possible of her own self. Last she took her consciousness, her memory of her whole self, and she gave them to me, and I became alive for the first time.

We were always together after that. Have you ever gotten into a relationship so much that you sort of forgot where you ended and your friend started, where "she" became "we" and for a moment you couldn't remember which one of you it was that loves hot chocolate and who it was that finds grasshoppers offensively pretentious? We were like that, my creator and me. On me, her wrongness wasn't wrong and so I handled most of the interacting-with-the-world for us. Don't judge, wouldn't you want to protect a little girl like that? The thing is, though, being in the world is sort of how people grow and work out who they are. So the more I got to be in the world the more we found out who I am, the way I deal with friends and with bullies. So many of those little bits that together form a personality, grow out of our experiences in the world. I might have started out as a barely formed lump of pain and determination—albeit one that looked a whole lot like my creator but then don't you claim to bear the image of your creator as well—but it didn't take long for me to start developing into a more and more distinct person.

We very rarely disagreed. I don't know if we disagreed at all until recently, but that comes later I think. Mostly we wanted the same stuff, liked the same stuff, hated the same stuff. We don't like bullies, we hate feeling awkward, we learned that anger is the armor you can put on sadness if you want to fix your problems. We learned that laughter is how you breathe and that friends matter a lot. She was always helping me out too, she has always been better at seeing who is hurting and she cares enough to make me care. Together we studied the world and together we figured out just what sort of boy she thought was cool, and together we worked and worked to turn me into that boy. We goofed up sometimes; it's hard to build a real person out of a hodgepodge of archetypes and pop culture images—we (she?) figured out the trick is to build in some personal touches and quirks. I don't really have any of those of my own, so the only way for me to be real was for her to give them to me.

I don't really think we forgot about her. If you look at it one way, we never really even knew she existed—or that she wasn’t me—or that I wasn’t her? I mean, her existence definitely turned out to be a huge shock to me; I think it surprised her too. I came along so early in her life, and everything hurt so much when she made me. I don't think she thought of me as another person, I was just the version of us that didn't hurt so much. I am the one that could survive in the world. I am not wrong.

I'm not perfect though (have you ever wondered what it would feel like to realize that you couldn't perfectly protect your own creator, that you can't quite properly perform the one role you were made for?). Sometimes I wasn't strong enough or solid enough to protect her. While we were kids—elementary and middle school mostly—this generally manifested as a wistfulness. We would see some girl. I remember this one girl; we played on a youth baseball league for a couple of years—we weren't great but we weren't terrible either; we got by with humor and an infectious smile—and this girl was on a team which played adjacent to our field. She was fast and confident with long black hair and an athletic build. We always felt strange around her—sort of happy and sort of sad. I told my friends I had a crush.

There were other times like that. I remember she sort of wanted to play with some of the girls in my fourth grade class. They were doing more and more impressive games with jump ropes which looked like fun. I found those girls sort of intimidating though, and playing those jump rope games would have been wrong on me; at least back then I really thought it wouldn't quite work with who she wanted me to become, not in public anyway. So I waited and we played the same games with my little sister and her friend when we got home.

Neither of us minded being friends with the boys anyway. We weren't really great at the sports side of things but we love giving everything to a competition or a fight; I have believed for a long time that sufficient passion covers over a lack of talent to at least some significant degree. And when our group moved away from sports and started playing games with our imaginations—pretending to be the Ninja Turtles, or making up our own superhero personas to defeat imaginary bad guys—I really got to shine. We both love stories and imagination. Those guys were fun and they were good friends.

Stories were a big thing for us; they still are. When we read stories we stop existing in this world altogether and instead we exist like a ghost floating over the world of the story. I have always been able to forget my worries, stresses, and pressures when I am reading. Some days I don't think that I have ever actually read a story—I think she reads them. When we are reading stories I stop existing; she has no body, no context, no social location. It's how she escapes from me. I don't mind though, I like the stories too and we have had a lot of fun thinking about them over the years. By high school we were reading five or six novels a week. It was a stressful time and I think she needed time away from us to breathe. But that is getting ahead of myself.

Some time in early middle school I read The Tin Woodman of Oz. For a portion of the book, the main characters get transformed into strange animals and forms for the amusement of a giant witch. She adds something to the enchantment that causes them not to mind the transformation. We found it overwhelmingly arresting. I clearly remember something happening inside of us when we read that passage. It was a new thing but it contained echoes of other experiences. There were hints of the agony and hints of the wistfulness but

Tip

there was something more, something new, something urgent. And there was shame too. I had borrowed The Tin Woodman from the library and I must have read and re-read that passage dozens of times in the two weeks I had the book. After the first time I read it at night, under the sheets of my bed using a flashlight as a reading light. I had no idea why I couldn't let anyone know that I was fascinated by that passage but I knew I had to keep it secret. Having someone find out about that book would be like having someone see me naked. It is a strange thing to be ashamed of something you don't understand and don't have any language for.

I think now that The Tin Woodman of Oz must have given her hope. I do know that after that I read all of the Oz books that I could get my hands on. Did you know that in Ozma of Oz we find out that Ozma, the princess of Oz spent her childhood magically transformed into a boy named Tip? L. Frank Baum had a hell of an imagination and those books are way stranger than most people realize. Did you ever notice that almost all of the protagonists are girls?

Ozma

She really liked Pippi Longstockings too, and Nancy Drew. One of the cool things about having a reputation as a voracious reader is that adults, and even other kids, eventually stop questioning your choice of reading material. Everyone knew I would read almost any story I could get my hands on so I was able to supply her with Pippi and Nancy and Beezus almost as much as we read Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, and Henry.

She must have had some idea of what was going on during all of this time. I don't think she ever vanished into me entirely. I think now that that might be why we had such an aversion to male-female boundary crossing when I was young. One time, probably around late elementary school, I visited some friends. Two girls and two boys all around my age. Well, the girls were close to my age, the boys were younger. That day the sisters decided to dress one of their brothers up as a sister. It was... fascinating? I remember not knowing how to feel about it but knowing that I should not let on how strong my internal reaction was. The kids I was playing with all clearly thought that the whole thing was silly and fun, so I went along with that reaction but I freaked out when they suggested doing me next. I think she was afraid someone would see her. I have always experienced a measure of fear anytime I encountered public gender play. There were other emotions involved too and I think they probably changed from time to time but the fear was always a constant.

I don't want to give the impression that I interacted a lot with my creator over the years. Most of the time we didn’t much notice each other—either because our interests were identical or because she left me on autopilot—and sometimes she would cheerfully advise me in the form of an inner monologue about what sort of man I ought to become. I think sometimes her dreams would slip through and I would catch myself day dreaming about how cool it would be to be a certain type of girl, but I knew that I wasn't supposed to tell anyone about that so I didn't. Well, no, there was one time when a friend of mine spent the night and, while we were in our beds chatting before falling asleep he blithely informed me that sometimes he thought it would be cool to be a girl. I think she told him that I agreed but maybe not. He did say it though.

In a lot of ways puberty was a pretty decent time for us. Our body developed in a way that seemed to satisfy her; just like she had planned, it was just right for what she was designing me to be. Or it was pretty close anyway. She never really minded—at least at the outset—that our body was increasingly wrong for her. She was pleased for me as my voice cracked and deepened and when I got to start shaving; I think she was amused, excited, and impressed with how well these developments all worked to make our body more and more into a fortress which would hide her from an unfriendly world. In fact, it helped me to defend her (or hide her?) more effectively.

Girls became fascinating in middle school, or rather that is when they became fascinating in that way. There was a cover of Elle magazine which had a picture of a woman with prominent cleavage. I was fascinated by the woman on the cover and couldn't figure out why, but I did know that I would be embarrassed or ashamed if someone caught me looking. The magazine was at a tutor's house and I remember working to sneak covert glances at the woman on the magazine throughout the lesson that day.

I need to stop for a second here and remind you that she is really smart, and a pretty keen observer. By high school, she had definitely worked out the most effective way for me to live into her wrongness. She had figured out what sort of guy I needed to be in order to maximize my own realness and to give her a chance to express as much of herself as possible in the world without ever being seen as herself. Humor, wit, a love of reading and critical thinking, loyalty to friends and family. We know that the best deceptions incorporate an element of truth (the more the better really) so outside of a few failed and humiliating experiments, she never made any serious effort to make me into some sort of macho hulk. I was never the soldier or jock type, but I also learned quickly how to avoid being seen as effeminate. It was the 90's and the funny-but-passionate kid was an easy role for her to slip me into.

I should also clarify that for all of this time—the cracks won't start to show till much later—I was just who we are. She never thought of any of this as deception or playing a part; were just learning how, and what kind of man we would be able to be in this world. We knew our options and she was living within reality. Neither of us had made a connection between the old anguish, the wistfulness, or our desires, and the possibility that she might exist.

I don't really remember whether the stories or the cross dressing came first. It was probably the stories though. People grow during puberty. That stage in life is certainly a physically liminal one, but it is psychically liminal as well. I think maybe she stopped fitting into me quite as well around puberty and that only makes sense doesn't it? It can be hard to tell a little boy and a little girl apart but once they become teenagers they differentiate a lot more. As my sexuality developed along the fairly typical "straight, red-blooded, male" lines we discovered together the special wonders of the female form. She wasn't struggling to get out exactly, I think maybe a better statement would be that she began to wake up, or at least to stretch around that time.

Seen another way, I stopped being right in the world around the time I went through puberty. I don't really remember how it was that I discovered the genre of gender transformation erotica on the internet but discover it we did. Here was a sexuality which felt comfortable, which "fit", in critical ways for the first time—the problem was that it didn't "fit" for me at all. It made all the sense in the world for her—at least it would have if either of us had realized that she existed at that time—but for the first time we had stumbled into a way of being in this world for which I was the one who was wrong. We both want to be with women, it's just that we both want to be with women as women. We resolved the tension by deciding that I am a pervert.

It is easy to convince yourself that you are a pervert when the things you want feel so shameful. I think puberty and the feelings that go with it were something of a godsend to us really, I think they kept me around longer anyway. Sexuality gave us a box to put our experiences in. If they didn't fit perfectly, they at least fit into that box better than they did into anything else we had. I think she must have decided that I am a pervert—sure that's a problem but it's a manageable one. Most perverts are perverts in secret anyway aren't they? And besides, there is nothing odd or unusual about being ashamed of your perversions. I think she likes girls too. I know I do and that made a lot of things straightforward for us; with a little forcing and a little forgetting, it could contextualize all (or at least most) of the

strange feelings I had ever had when I encountered femininity. Clearly, we decided, I was just hyper-sexual and so incredibly straight that my healthy sexual interest in femininity must have somehow overflowed and caused some perverse desire to enter into it myself. There is the one writer, C.S. Lewis, who said that we don’t just want to experience Beauty, the deep longing of our soul is to enter into it—to take part in it; but I don’t think he meant that the way I experience it.

So I also started cross dressing in high school. I am not proud of it (I am not built to be proud of it) but it is a fact. I am beginning to wonder whether she might actually be proud of that. After all, cross dressing probably marks the first time she asserted herself powerfully enough to dictate my actions. I didn't do it a lot—only when the mood struck, the family was asleep, and I was sure I wouldn't get caught. I would sneak into the bathroom with my stash, lock the door, and turn into... a girl. You have to realize that this was a fairly confusing thing for a teenage boy to find himself doing. It wasn't really sexual—which would have also been confusing if I had let us notice it—it just felt good for about 10 minutes looking at myself in the mirror. Then I would take everything off and try to erase any trace of what I had done. Then I would get in bed and fall asleep praying that I would get caught so that someone would stop me from doing that ever again.

My senior year in high school, my family found my stash. So that was awkward. They are a pretty cool family and I think they were more confused than anything else. I think they just threw it all away and confronted me about it when I got home from school. I kind of apologized, they made it clear that "it" wasn't cool but everything stayed pretty vague and nothing further was ever said about it. I think I ran across the term autogynophilia* on the internet around that time so at least I had a name for my perversion.

I went to a small religious college and those don't provide many opportunities for cross dressing so I managed to stop that behavior after high school; she was relegated back to my fantasy life and only dared to hint at her own existence when I was especially aroused. Sexuality had become the only context in which she could emerge safely because it was the only context we had for making any sense of her.

After college I got married. We both really love my wife. I should probably mention at this point that our whole upbringing and background was both religious and conservative. So it shouldn't surprise you to hear that we were hardly affirming of LGBTQ folks. I was definitely on the side of Team Conservative Christian. I don't know the extent to which shaping me towards being a "Big Hearted Conservative" type person was her decision or just the natural consequence of my surroundings as we grew up. But that is definitely what I was trying to be all through high school and college. At the same time, this meant that everything relating to her was something I spent a lot of my early adult life categorizing as "sin". I don't think she really had any problem with this since she had created me as a way of righting a wrongness she originally sensed within (without?). To the extent that she manifested in me, we both assumed that she was, herself, a wrongness (and yes I realize that there is some inversion and circularity involved there, people are complicated OK?). I didn't have any qualms about getting married. We were, we are, in love. Sure I was a pervert but I was pretty sure I had that under control and I was totally up front with my wife about the fact of my perversion as I understood it at the time. Well I was mostly up front anyway. I didn't get into specifics, I just talked about how I struggled with "sin". At the time it just seemed inappropriate and distasteful to talk about what type.

Our outlook on LGBT people changed over time. Someone once asked me whether I believe that souls have gender. It occurred to me that I do but I have been struggling to find some proof or strong argument for that conclusion ever since. It just sort of seemed obvious to me at the time. Bodies are bodies. They are shaped in different ways and have different functions. They fit our purposes more or less well. The stoic philosophers used to argue that, since we have limited power to shape the world, the only way to become happy was to shape our desires to conform to the world; I get what they were saying but I think they were full of shit. Souls also exist. My whole experience of life tells me that souls can be and sometimes are gendered in a way which just doesn't fit the body. Some bodies just don't naturally function in a way that allows the soul to express itself fully. Anyway, we were affirming of transgender identities several years before we were affirming of lesbian, gay, and bisexual relationships; but it was the latter that led to the big change for us.

Sometime after I had changed my take on LGB relationships (and we try to be a good ally now) someone—a gay man—asked on social media why it was that straight cis people who do ally work are so often assumed to be queer; can't people just be doing that work because they are decent human beings? I think it must have been a Saturday morning because I hadn't taken a shower yet. I cheerfully agreed with the person and said something or other as an encouragement to him. But as the day wore on I started to think about his question more and more. I was (I am?) a straight ally after all. But then I have always had that niggling thing in the back of my mind reminding me that it would be pretty cool to be a woman—but that was just my perversion wasn't it? I decided to take a minute and really properly examine that niggling thing so that I could get a proper grip on it, understand it, and move on.

The thing is that, by then, I had learned a lot—a whole lot—more about LGBTQ folk than I had known back in high school and college. I mean I have always been drawn to queerness. I would never tell a trans person that their sense of a gendered self is a perversion. By then I had, she had, we had made quite a few LGBT friends, We, I, she, had read so much more. We know, I know that autogynephilia is utter bullshit—most cis poeple find it arousing to be in their own skin with their own bodies. But we hadn’t take that experience out and looked at it in a long time.

When I really need to concentrate on a problem or a question I think about it in the shower. It's a quiet environment, the water provides just enough of a physical stimulus to allow me to concentrate at maximum efficacy, and I am relatively unlikely to be interrupted mid-ponder by one of my children.

So I asked myself as I stood under the flow of water do I actually want to be a woman? What is really going on with this? Until I asked the question I genuinely expected an answer in the negative and to be able to get on with things. Instead I suddenly felt like I was falling: I couldn't answer "no". I could not, when being honest with myself, honestly say that I don't want to be a woman. Cis people do not want to be the opposite sex, cis people do not want to be another sex, cis people are happiest being the gender that they are; that is what makes them cisgender . But, the more I thought about it, the more I turned the thought over and over in my head, our head, her head, the more I found I wanted—no desperately wanted—to be a woman. And then it was like a bomb going off in my psyche. Everything was wrong again—I was wrong again. The next thing I knew I was curled into a ball, shaking under the water from my shower. I couldn't answer "no"; I couldn't answer "no"; I couldn't answer "no”. Oh God, oh God, I want to be a woman. What does this mean? What do I do with this? Am I a woman? What even am I?

 

Even existential panic can’t last forever though and eventually we managed to pull myself together enough to finish my shower and get dressed. After all, I had almost half a lifetime's experience repressing—protecting?—this thing inside me; I was practiced at it; I knew that this shower experience was not something that the life I had built would be able to survive, and I have built a good life. So I concentrated on pushing, crushing, ignoring the whole experience. At least that is what I decided to do. It isn't what happened.**

Footnotes:

* This was my experience of what is called Autogynophelia theory. The theory has been thoroughly debunked but managed to hurt a lot of trans women and is still pulled out and weaponized against us by bad faith and misinformed people.

**When I returned to this theme after processing all that shows up here and ultimately deciding to come out and live as my full self, I planned to write a sort of sequel from "the girl"'s perspective—and I may end up doing that some day—but what I ended up writing was this poem and honestly I think it is a great follow up.

You really should read this wonderful series by the incomparable Mae Dean

What Happened to My Deconstruction?

In my last post I started with the observation that, while much of my personal "faith journey" maps well onto a common faith deconstruction narrative, I haven't actually experienced a deconstruction—at least not it the way that experience is usually discussed. I offered (got sidetracked by) a short analysis of the difference between a modernist and a premodern approach to understanding reality and indicated that my tendency towards premodernism might account for my lack of a typical deconstruction experience.

In this post I want to pick up that thread and give a few more reflections on how my tendency towards a premodern understanding of reality let to my having a different experience with regard to deconstruction. The really short version is that I never had a deconstruction because I am always deconstructing and always reconstructing. But explaining what I mean by that might take a few more paragraphs.

I have mentioned that I was raised in a fairly typically conservative US Evangelical household. My parents helped to found a non-denominational Protestant church, I spent time both being home-schooled (using a really conservative curriculum) and at a private Christian school. But there is one, really important way in which my experience growing up was non-typical for conservative US Evangelicalism of the late 20th century and it has everything to do with my parents.

My parents are politically heterogeneous as people. Where my Dad has a generally conservative approach to life; my Mom is has a pretty liberal* approach. Further, I would say that both of them are bad fits for those terms. My Dad's conservatism is nuanced by deep wells of reflection and a phenomenal appreciation for the stories of other people. Where the typically conservative response to unfamiliar stories is one of fear, anger, or rejection, Dad has always responded to new stories and data with interest, excitement and attempts to generate new models and theories about the world. In a parallel way, my Mom's liberalism is nuanced by razor sharp critical thinking and a strong empathy for those who found beauty and security in tradition and the past. At least—and this is what determined my experience—that is how I thought about them growing up. I should note that while these general tendencies did map onto their respective politics and theology to a significant degree I am speaking more here of their approaches to life in general than to any particular policies or beliefs they espoused.

I don't think, though, that simple constitutional heterogeneity accounts for everything that I ascribe to the way I was raised. My parents didn't only have different approaches to life, politics, and theology, they were cheerfully open about them. My home was one where finding the right answers was important but so was thinking about the question. Until I was in Bible College, I assumed that every church going family spent time after church discussing the sermon—disagreeing with some parts and agreeing with others. I always knew that my parents had different politics; and while I was somewhat more inclined towards my Dad's, I understood that these things were debatable and that there was value in having the debate.

On top of this, I grew up as a third-culture kid. My family moved to Turkey when I was seven and I stayed there through the end of high school. Due to the many cultural differences between Turkey and

Turkey photo by Samuel Giacomelli at Unsplash

the US, and thanks to my parents' and Grandmother's deep enjoyment of cultural diversity and exploration, I ended up with a pretty well developed understanding of the fact that the world is a complicated place, that lots of people have strengths and some weaknesses in the way they do things and the way they go about understanding the reality of their world, and that it is unlikely that anybody has things "just right". The conservative part of my makeup had (and still has) me convinced that it is almost always worth supporting the model of truth I found most compelling at a given point, while the liberal part of my makeup (one which was the weakest in me while I was in high school) reminded me that that I still had plenty to explore and learn.

The net effect of all of this was that when I went off to Bible college seeking to find all of the final answers to all of my questions, I went with a really robust understanding of what that would entail and a still (somewhat) flexible understanding of what reality might turn out to consist in. That said, I went to Bible college with the full expectation that I would find proofs and demonstrations which would allow me to concretize a final model of the world. I genuinely believed that the answers (and logically unassailable proofs of those answers) to all my questions were going to be found during my time in undergrad. And it seems likely to me that, were I going to have a deconstruction experience, mine would have started there. What I realized slowly over four years as an undergraduate was that, we still don't have final answers to "life the universe and everything"—we are still building our models of reality even while we are living in the world.

There were other factors too. I have been a fan of fantasy, fairy tales, and mythology since I have been reading and, in many ways, those genre are themselves an immersion into a pre-modern approach to the world. I also discovered philosophy during my last year of high school and focused heavily on that subject in college as a part of my attempt to finally "get the True answers". Most vitally I had a series of experiences which began to center my experience of Christianity more on a relationship with the person of Jesus and less on the lists of things people believe about Jesus. (I have written about that aspect of my thinking HERE)

None of that is to say that I "abandoned my faith" or even made a particularly significant change in the tenets of my belief structures while I was in college—I didn't. What I do think happened though is a sort of final shift in my overall approach to understanding reality. The experience of finding more questions than answers in college shifted me, or maybe just finally determined my psychological development, away from a modernist approach to a pre-modern approach to understanding reality. On a strictly historical level, it was over the ten or so years most directly after Bible college that my theological shift from functionally conservative white Evangelical to functionally progressive Christianity took place. But I am pretty convinced that it was the experiences which I have outlined hear which allowed that theological transition to happen in the way that it did—that is to say, that prevented me from experiencing a deconstruction in the way that it seems to typically occur.

By the time I really began taking out and examining or questioning those tenets of my faith and of reality itself, my understanding of reality had shifted from the strong-yet-brittle modernist "wall" to the more complex, less easily defined, and less thoroughly interdependent pre-modern symphony or dance. If a piece (a tenet) was discarded (as my original beliefs in gender complimentarity, LGBTQ+ exclusion, young earth creationism, Biblical literalism and others were) the total edifice did not shatter. It was affected, certainly. Each piece I removed had played a role in constructing the whole, each piece resonated with many other pieces. The whole, therefore went through a process of "re-tuning and re-orientation" each time something was removed. The ideas, beliefs, facts, convictions, and tenets I replaced them then necessitate further re-tuning—both of the idea itself, and of the edifice as a whole. But far from experiencing this as a crisis, I find great fun and even joy in it. When I discover that I now think a new thing to be true, I am thereby promised the opportunity to work through the rest of my beliefs, ideas, opinions, etc... and to find out how they are influenced by this new idea, and how they influence it in turn. Sometimes I will try ideas out, just to see what impact they will have on the edifice and what impact it will have on them.

I wish that I could end this with a recommendation for how one could choose to experience deconstruction in a modernist or premodern way—I suspect that mine has been slower than the modern one but that it has also been far gentler—but I don't have any certain prescription for how that might be accomplished. Modernist Christianity has gone to great lengths to wall out the whole philosophical tradition (postmodernism) which was built as a critique of modernism and as a result, most Evangelicals will probably experience a softening towards postmodern critiques of modernism as a de facto deconstruction in any case. There may be a back-door if an Evangelical were to start reading as much as they can of the Christian mystics, of the Inklings (try Lewis' essays, Tolkiens Silmarilion and On Fairy Stories, Barfield's Poetic Diction, Sayers' Mind of the Maker, Willaim's The Descent of the Dove) Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, and MacDonalds At the Back of the North Wind and other premodern thinkers with an open mind and without merely trying to mine them form apologetics or for aids in evangelism, but I am not entirely sure whether that will work. The simultaneous strength and brittleness of Modernism require both great power and great gentleness to undo it without shattering it. I suspect that in most cases the shattering may well be inevitable. And maybe that is another reason that community is needed. We need to be there to help pick up one another's pieces—maybe even to keep a few safe for a time while our friends are rebuilding their world. If it is a good piece they will find a place for it in due time.

Footnotes:

*I use the terms liberal and conservative throughout this piece in a horrendously oversimplified way but I haven't worked out a way to get around that in a blog post. Maybe someday I can write a book and luxuriate in the nuance and complexity that medium affords. In the meantime, by liberal here I am using the loose political definition of "an outlook which tends to welcome change and improvement" whereas conservative "indicates an appreciation for tradition and stability with an attendant skepticism towards change".

Myth as Dream and Nightmare

“When they told him this, Ransom at last understood why mythology was what it was -- gleams of celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility.”                         - C.S. Lewis  Perelandra

I have been thinking about myth again recently. It is a particularly special kind of story, myth, neither history nor fiction, nor—quite—a mere combination of the two. Myths are not properly understood to be lies about history, nor are they fictional histories. Despite some of the rather bigoted and paternalist theories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it looks more and more as though the great tellers and recorders of myth never believed their stories to be historically true. But they did believe them to be true nonetheless. If you will excuse the circularity I think the answer to the question "what could be more true than facts" is "myth'.

It is, after all, the case that story is the instrument we use to access reality. Without story our experience of the world would be nothing more that incoherent data. It is story which turns the collection of shapes, colors, sounds, smells, and sensations into a child. Every thing with which we interact is its own story a story we write and are told. To spend much time thinking about this will open you to the twin shocks that the story of this life which you think you are writing is really one which you are being told and that the story you think you are being told is really a story that you are always writing—existence is a collaborative piece of art.

These are stories which are neither fact nor lie but are often deeply true. Because myth is the exploration of meaning, it can neither ential perfect correspondence to facts, or utter independence from them. The hard bitten empiricist reduces myth to lie (though that conclusion will never be found in their accumulated data) while others attempt to harden myth into brittle fact  thereby exposing it once more to the attacks of the empiricists. But myth will not submit to any enforced metamorphosis and, to my knowledge, only one myth has ever become fact, and that was of its own volition. This is all a rather round-about way of saying that our myths are our attempts to find the meaning behind our existence. Without them we would be beyond lost, we would be without meaning.

I will not walk with your progressive apes,
erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends
if by God's mercy progress ever ends,
and does not ceaselessly revolve the same
unfruitful course with changing of a name.
I will not treat your dusty path and flat,
denoting this and that by this and that,
your world immutable wherein no part
the little maker has with maker's art.
I bow not yet before the Iron Crown,
nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.

Selection from Mythopoeia  by J.R.R. Tolkien

There are two myths which I have been particularly thinking about recently and I hope that by thinking about them together I might be able to shine a little light on a few of the healthy and dangerous uses of the art. Specifically I have been thinking about the recent musical The Greatest Showman and also the myth of America.

The Greatest Showman

The Greatest Showman is one of those wonderful movies which was panned by the critics and embraced by audiences. The movie does not represent the facts of the history on which it is based instead the movie is a myth about community, humanity, acceptance, diginity, ambition, and right relationship. It is a hero’s journey (actually it is several overlapping hero’s journeys) and it pierces right to the heart of the tension between and unjust society built for the comfort of the rich and powerful and a just and joyful society built by and for those marginalized by the rich and powerful. In Christians terms, it is a myth all about the difference between the Kingdom of God as described in the Beatitudes and the Kingdom of this world. The loud secret of The Greatest Showman is that the life of joy and dignity is to be found only when we celebrate the humanity and worth of not being safe, secure, and privileged. It is a well told, and beautiful version of the story all of our hearts desperately long to live and most of our hearts are too afraid to ever try. The quote, often attributed to Thoreau that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them” represents a dark magic which The Greatest Showman works to unravel—story and myth are, after all, the good magic which sets us free from the dark lies we tell ourselves about this world, and The Greatest Showman is a story of singing the song in the face of the dark.

But the history is not the same as the myth. In real, factual history P.T. Barnum simply was not the man we see as the protagonist of the myth. In real, factual history his circus was not the full celebration of humanity in all of its glorious diversity that we see in the myth—actually there was some serious exploitation and racism going on there; Barnum was pretty terrible with his animals as well.

The man on whom the myth-story is based was a broken, messed up, guy. He was wildly imperfect and sometimes evil. That isn’t a problem for The Greatest Showman unless we make the myth for the facts, unless we try to replace history with myth. Because the history is also important. The real history of racism, bigotry, animal abuse, exploitation, and the other wretched sins Barnum committed matters. The facts matter. When we pretend that the myth is the history we turn good magic into bad magic. We have a term for doing that: “whitewashing”. The spell which could work to liberate us, becomes a curse binding us more tightly to the sins of our past. Because the facts of history will remain regardless of whether we remember them. And history always has its effects.

The world is the way it is because of its history. When we whitewash our history it is like trying to tell a good story but changing all of the unpleasant parts at the beginning—it won’t work. The prince cannot search the kingdom for the girl whose foot fits the glass slipper if Cinderella is never kept from the ball in the first place; there would be no fairy godmother and the story would end with her having a pleasant time at the ball. Once the darkness is erased from the story, the happy ending (what Tolkien called the “eucatastrophe”) becomes impossible. So to with the real story in which we live. If we do not know our own history any real improvement on our current situation will be impossible.

As C.S. Lewis is want to remind us, it is the highest angels who make the most terrible demons. Myth known as myth highlights meaning and draws us towards progress and joy; myth mistaken for history blinds us to the ability to ever improve.

The Myth of America

The myth of the United States of America is a beautiful thing as well. The myth of America is one of freedom for and the equality of all people. The myth of America is a story of a wild, empty land slowly tamed for the good of all people by the rugged determination, the blood sweat and tears of fiercely determined regular people. It is the story of tough people who struggled to overcome oppression and tyranny and succeeded by strength of their grit, faith, and families. The American myth is the myth of a people enriched by and ever enriching their land. It is the story of the downtrodden of many lands who find sanctuary, overcome, and rise up to protect the downtrodden of the world. The American myth is hard work, hard living, and the simply joy of well earned safety in a healthy home with a loving family. The American myth is not a perfect vision of human flourishing but it is an honest and joyful representation of that ineffable spirit which is the United States.

But the Myth of America is not the history of America.

The land was not empty

The history of the United States is much more complicated and far, far darker. The history of the United States is the history of slavery and oppression of the poor and those who were not “granted whiteness”. The history of America is the history of a land cleared of its inhabitants by disease and violent genocide for the sake of those who believed that land is a thing to be owned and exploited. The “wild empty land” of the myth was, in fact, the land of the Susquehannok, the Cherokee, the Lakota, the Iroquois, the Creek, the Seminole, the Comanche, the Chinook, and so many, many more. Some little of it they have kept, their blood stains the rest. The history of America is a history of liberty won and liberty denied. There has been progress, yes, but that progress has been always too slow. The history of America is a history of stolen wealth, of robber barons and a civil war fought to retain a “right” to keep others enslaved. There have been plenty of tough and hardworking people in America’s history and they have accomplished great and unprecedented things. But the system they used to build those things, the institutions which enabled them to do what they did, can not be separated from the genocide and slavery out of which they were born. There is no America without those sins.

Dred Scott

The history of America is a history of poisoning our land for money. The history of America  is the history ripping apart the atom in order to slaughter our enemies. The history of America is ending slavery with one amendment and recreating it as mass incarceration with the same amendment. The history of America the strong prey on weak and throw their bones to their brothers to buy their complicity. The history of America is one hand stretched out to immigrants while the other pens “Chinese exclusion acts, the US vs Baghat Singh Thind, executive order 9066, and a million other words of exclusion. The History of America is Wounded Knee and Jim Crow. The history of America is the history of “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” and then treating one million flavors of “Christian” as the only religion that counts. The history of America is the history of not worrying about an epidemic which “only affects gays and Haitians.” The history of America is 200+ years of marriage and identity denied to those unlike “us”.

The United States has accomplished great things, but each great accomplishment has grown, in some degree, out of the corpses of those who were walled out of the myth.

Take a moment and stare the tragedy of America right in the eye. Don’t blink.

It is only in recognizing the nation’s darkness, in seeing it for what it is, that the US has any hope of moving towards what it might be. The great danger—the great temptation—is to substitute the myth for the history and thus to turn the angel into a demon. As I have said elsewhere, I have never encountered a more powerful vision of both the history and myth of America than in Langston Hughes’ Let America be America Again. This is the eyes-open view (it should not surprise us that it is a poet who is able to see both truth and fact with such clarity) which hears myth and fact in sterio and never confuses the one for the other. May we learn to do the same.

Finding God in the Body: A Review

Finding God in the Body by Benjamin Riggs is the book about almost everything my conservative Christians friends worry I might believe. That doesn't automatically make it a bad book (neither does it automatically make it a good one) but it certainly made for an interesting read. On one level, Finding God in the Body is a well written, frequently insightful book containing some really useful spiritual practices and perspectives; on another, reading it felt a little like reading a caricature of myself, drawn by one of those more conservative friends. Whatever else it was, this book certainly was a good reminder to me that Christian theology is not the binary we like to make it into, but large room with a lot of shared furniture.

Because my overall reaction to the book was fairly complicated, I want to address a few aspects of it independently and will try to finish with a broad gestalt impression.

The writing

Riggs is a talented author and Finding God in the Body clearly benefits. His thoughts are well organized, he takes a warm, usually non-challenging, tone, and skillfully weaves narrative moments into his broad argument. While the ideas are deep and certainly challenging the read in itself is easy and quite compelling. While I did get a little bogged down in two of the thirteen chapters, the book as a whole is fundamentally read-able.

What I agreed with

There are several great insights in Finding God in the Body (not the least of which is that God is to be found within the Body). Riggs' overall project seems to be to represent some of the best of western and Tibetan Buddhist wisdom, insight and practice, in the idiom of Christian mystical and monastic/contemplative tradition. As such, the book participates robustly in the conversations around the relationship between eastern wisdom philosophy and Christian theology (I caught particular resonances with Thomas Merton, Joseph A Loya, and Heiromonk Damascene). Without launching into a defense of God's working in all peoples throughout history, I want to affirm Riggs' basic project here; we should all welcome attempts to bring the best of eastern and western thinking  into conversation with one another.

Not only does Riggs participate in the conversation, he adds to it significantly. The overall premise of the book is that we can benefit from paying attention to the the body as such beyond our thought-life (what Riggs refers to as the "false-self") and Riggs helpfully expounds quite a few techniques drawn from both eastern (primarily Buddhist) and western mystic traditions. He combines the practical directions well with the "why" of these practices, Chapter 11 How to Meditate with the Body is particularly good in this regard. Before laying out a helpful contemplative practice, Riggs explains the need as follows:

Busyness is the false-self's response to shame and insecurity. If our spiritual practice is to be transformative, then it cannot be characterized by this busyness. We cannot think our way out of  disembodiment. This is where many of us throw our hands up in frustration. We get mad because thinking about things is all we know. We feel stuck. 

... 

The false-self system is a closed circuit system. It ignores any information that does not originate within itself. It disregards emotion, intuition, inconvenient truths, and challenging points of view. A closed mind cannot feel, listen trust, be still, or be silent. It is so closed off that it only sees itself. This breeds corruption. The mind keeps turning to itself to solve problems that it created. In a disembodied mind, the criminal is in charge of the crime scene. If we hope to escape this cycle, we must find another vantage point.

This overall project, insofar as it comes down to encouraging spiritual pilgrims to listen to, value, and honor the body—to find that the body is an image of God—is one I heartily approve of. It strikes me as a vital corrective both for contemporary western Christianity and for western culture as a whole, which has tended towards the modernist error of isolating the intellect as "true person" and the only final subject of improvement. Further, I cannot get over how happy I am that he offers practical advice for the reader wanting to develop a habit of body-mindfulness.

But...

At the end of the day though, I part ways with Riggs on a basic level. He seems (ironically to my mind) to have accepted far more of the modern, western understanding of the world than I do, or could think wise. In focusing on the body Riggs somehow has managed to ring himself in as a deconstructed materialist. I am confident that he would dislike and want to challenge this characterization but I am tempted to say that Riggs ultimately rejects the transcendent (I suspect that he believes he has found it and that the natural is, in and of itself, the transcendent).

Riggs seems like a
neat guy...

Our disagreement comes down to this: I am a supernaturalist and, so far as I can tell, Riggs is not. Where I want to argue that the body (and the mind) are images which have value in themselves, to which even more is added by the fact that they also point beyond themselves to God, Riggs seems content (and insistent) to say that the body points to itself alone. He he has found God in the body but seems to have concluded that God cannot therefore exist outside the body. As a result, his treatments of Jesus (chapter 8) and myth (chapter 7) suffer significantly. Where I believe that myth is an image of transcendent Truth clothed in particularities of history, culture, and story, Riggs claims "The primary function of myth is to move beyond the surface and penetrate our inmost core, laying bare our human nature" and so, his reading of myth focuses on the wrapping and mistakes it for the substance within. 

So too, when Riggs turns to talk about Jesus, he dismisses all accounts of the supernatural as literary and poetic licence (oversimplifying the text and thereby making the equal-and-opposite mistake of the fundamentalist who insists on an entirely literal reading of the bible). The result is a Jesus of Nazareth who is no more or less divine than any human person and who works well as a model, and maybe even savior-by-example, for us but not at all as a friend, or Lord. At the risk of sounding too damning, Riggs knows a good deal about Jesus but doesn't even claim to know Jesus. In fact he worries that those of us who do make such a claim, are committing the idolatry of worshiping that which is outside of ourselves (Jesus) in place of the divine within ourselves. My only real response to him there is a total acceptance of the accusation. I have given my allegiance to Jesus as external to my own being.

Bringing it all together

My final characterization of Finding God in the Body is that, while it contains a useful, and even necessary corrective to the culture and Christianity of our day, the book ultimately suffers from a pendulum like over-correction based in Riggs' rejection of the transcendent. He has read his Joseph Campbell but not his C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien; he has recognized myth but not realized that it might be fact at the same time. Ultimately I would argue that Finding God in the Body represents an important voice in the conversation about spirituality, philosophy, and being, and we are the richer for having Riggs as a part of it, but he has missed the main thing and his work suffers for it.  

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the author and/or publisher through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR,Part 255.