a not funny situation and a word to The Truth

On any given morning you will see two men making each other laugh.
If you're like me this can be a mysterious thing. Grown men, laughing, hopefully at themselves and inviting joy into the pain of life's daily grind-which is generally the healthy, humble thing to do.
But it's not always possible.
I will tell you what I know:
Two men, one is a member at the Morgan Family YMCA. The other is an employee there. They are not young, not old. The member tries to make the other laugh by claiming to have transitioned from female to male and pretending to be confused about which locker to use now that he is a man.
At this precise moment I froze and stared-not just to see what the employee would do but also because I was curious about whether this joke is part of his idea of his gender expression. We've all seen it: me trying to define myself by making a joke at the expense of another person. Don't worry; we've all done it.
Hopefully we have all had conversation partners who didn't let us get away with it.

The employee did not laugh. It was clearly not funny to him. But the member continued to try to make him laugh.
I felt a little sick and yet I took a cheerleader stance: my legs formed a triangle and I set my arms akimbo. I set my face in an impish smile and made eye contact with a woman behind the counter who was also bearing witness as you would bear a ten ton load of bricks and try to keep a gentle expression on your face.

New rules at our YMCA require the employees to tell persons in transition that they will be shown to a specific restroom. Not entirely different from showing someone to the back of the bus. So the employee offered to do so and the member finally gave up.
I wish I could tell you that the member suddenly realized that if he really were transitioning this would be the moment that all staff on site are supposed to take note and clearly communicate that their policies limit his movements on site. That this is the moment, that he has come out to his community and will be treated differently. This (this!) is one more in a series of impossible conversations that our friends at the margins must have if they desire to be open and honest about who they really are. And, perhaps, the staff will treat him differently from that moment forward... it's not for me to know.

No, this is not a joke.

In fact, this is not a joke or even a drill. This is a serious situation.
My colleagues and I have had conversations with Phil Carter at our YMCA and found him to be honestly disappointed in this new policy that requires his staff to discriminate.
We wrote a letter to the governing body and only then were we made aware that as part of their efforts to clean up the mess made by this policy and the procedure by which it came to be
they are inviting those of us who consider ourselves community leaders from diverse backgrounds
to conversations-which seem, as of this publication, unscheduled.
Here is where it gets good:
If you want to be part of these conversations you are asked to email president@ymcapkc.org 
You can learn more (about their clean up efforts) here: buried in the archives of their newsroom
The letter we sent and the undersigners will follow this rant. Use the link therein to view the original announcement.
The response was lacklustre and simply directed us to the above link.

So the question is not now nor ever about whether you are transitioning or cisgender but what kind of human do you want to be?
Maybe even: what kind of advocate do you need or want to be?
And even though the YMCA leaders stipulate they want to invite community leaders (rather than mere members) I want to tell you something: if you have the literacy skill to read this post you can count yourself among those with more education than many and that makes you (yes, you) a leader in your community whether you like it or not.

And to my friends reading this who have had to have these type of conversations already (the kind I'm inviting you to and the kind I mentioned above):

Keep telling the truth. When it's hard, when it's easy, when it seems impossible I beg you to tell it anyway you can-use words if you want to, signs, flags, hugs, high fives, shouts, cries, whimpers, winks and eyerolls, songs and poetry. Sound the alarm that tells everyone you care, you matter. Ignore those who ignore you or disrespect you and keep watch for the rest of us to notice and love you, the real you, the truth...
The Truth.

Dear President Ecklund,

We the undersigned are pastors, parents, active members, and financial contributors to the Morgan Family YMCA.

The Y continues to embody its mission to provide for our families’ bodies, souls and minds. One of the most impressive aspects of the Y is its commitment to the inclusion of all people in its mission and vision. That's why your recent announcement of policy shifts regarding full inclusion for transgender members in transition at the Morgan Family Y and other locations in Pierce and Kitsap counties is so disappointing. 

We know this is a difficult conversation rife with the potential for conflict and unwanted publicity. Our congregations are divided on these issues as well. Thus we understand your unique position and respect your attempts to serve all involved.

Your letter, dated October 5, stated that the decision to relegate transgender members in transition to private changing rooms was made after receiving feedback from concerned members and citizens. Obviously all concerns should be taken seriously. We believe, however, that much of the hysteria over exposure to transitioning individuals is rooted in fear rather than reality. In fact, we’ve learned that no incidences of misconduct have ever been reported at the Morgan Family YMCA. What is reality is that the Y’s new policy requires the staff and members of the Y to discriminate against transitioning individuals regardless of threat.  

In your deliberations, was there time for conversation about safety, exposure, and preferences with transgender individuals and their allies? Was there an opportunity that we missed for us to share the concerns that we have as pastors, rooted in our Christian faith, about this policy change? If so, we deeply regret missing this opportunity. If not, let us express our disappointment that such an opportunity was not given and/or clearly communicated. 

We are, as leaders in Tacoma churches, raising our children (in our families and congregations) to appreciate the strength and beauty of all bodies. This includes healthy and weak bodies, big and small bodies, bodies of cancer survivors with a double mastectomy, adolescent bodies in transition to adulthood, and adult bodies undergoing transition from one gender expression to another.

Thus the Y’s decision to exclude some bodies from full inclusion in our community is very troubling.

We know the YMCA is a safer place than most and we will be vigilant in support of your policies that protect vulnerable populations. We are requesting that all people be treated with equal respect, and equal opportunity, to impact decisions that affect restriction of movement or access to all services at the YMCA of Pierce and Kitsap Counties. We ask this not simply for the sake of our bodies, but for the sake of the Gospel that teaches us that the way we treat our bodies, and each other’s bodies, is a direct reflection of the care we provide for minds and souls as well.

We would be happy to meet with you to discuss this further.

Sincerely,

Rev. Nathan Hollifield, Fircrest United Methodist Church

Rev. Abigail Vizcarra Perez, The Bridge United Methodist Church

Rev. Sarah Wiles, Bethany Presbyterian Church

Rev. Ann Adkinson, First United Methodist Church of Tacoma

the miracle emotional

I wasn't always what I am now. For a while I was a Social Anthropologist. I ran experiments and wrote observations in notebooks, sometimes I even drew diagrams. I read extensively on topics such as modern applications of first century pagan rituals; Madonna: ancient beliefs to post modern pop star with an ex husband or so. I was a collector of rare facial expressions and took a special interest in violent sibling rivalries in the late 20th century. I was 12 years old at the time.
In my mid thirties I've pared it back, thank goodness, to an odd tendency to wonder what the postal carrier listens to in his headphones as he delivers the mail and a puppy love for muscle cars or really, anything with a slant 6. In short, I've given up most of my junior high tendencies for a different kind of musing.

But the impulse is the same: I am still watching others for clues about who they are and why they are, say, kind or indifferent. Why you hold me at arms length or can't stop hugging me. When you tell me who you are I want to believe you. But this is difficult, arduous.

It requires organizing my thoughts in a way that would give Martha Stewart's staff a run for their money. Otherwise I'd just be a hoarder of experiences. Not healthy. How does one quiet her emotions to the extent required for this task?

If the goal here is to offer a helpful comment, a hopeful idea about the next challenge or a bona fide listening ear, then I have to create categories that don't truncate the meaning of a gesture or limit the definition of your smile. My study of humans has required a turn toward other animals and their habitats now.

How does one tame a lion heart? How do you teach a whale to hum when she wants to sing?
My only hope is in the fact that even mean dogs have to sleep; they need no training for this. They have to lie down and when they do we let them lie. They do not seem mean at all as they snore and whimper in their dreams. It's somewhat dishonest of them but it does create a balance. And the fruit trees that seem to blossom and shed their fresh petals sloppily like pubescent adolescents, the rivers that swell like the veins of a runner in the final mile, the vines reaching, climbing, clinging to hillsides like so many toddlers to their mother's limbs.

So the animal and wild nature of emotions in me that want to fight or fly do know how to rest. The fears climbing my windpipes, the tears welling up could very well follow the cues of the seasons-which is really to say they respond to the sun and moon or the earth spinning quietly.
So I am turning the observing eye inward and becoming able to slow the pace of conversations and keep ballast in the torrent of confusion just a little.

I've read that it's possible to understand emotions and manage them-both mine and yours. They call this process emotional intelligence. I call it a miracle of the human condition. That I could face a fear or forgive a friend in spite of my instincts to cut losses, turn and run is quite a wondrous idea.
Let's not pretend it isn't.
In the daily mess of life we are expected to make these little miracles happen and then pretend they are not miracles because they are constant-what a sad sad life that would be!
Well, I'm not in junior high anymore which is to say, it's expected that I have a good deal of this intelligence at my disposal. But that doesn't make it any less miraculous.
So there you go, permission to expect the miracles-but also the hope that you will celebrate each one. Thank you.

chasing bullets

Spent the morning chasing bullets.
We know we aren't fast enough to stop them before they hit their mark.
So we followed them.

One of the bullets led us to the street corner where the man who caught it had crashed his truck. He had found his lost dog and then, together, they found two 16 year olds with a gun. When the boys threatened him he laughed and tried to take the gun. He wasn't able to get the gun, only the bullet and then he drove away, straight into a tree.

We followed one bullet to a grassy hill beside a gas station. We saw the cars on the highway speeding past us like a stampede out of town the same way they did on the day a three year old boy caught the bullet we were following. He had discovered his father's loaded gun under the seat of the car while waiting for his mother and auntie to shop at the quickie mart.

We followed another bullet to a vacant lot. The grass was just high enough to hide the litter. We stopped under a tall tree in what used to be a front yard. One of our group had seen smoke, not from the gun, but from the house fire lit by the man who had first set this bullet's course, then set his home ablaze.  His wife caught the bullet and so stayed in the house while it burned. We arrived too late, of course, to stop any of this from happening.

One bullet led us past the house where one of my friends is raising children, and a puppy. We crossed the street and stood on the lot where volunteers are planning a community garden.. We saw the signs of change. The yellow police tape is gone; neon pink tape marks the locations for raised beds. A shed has been erected in the alley where a man named Saul had caught up with some car thieves and the bullet from one of their guns.

And then it began to rain like a mother's tears. Our maps were sodden. We might have lost our way.

Before we gave up we hurried to follow another. It led us to a grove of trees proudly rising out of a well kept lawn sprinkled with tiny daisies, between the elementary school and a little church. One of the women with us explained that she had seen the gun that had shot the bullet we had followed here. She bravely recalled the young man leaning out of a car window, pointing the gun at her while he laughed. As she spoke, I marveled that her mind had finally found a way to wrap around the fact that she hadn't caught that bullet. A week later a teenager had caught that bullet between his shoulder blades as he ran toward the trees for shelter. And now, we had followed the story, followed the bullet. We stood between the very trees that might have saved his life had he reached them in time.

Why do some people catch the bullets and others only chase them?
I can't be sure.
But I know that I will continue to follow those I cannot catch. I know I will not ever be fast enough or brave enough to catch them but I will chase them. I sometimes hear them explode like fireworks in the middle of the night. Their sounds punctuate my dreams and when I wake I am filled with a kind of curious gratitude and wonder why. Even if we never find the bullets we chase and even though we hope no one will ever have to catch them, they are caught. They are caught and therein lies the great sadness that sets us on the journey toward answers for the hardest questions about death. I will follow the bullets because the routes they draw invite me into beautiful places of past loss, heroism, rage, courage, resilience. These are things we should follow closely so as not to lose track of them.

the photos I didn't take

We wouldn't dare take photos of the worst places.

The window ledge I leaned against when I denied you the pleasure of a forced apology.

The table that propped up a good many raw elbows as she leaned in, locked eyes with mine and told me she would never speak to him (never forgive him) as long as she lives. 

The couch we sat on when he compared me to a disloyal dog.

The way the light made a calculating slanted rectangle on the carpet as you explained, one last time, you were sorry, all the while knowing it was too little too late.

The view of the grand canyon from 30,000 feet and forces you to admit you are moving, as fast as you can, toward your life without her and the chasm below is a crack in the sidewalk compared to the one in your heart.

It would be a really upsetting slideshow.

So I don't take the photos of these places.

What I need you to see isn't in the picture anyway; it's in your heart, in your memory, in the space between us as the story unfolds.

I don't need photos; I need friends who listen as my words slowly paint the picture.

Here is where it gets good:

There are things afforded me that are not accessible to other minority women.

and one of them is this: a room full of educated white men (with plenty of other pressing obligations). and as if that isn't enough, they are listening, really listening. To me.

Not just shuffling a deck of photos but sitting down around the table, putting themselves in my place: in the seats where I sat as I lost my spiritual foothold, lost my self.

One of them climbed up in the pulpit and, at my request, crouched down a bit, to understand what it is like to be me in a box not unlike an upended coffin with a microphone for the dead.

Another one stood near the baptismal font and looked around slowly, "I want to be able to imagine her here," he said, maybe because it is hard to imagine someone with a nose ring and tattoos glowing under the red light of stained glass. I don't forget that I have physical characteristics of my womanhood that include markers of the time I have spent embedded in cultures that permanently alter my skin, poke holes in me, leave scars and some marks I have chosen. I don't forget that it can be a shock to see me approach the altar which is as much to say I don't forget to pray for those who feel as though I am creating a spectacle. 

I suspect, though, that this man in particular wants to imagine the kinds of glory and gore that I bring to the space without need, without malicious intent but simply because I am a woman and I am created to bring forth life-quite a messy business.

Is that what he saw? What he imagined?

Even though the superabundance of photographs is more real now than ever, there are pictures we refuse to take. There are images that create a blur on the lenses. Maybe we don't want them anyway. Maybe we don't need them. Tears render photographs useless.
There are moments I wish I could forget. I want to take the hands of the ghost of me and hold her palms to block my view when they replay in my mind's eye.

And then there are moments I wish I could go back to but no photograph will take me there.

So I have decided it is a good thing
there is a story and a song:
(just a word and a sound, really)
There is a line on my skin that you can trace with your finger tip
and the loose thread of my frayed soul that I would offer you
knowing that to pull it would unravel the whole.
There are feelings hidden leagues beneath rising to surface...
You know, all the stuff you see when your heart is brave enough to turn toward the sadness you cannot see with your eyes.

better prayers

In the event you should find an hypodermic needle in your pulpit you may consult the anglican book of prayer but there is not (yet) a specific prayer for such an occasion therein.

On the occasion you unwrap a gift from a lover... 15 years too late. Too late for what? To know you were loved so deeply? No. It is never too late for that. But there is no prayer for that.

In case you are having the hardest year of your life there is no prayer for that. Other than the tears or swears that seem to come too easily.

Or for the day when you think she said her first word, but you're not sure because, well, do babies really know how to say "Thank you?"

Is there a prayer other than, "O God. I'm not sure what any of this means. Help me figure this out"?

So I'm terribly distracted these days,
writing prayers better than the flare prayers from a sinking ship,
Setting intentions (you know, getting specific about the goals like "practice radical gratitude because logic isn't your style anyway" or "stop reading facial expressions through the lens of fear" or "notice birds-at least their songs-every day")

And I'm doing all this as though I were planning a funeral: mine as if it were yours. Worried that you will not go on without me. Narcissistic, I know. But I'm just being honest.
The funeral I'm thinking of is more a bon voyage party: you will go on this great journey without me.
You don't need me anyway, not nearly as much as I wish you did... and you surely don't need me if I'm not grateful or brave or noticing birds.
Setting intentions that way: knowing I am not all things to all people and sad about it.
since we're being honest.

In hopes of being useful,
I live a public life. It's not any weird thing (anymore) to make my thoughts public. In fact, I'm rather coming to depend on it. It's like sending messages in bottles... one word at a time. You'll have to compare notes with someone else if you aren't sure what exactly I'm trying to say.
I would have compared this to sending carrier pigeons but a small bird of prey was busy killing a pigeon in the alley behind our apartment when we left the house yesterday.
If only David Attenborough had been there to explain it to my inner five year old. He wasn't. I nearly tried to save the pigeon. Now all that is left is a scattering of feathers looking like someone tore up a love letter into bits.

So not like a carrier pigeon-endangered by hawk beaks.
Instead, already scattered, but not so much you can't understand what happened (maybe only what is happening).

That is how the prayers are coming and how the intentions are setting.
One word at a time.
and here is the catch:
the larger question is this, what do we do now?
Now that human frailty is more present in the pulpit.
Now that I am finally able to see I wasn't ready to be loved until now.
Now that babies are capable of gratitude.
Now that the words come one at a time and not just to me but from you.

what else can we do?
Even if you don't believe in prayer (how did you ever make it this far in this post?) you probably still roll your eyes (heavenward),
you probably mutter or hope or breathe

and I think that will do.
even if it isn't written, yet, those tiny acts change things. They can set things a right and set them afloat.
Maybe not me, maybe not you, but something. Maybe not ships or kings but words or air.
and just between us, that is all that is needed.

smooth the worry crease

Took a tiny paintbrush

To the baby’s face

Traced

her brows

to smooth the worry crease

Between

her eyes

as both

Followed like curious

eclipsed suns

surrounded by shattered blue skies

turning heavenward

It was just

(Like painting vines on a porcelain saucer

Or branches before they become twigs)

Only longer

Lasting.

The Baptism

I think I forgot to put this up... but if I didn't maybe it is a good idea to keep it close by... just to live with it, just in case.

The Baptism

I was born slowly and immediately

wrapped in the falling leaves of the wind-

not crying aloud,

merely breathing the first few clouds

in and out,

ferocious and bound forward-

the way the stone parts pieces of sky

before it breaks through the glass.

And this, my first word, is one word

for both of you:

(anger and hope)

at the same time.

You drank it in, tasted the salt in it and then

knew how to bathe me in it’s cold ambivalent blessing

I caught you looking down from the above just

as I shuttered in your arms and you tightened

to comfort me

Suddenly this way,

you spoke

to me,

wholly,

about me: the word dripping out between tears

-a fiery honey on my forehead

and in my mouth-

causes me to rise early and fly

-my breast ablaze with spring like the robin: curling

tones and toes-on the topmost branches of this risk

called home.