“Let us begin where Quakers claim to be most comfortable when tackling
difficult questions – with our own personal spiritual experience. Quaker discussions traditionally start from
this point, or are recalled to it if the discussion seems to be losing its
way.”
–
Margaret Heathfield, Swarthmore Lecture 1994
When I think about the word discernment, I realize it is a
shiny new word for me. Previously, I
might have used decide or choose to describe this process of
uncertainty. Now, when I use discernment
as a process, I realize I am looking at the nuances; the subtle ways in which I
am tempted to approve of one over the other because someone, or something, once
told me it was better.
This process of choosing often has subtle emotional
implications. I try to sense a nudge to
choose one over the other because someone somewhere once felt pain or joy in
relationship to it. I want people to heal
and to feel loved. Other times, I am
jealous, angry, or insecure. Choosing
one over the other would release some ache in me or in someone I love.
Difficult decisions often come to me in community with
others. I want to feel connected to and
approved of by all. Because this seems
an insurmountable task, I pass through moments of fear, exhaustion, suspicion,
self-preservation, and a hunger for perfection. Remaining
open to the possibilities of that surprisingly good feeling that comes from
unanimous decision-making is something I return to again and again in difficult
moments. It is a physical memory, like the
feeling of being hugged by someone I love.
 |
Target Practice, acrylic on wood,
7/2014 by Glee |
Occasionally, I am given the gift of community discernment
that leaves me transformed.
Recently, my
Quaker community in Portland found ourselves deciding to either honor the right
to free speech of the Radfems group, who has openly denounced the rights of
transgendered women to seek refuge under the umbrella of anti-patriarchal
activism. Or to cancel the space rental of their
conference entitled Radfems Respond, intended to bring peace to the conflict
between their movement and transgendered activists. Radfems want to move toward a world without
gender discrimination, but due to its overt invalidation of the transgendered
experience in America, it clearly falls under the description of a hate group
by Southern Poverty Law center.
Our community did not come to unity as to whether we should
cancel the proposed conference, but it was cancelled after members of our own
body of Friends (Quakers) came to share personal stories of the pain they have
experienced as a result of the Radfems activist work with sex workers and an
urgent environmental movement advocating force.
Here is an excerpt from a petition written by an attender at our
meeting:
As Quakers and transgender activists, we are calling upon you, a
community dedicated to peace and non-violence, to cancel the Radfems Respond
conference. Radical Feminists are a hateful group, increasingly defining
themselves by their hatred of trans people as this stance becomes less and less
acceptable in mainstream feminist dialogue. By allowing this group to use
Meeting space, you are choosing to alienate trans people and be complicit in the
violence against them.
Both views have the potential to bring our world into a
place of healing unity, at least as a theological/paradigmatic change. As a
Friend, I believe humans can accomplish deep and lasting peace among all beings
by using non-violent means. I also
believe in the right to free speech, even if what one is saying is hurtful and
wrong. If we can’t learn to listen,
their silence may become violence.
Dialogue is essential.
 |
Forever Free, acrylic on wood
7/2014 by Glee |
During the above mentioned discernment process, I was left
feeling that there was potential for a charismatic leader to influence a group
of people seeking a vision of utopia (equality and acceptance) by doing away
with individuals who do not fit into, and perhaps even invalidate the premise
of, the vision of the movement. In this
case, it is the leaders of the Radfems. I was surprised, at the end of this
process, to hear that many individuals in our Friends community were not in
favor of the cancellation. I did not
feel that good feeling of unifying
community discernment. Instead, I felt
the ache of uncertainty and divide. Somehow,
I had to go back to my work co-clerking a planning committee of a Quaker
Women’s Theology Conference taking place just a month later. I had just returned from attending the first
ever women only 13 Indigenous Grandmother’s event, carrying a message of peace
beyond factions and environmental healing of the Earth. Even though these two groups were open to
transgendered women, how could I move forward carrying the weight of
exclusivity?
This began my process of discernment.
It is difficult to know where or when this story begins. I’m forty-three years old and I can’t recall
the moment in my life when I decided, chose, or discerned my gender. As a child, what I did and how I acted seemed
separate from the esteemed title of “girl”.
How others treated me seemed directly related to their perception of my
lowly assigned condition of being a “girl”. (Note that putting quotes around
something, my six year old pointed out to me recently, is an indication of
falsehood. In this case, however, quotes
are being used like an agnostic would put quotes around “God”, as if ascribing
truth to a word would indicate certainty in the heart of the author.)
The inner knowing I understood in me differed
from what others perceived. So often, as
a child, there were no words given to describe this condition. I think language is powerfully disempowering
in this way for children.
My friend is
learning Russian and was baffled by the omission by his teachers, thus far, of
the word for fire. He’d learned air, water, tree, and things
like this, but the one word he needs to describe the movement of Spirit in him
was not yet available. I am left
wondering about the overt disempowerment I experienced through the language and
culture in which I was raised.
I recall very clearly the moments when I re-awakened to the
external perceptions and treatment of my unfortunate title of “girl” and then
“woman”. It is the implicit
categorization according to the title I carried that differed from my inner
knowing. To describe my inner knowing
would have involved something that feels like arguing without words.
So, wordlessly, I came to associate with the sensitive
nature of the frog. I could find my true
self in the life of an amphibian, in its effortless movement from one world to
another. It gave me so much joy, to know
that a frog knows how I feel, and that I had a kinship with the non-human
world. I could not become a frog, but I
could feel like one.
 |
New Beginning, acrylic on wood, 7/2014
by Glee |
I have a visceral memory of the times I re-awakened to the
condition of my body and of my learned vulnerability as female in my culture.
I knew I was the meat into which the fork and
knife were to pierce. I knew I was the
creature who would be consumed. It was
only a question of when my weakness would become noticeable. I was aware, in those moments of my place in
the hierarchy of life. I didn’t feel
weak, though. I felt invincible. I felt free to love and to be loved. But, the more I lived into my power and
strength, the harder it was to move up.
The conflicting stories I heard about my body were tearing
me apart. I was afraid. I felt like my body was going to be separated
from its power and strength if I were raped.
The stories the women around me were telling me were about loosing their
souls. They were telling me about being
separated from their bodies through violence an disregard and that they were no
longer whole.
I carried their anger,
sadness, and separation. I wanted to
unite us all with our bodies again. It
almost seemed as if there had been a larger, more devastating separation, the
great separation between male and female, masculine and feminine.
To me, it was a matter of science and evolution. A trained anthropologist, I had become
enthralled with knowledge of sexual selection, and of Lucy, the missing
link. I memorized the description of her
pelvis, her smaller body, and her upright posture. I had been introduced to feminist
anthropology, the assertion that female anthropologists were privy to a
different perception of the culture being studied simply by virtue of their
gender. It had become apparent to ethnographers
that male anthropologists were not allowed into female spaces and therefore had
a skewed view of the culture. So, now anthropologists
had to sort through gender and perception.
This also meant that we, as outsiders, could describe our own divide by
observing and recording other cultures. How
confusing! No matter how hard we try to become a fly on the wall of
understanding, we are still imprisoned by our gender identity.
All of this describing through science wasn’t helping me
heal this great separation in which I found myself very personally
involved. I suddenly knew what I didn’t
know. I felt I could never know how it
feels to be a man and that I would always be excluded from knowing. I had learned to pull things apart, to
categorize and to describe. I had
learned to categorize myself as female.
This felt like a process of rationalization.
So, I returned to my inner knowing, because, after all, it
had been the only constant from my earliest memory. What was it, I wondered, after so much
hardship in my female body, that made me wake up each day with renewed vigor to
continue a search for truth and wholeness?
I laid out in the back yard to sleep one summer night and
woke up at three in the morning. Looking
up into the clear California star-filled-sky, I had the overwhelming sense that
I was not alone. It was more than a
sense of being in the presence of something greater than myself. It was a feeling that I had become the Earth
and everyone on Earth, and that I was witnessing as all of humanity, that we
are not alone in the universe. Beyond
that, I felt that my body is never separate from the whole. I was so excited, so overjoyed at this
news. I have no idea how long I laid
there enveloped in this certainty.
I live in Portland, now.
I am a member of the Religious Society of Friends, where I feel
validated and loved.
I am married and
have two children.
As I sit on my porch,
writing, I hear a newborn baby crying and my body becomes alert.
I remember feeling the milk in my breasts
drop when my babies were hungry.
I see
the mother and a baby come down the street and sit down under the old oak tree
on the lawn of the vacant house across the street.
The mother pulls the baby from its pouch and
begins to nurse.
The baby quiets for a
time.
I cry with relief that I live in a
neighborhood where a mother can do this.
Where a body is a gift to life and life a gift to the body, and it is a
choice to bring life.
Even more, I feel
it is possible that this mother has a symbiotic relationship with this child
and with another who is co-conspiring with them to walk through life
together.
My hope is that they will all
have a relationship free of inequality.
 |
| My Rainbow Flag, 7/2014, by Glee |
I need a word, now, for the experience the nursing mother is
having that is so much a part of my own experience, both painful and
beautiful. The ability to share this
common experience feels like compassion. As they sit now, a calm baby in the arms of the holder, I see between us
the rainbow flag my kids and I bought and put on our house two weeks ago. I am happy to live in a state where this flag
can mean tolerance and the power of love.
I feel as if I have finally pushed past the black and white of pigments
and moved into the full spectrum of light.
I am reminded of the description, heard on Radiolab (
http://www.radiolab.org/story/211119-colors/),
by the first people to realize that a crystal is splitting light to reveal its
whole spectrum and not that the crystal was transforming it into something
new.
Yes, this perception makes a big
difference.
The crystal, for me, is
science, the search for truth, the need to see more.
The light is what I am looking with.
Without light, I could not see.
Now, the person nursing the baby is gone and I am left with
my soft belly, changed breasts, warm softness, and the frogs to define my
gender experience of forty-three years.
The hope I find in this experience is the possibility of symbiotic
relationships between masculine and feminine.
I learned about symbiosis in high school. I remember the moment I got it. I walked around
trying to change my perception of moss, lichen, and bacteria. Thirty-eight years later, I realize that my
entire experience as a being is
symbiosis with all living things and maybe even the Earth, and that nothing exists
separately from anything else.
I imagine how it might feel to bring the inner knowing
together with the way one is perceived externally. This seems like a spiritual experience.
The question is whether it is the effort of the person to express the
truth, though there are not words for it?
Or whether it is the effort of the observer to allow the true colors of the inner knowing to emerge?
I want to say something here about the quandary of gender
and of the gifts I have received from the notion of gender. Healing from the great gender divide somehow
requires a battle in the United States, one of balancing power and expressing
our pain. I have come to this after two
years of searching for a way to describe spirituality beyond the gender divide,
even looking for a way to balance the damage already done, especially in
Christianity. I felt deep healing when I
found myself in women only gatherings, recently a Quaker women’s gathering and a
first ever women only Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers gathering, where
kindness and compassion toward the men in our lives was encouraged. I learned that women have to live the kind of
power we would like to see in the world. Why was I learning ways beyond
violence in circles of women? What do we
gain from separating ourselves from men?
I feel that if we humans can return to a symbiotic
relationship of rainbow genders, we may be able to see a new paradigm, the
paradigm of those who cross over.
Last week, in deep silence with Quakers (Religious Society
of Friends), I came fully into a different paradigm. It was one of awe and gratitude for those who
cross over. I understood those who have braved
the great divides, those of color, gender, disability, age, sexuality, culture,
religion, and more. If not for these
brave souls who can choose no other way but to leap across the abyss of our
categories, titles, and external perceptions, we may never realize that the
rainbow is none other than the light that allows us to see.
How can we let the light heal us from our separations?
Learn More:
The mission of the San Francisco
Trans March is "to inspire all trans and gender non-conforming people to
realize a world where we are safe, loved, and empowered. We strive to create a
space for our diverse communities to unite and achieve the social justice and
equality that each of us deserves."[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_March
“A few weeks ago, I was reading Eleanor
Roosevelt's "Tomorrow Is Now,"
which was recently reissued by Allida Black,
a mentor and former college professor. President Bill Clinton and Dr. Black
wrote in its introduction how it was one of ER's most important books. While I
was reading it, I was blown away that half a century after her death, she still
has the power to speak to the challenges of a dangerous and uncertain world.
"Learning to be at home in the world,"
she writes, "is, I believe, the surest way we have of reducing our fears.
For fear, after all, is too often fear of one's inadequacy in the face of the
unknown."
If we care enough, we can give ourselves
permission to journey into the shoes and lives of others we don't understand.
You choose the language and identity that you are most comfortable speaking:
"I'm queer, Muslim, Christian, Iranian, American, South African, straight,
trans, male, female, black, white..." it really doesn't matter. What
matters is that underneath these identities and within these beliefs is a real
intention to "be at home" in the world.
"[We] must learn to live with other
people," ER writes. "If [we] are going to belong to a world society
[we] must be trained to cope with it, neither to follow nor to dominate, but to
cooperate as mutually self-respecting human begins."
