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ORDINARY TIME Seeds of Change: Seeing Transformation in
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Listen to Rev. Erin Swenson speak of her experience and Ordinary Time. |
See us, hear us. Listen to our stories of
Ordinary Time…
Erin Swenson, a transgender woman and an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., links her experience to the days of Ordinary Time – a slow growing season where forces seem to squelch hope and transformation takes so long. Yet it happens! Hope blossoms.
“After the first newspaper article about my transition was published in the local paper, I received dozens of notes, letters and phone calls — most of them supportive — in the weeks following publication. Perhaps the most moving contact was from an older woman who wanted to meet me for breakfast. She explained that she had, many years before, gone through a ‘sex change.’ She moved into a retirement home next to a large urban church she had been attending for many years, often volunteering her musical skills to accompany a women’s meeting or a Sunday school class. But she had never joined the church. When I asked her why, her eyes dropped to the floor and she said that she felt unworthy because of her ‘sex change’ operation. ‘When I saw the article about you, about the minister who was a transsexual, I was overjoyed,’ she exclaimed, tears in the corners of her eyes. I was stunned; overwhelmed with the decades of brokenness this beautiful old woman had endured. And it wasn’t her brokenness—it was the Church’s.”
Aidan Dunn, a transgender activist from San Francisco, reflects on how a supportive community can create a holy and fertile place for God’s transforming work to happen.
“When I directed a transgender youth organization, I often received phone calls from social workers and teachers seeking advice about how to work with transgender teenagers. Their questions ranged from whether to house a runaway male-to-female transgender youth in a girls’ room at a group home, to how high schools could help transgender students with unsupportive parents. I was well-practiced in answering these questions, but I began to receive phone calls that baffled me.
Parents, some with children as young as four, were calling about children who they thought might be transgender: the son who insisted on wearing girls’ clothes, the daughter who adopted a male name and asked to be called ‘he.’ These parents were not seeking to ‘fix’ their children, or force them into a gender that wasn’t working. They wanted to know how they could support their kids’ gender journeys. I couldn’t help but think what a difference having supportive parents makes. This generation of transgender kids won’t have to run away from home to find acceptance. They can experiment with gender, without being shamed. They will grow up knowing that they are loved regardless of how they express their gender. What a difference this will make – these parents may be saving their kids from the years of grief that have plagued previous generations of transgender people.”
Matthew 13 includes two of the “green” Bible passages for Ordinary Time (Proper 10 and 11, Year A, in the Revised Common Lectionary). In that chapter, Jesus tells a parable about how different seeds thrived or failed depending on the environment in which they were given to grow. Erin and Aidan’s stories show the difference that a supportive or unsupportive environment can make in a human life. In Ordinary Time, we can reflect upon the different ingredients needed for spiritual growth and transformation: a supportive community, openness to change, and personal willingness to transform.
Through Our Eyes: Seeing Ordinary Time as a Growing Time
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When we think of the liturgical calendar and the cycle of the church year, our attention is often drawn to the holidays – the great holidays, the days that stand out. We remember these milestones as Christmas or Easter, the extraordinary. However, most of our lives are actually lived out during ordinary time – the space between the major events of Pentecost and Advent, the ordinary summer days between spring and winter. This time, when we are not distracted by major celebrations, provides a good opportunity to firmly ground ourselves in our spiritual practices, which we too often leave aside for “later” during the hectic holiday season.
The Gift of Ordinary Days
When we consider the lives of transgender people, our attention is often similarly drawn to the significant milestones of our gender transitions. While no two trans people have identical journeys, these milestones may include some of the following: coming out to ourselves and others, our first time appearing in public as our chosen gender, beginning to take male or female hormones, changing our names, or having surgery. These big steps toward our true selves are undoubtedly an important part of gender transition.
However, these big steps in our lives are often milestones in the most literal sense of the world – external representations of the internal road already traveled, a way of making visible to the world what has long been true for us. These events, just like high holidays in the Christian liturgical year, are often afforded more significance in the telling of our stories than the rest of the time of our lives as transgender people. But just as the days spent in ordinary time deepen our faith journey and prepare us for the major holidays, our mundane, daily lives as transgender people are where the bulk of our preparation and formation as human beings takes place.
A farmer spends much of the agricultural year carefully tending crops, watching for signs of growth as a plant slowly and miraculously transforms from a tiny seed to a full-grown plant, and then flowers and bears fruit. Gender transition is a similarly slow but miraculous process. People who knew us before transition sometimes don’t recognize us when we meet again a few years later. We carry proof in our bodies – and can serve as a powerful reminder to our spiritual communities – that transformation happens. Our mere ministry of presence may give other people hope that they too can transform, in whatever ways they need to change in order to be true to themselves and their callings in this world.
Perhaps transgender people are so often feared and reviled because we embody major change, something that frightens too many people. When people feel called in a direction that may be difficult – whether it is to move to a new town, begin or end a relationship or career path, a religious conversion or something else central to our lives, we are often confused, doubtful, or downright terrified. Transformation and growth are often difficult, frightening, and painful, and we seldom know where our transformative journeys will take us, but having faith and trusting God often leads us on journeys more powerful and amazing than anything we ever could have imagined for ourselves.
The days of Ordinary Time cover approximately half of the calendar and reflect a wide range of Bible stories and human experiences. Agrarian themes dominate the Scriptures for Ordinary Time. Throughout this long season, people examine Jesus’ ministry, his cultivation of disciples and community, as he tilled soil for growth. This is a time of sowing, a time of fertility, cultivation, work, and harvest. No wonder the color that is used in many churches to celebrate these days is “green.”Just as most of the liturgical year is spent in ordinary time, most of our real lives as transgender people are spent doing “ordinary” things. When transgender people are free to simply live, instead of fighting for our lives, we do ordinary things: play with our grandchildren, go to the movies, celebrate birthdays with our friends, and wash our dishes. But as the Scriptures from this season teach us, it’s in the “ordinary” rhythms of our lives that we are able to plant the seeds of true transformation.
Planted on Rocky or Fertile Soil?
Many of the Bible passages for these days invite us to examine the kind of environment that allows us to flourish in God’s realm. In Matthew 13 (used for Proper 10 and 11 in Year B), Jesus tells several parables about seeds, including the parable of the sower. The parable describes the plight of different seeds, how they thrived or failed depending on the quality of the soil in
which they landed.
Like the seeds sown in rocky or barren soil, many gender-variant people grow up without the resources they need to flourish. The prevalence of mental illness, drug addiction, homelessness and suicide attempts is so high in the transgender community that many people have come to see an inextricable link between transgender people and these problems. As Raven Kaldera explains in Hermaphrodeities:
“If years of living in the wrong body don’t grind you down into insanity, being discriminated against in the workplace, assaulted on the streets, and having difficulty finding partners and friends might well do it. There are an appalling number of transgendered people on mental disability, and even more living on the streets or clinging to a subsistence life because of mental problems. It’s not that transgender is caused by mental problems, it’s that it creates them – and they are compounded by society’s gauntlet…Just living a transgendered life is enough to give some people a bad case of post-traumatic stress disorder.”1
The Church: Rocky or Fertile Soil?
The church has often been rocky ground for many transgender people, failing to provide a place of nurture and care to those who are most in need. The world is an especially hostile place for transgender people – we are taunted on the street, we lack access to medical care, our families often reject us, and we are routinely denied employment. Even religious communities who claim to be welcoming “house[s] of prayer for all peoples” (Isaiah 56:7, Proper 15, Year A) often find it difficult to welcome those whose gender they do not understand. Some exclude us based on biblical injunctions taken out of context. When transgender people, or indeed any people, grow up in supportive and loving environments, they can go on to flourish like seeds in fertile soil.
There are spiritual communities that affirm and welcome people (transgender or not) just as they are. Being included in all aspects of church life, from potlucks or ushering, to small cell groups in homes and ordained ministry can be an incredible blessing for a person of faith. A spiritual community that welcomes people just as they are, without shame or guilt, can be a place of healing, growth, and transformation.
Growing into Communities of Inclusion
In her church community, pastor Elise Elrod sometimes finds her relationship with God challenged. People question her right to gender transition, saying that God doesn’t make mistakes. Elise sees things differently. To her, neither the years lived in a male body, nor the decision to transition to female, is a mistake – it is all part of God’s creation in her. Instead of getting sidetracked by judging personal matters, Elise believes that the church should focus on its central message and goal: “The thing that unifies us all, no matter your situation or identity is the Way itself, the Way of Christ. God’s desire is that each of us becomes what God intended for us. God's true image is reflected inside us, in the Way. The Way is the essence of Christianity. The Way lives alongside many doctrines, many creeds, many confessions, and many styles of worship. The Way brings joy; blessedness. The Way is the tie that binds the church together; it is the path beneath our feet, the fertile ground on which we travel. We need only watch our step to travel the route together.”
Many people who have significant struggles with gender identity spend years and perhaps decades believing that their gender variance is a curse. In seminary, long before her gender transition from male to female, Erin Swenson would escape alone to the chapel for painful, tearful, and often angry conversations with God. Years of therapy intended to “cure” the gender issues had no effect as Erin struggled to maintain her shame filled secret. Erin’s fear was clearly not God’s fear, and the despised and rejected part of her life became, in the fullness of God’s time, a powerful witness before her brothers and sisters in her church of how God’s love had enabled the courage to speak her truth. The seed of her fear grew in time into a story that inspired and encouraged many other transgender people of faith.
The kind of inclusion that transgender people (and indeed, any other marginalized people) need, has a long history and has precedent in the Bible. When the Israelites were released from slavery in Egypt, on the way back from captivity, they began to decide who would be included in the House of God. Isaiah 56:1, 6-8 (used on Proper 15, Year A) lists peoples who have previously been excluded, but who are now welcome to join in worship, including foreigners and eunuchs. The only requirement for membership that worshippers must now fulfill is that they keep the Sabbath, "[m]aintain justice, and do what is right” (56: 1). This passage ends with a triumphant message of inclusion:
“Their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations. The Sovereign God, the one who gathers the exiles of Israel, declares: ‘I will gather still others to them besides those already gathered.’”
The prophet Isaiah mentions those welcomed by name, but also leaves room for new groups who will join them in the future. This visionary prophet describes an inclusion that remains a calling for communities (and individuals) of faith, even to this day.
Growing and Becoming Splendid!
In Mark 4:20-35 (used on Proper 6, Year B) and Luke 17:5-10 (used on Proper 17, Year C), Jesus tells the parable of the mustard seed: “The dominion of God is like a mustard seed which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs” (Mark 4:30-32a).
Some transgender individuals see themselves in this image of the mustard seed – something that society sees as small and insignificant, but something that given the right conditions, has the potential to become a source of nurture and nourishment for others. Just as the tiny mustard seed undergoes a dramatic transformation as it becomes a tree, the lives of human beings (transgender or not) can similarly transform – and inspire God’s transformation in others.
In this season, we are given a chance to appreciate the ordinary gifts of growth, change and transformation that we so often fear or take for granted. If we are open to God and the message that Ordinary Time has to offer us, we may find that this time of growth offers us a great opportunity to reconnect with or deepen our faith. May God work within you and bring to full flower God’s greatest hope for you. Grow in God.
