Month: November 2018

This week a group of us from Pilgrimage United Church of Christ (PUCC) went to the 20th Transgender Day of Remembrance ceremony in Atlanta. Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) is an observance every year on November 20 that honors the memory of those whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence. We went to pay respect and to support two of our members, Monica and Darlene. Darlene organized the ceremony and is a strong presence in Atlanta’s transgender community. Her wife Monica is a Navy Vet who served on a submarine. Monica is extremely proud to be a veteran. She wore her USN cap when she was recognized at Atlanta Braves games–and when she was an Atlanta Pride Parade Grand Marshall this year. Monica designed the Transgender flag, below. The original is in the Smithsonian in D.C.

The first thing you should know is trans people are murdered, and when they are, they are victims of trans-related hate crimes.

These are persons who often leave homes so that they can live their true identities, their true selves, often at great cost to themselves. And when they die, as I learned at the Atlanta observance, that identity is stripped away from them. How? Families, obituaries, police reports, newspapers refer to them by their “dead names,” their name before transition. What difference does that make? Well, after having fought so hard for true self, dead naming erases that self in a final, crushing blow. Still not clear? Ok, when cis-people (those of us whose gender identity matches the one we were assigned at birth–e.g., I am a woman, who was assigned female at birth) drop dead in a parking lot, our drivers license matches our reality–both our name and our gender would be the same. The paper reports that “Ugena, female, 55, Marietta” was found, etc., etc. If I have been living my true self as Eugene for the last decade or so, guess what? The paper would probably still report Ugena’s death. My funeral service–if my family were not too ashamed to have one–would be a farewell to Ugena. Would anyone remember Eugene? Would anyone notice or mourn me? That is what TDOR is for–to remember and remind us why it is important to remember.

The Transgender Day of Remembrance seeks to highlight the losses we face due to anti-transgender bigotry and violence. I am no stranger to the need to fight for our rights, and the right to simply exist is first and foremost. With so many seeking to erase transgender people — sometimes in the most brutal ways possible — it is vitally important that those we lose are remembered, and that we continue to fight for justice.”
– Transgender Day of Remembrance founder Gwendolyn Ann Smith

The TDOR service is, as are most funerals really, for the living. For members of the transgender community, it provides critical space for both joy and lament, laughter and tears–that for all the struggle and turmoil and oppression, they live. Not just live, but prevail. As an outsider–an ally but still an outsider–I observed these persons comfort and lift one another up. Those of us there as friends, family, and allies needed to see the strength and vibrance of a community that asks only a life of liberty, justice, and dignity. We needed to laugh and break bread together–which we did Atlanta style with Fox Brothers Barbecue. When you think about it, there are a few times in life that an opportunity for justice, hospitality, and compassion–an “integrity moment”–taps you on the shoulder. This is one of them.

Every Transgender Day of Remembrance observance concludes with a Reading of Names to honor each victim (that’s the word used at the GLAAD TDOR link). This was done, followed by a tolling of the bell, for each of the twenty-five U.S. dead and for the unnamed trans people who died violently while incarcerated. Here are their names, and if you scroll to the end of this post, there is a screenshot of the TDOR program with their photos.

• Brooklyn BreYanna Stevenson
• Rhiannon Layendecker
• Christa Leigh Steel-Knudslien
• Viccky Gutierrez
• Celine Walker
• Tonya Harvey
• Zakaria Fry
• Phylicia Mitchell
• Amia Tyrae Berryman
• Sasha Wall
• Carla Patricia Flores-Pavon
• Nicole Hall
• Nino Fortson
• Gigi Pierce
• Antash’a English
• Diamond Stephens
• Keisha Wells
• Cathalina Christina James
• Sasha Garden
• Vontashia Bell
• Dejanay Stanton
• Shantee Tucker
• Londonn Moore
• Nikki Enriquez
• Ciara Minaj Carter Frazier
• Those Unnamed

Another of the photos below shows the number of deaths by state. Georgia has one: Nino Fortson was killed in Atlanta on May 13. Here is a description of Nino from the HRC web site:

Fortson, 36, also went by names Nino Starr and Nino Blahnik, and was a gender-expansive individual…An active participant in Atlanta’s ballroom scene, Fortson was a member of the House of Blahnik, a national organization serving LGBTQ performers of color. Fortson was known for walking in the “Butch Realness” category.

A “gender expansive individual”–I wonder why it is that more of us don’t understand this as a gift, or a superpower? The last photo shows the number of known violent deaths of transgender persons, worldwide. There are 309. The U.S. ranks third. I would really like to live in a world where we don’t need to have another TDOR, but sadly, we seem to be moving in the other direction. Step back and think about why there is such a violent need to legislate gender. I can’t think of a reason. Yet, see articles like this one and look up #WontBeErased:

Trump’s Anti Transgender Push: 6 Things to Know

I’m finding whenever it gets really discouraging to contemplate how humanity treats one another, it is helpful to turn to Mister Rogers and Dr. Seuss. Ever since Tuesday evening, I’ve been thinking of an elephant named Horton, who heard a small noise.

“Mr. Mayor! Mr. Mayor!” Horton called. “Mr. Mayor! You’ve got to prove now that you really are there! So call a big meeting. Get everyone out. Make every Who holler! Make every Who shout! Make every Who scream! If you don’t, every Who is going to end up in a beezle-nut stew!”

And, down on the dust speck, the scared little mayor quickly called a big meeting in Who-ville Town Square. And his people cried loudly. They cried out in fear:

“We are here! We are here! We are here! We are here!”

“Because a person’s a person, no matter how small.” We will remember.

Here is the feature article in Project Q:

LGBTQ Atlanta honors victims of anti-trans violence at annual vigil

 

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

This is a place for peaceful contemplation inspired by story. What is spiritual mindfulness? For me, it is remembering to feed my spirit. This blog is a spiritual practice~~storying the soul, if you will. Most sites I find on either one of these topics focuses on meditative and wellness practices. Maybe that’s what you are expecting here. I hope you’ll be pleasantly surprised as instead you find a narrative approach to exploring spirituality, mindful of the everyday. That’s what I do–I write. For almost two decades I dedicated my time and energies (a lot of mental energy, i.e. worry) to academic writing. Here’s how I did it: I would write my narrative essays about place, religion, gender, sexuality, white privilege, etc., and then cite the requisite sources (that’s the academic part). But a funny thing kept happening. People would approach me after a panel presentation and say, “You know, you really ought to write a book with just your stories.” Which is exactly what I wanted to be doing. The problem is, I am an academic; thus, the academic writing.  This is a period of discernment and transformation in my life. Of course, that’s part of what you’ll find here too. I started to seminary and had to make some life choices. One was to step back from academic writing and do the kind of writing I really do enjoy–and that’s what you are reading now. I invite you to come along on my journey as I nourish my own spirit through story telling, being mindful of every, every minute, as Emily in Our Town would say. It is my hope that my stories offer you nourishment of some kind too.  The writing here comes from observations that dawn on me as I go about living life with as much intentionality as I can muster. That’s the mindfulness part. What makes it spiritual? Well, that’s the part of me where the words come from—the part that hopes to connect us to, as Paul Tillich would put it, the ground of our being. One.

Yesterday I was reminded by two different folks of my blog, which is the first item put on hold when life gets really busy. Blog writing–reflective essays, really–is my favorite kind of writing, and I always mean to do better about not neglecting it. If I could do this for a living, I believe I would. So here’s something for today.

When I opened the page to start an entry, I found the following two paragraphs that I had begun last year. Let me tell you, I was in a really different place then than I am now, so it is not the same entry I would do today. Still, as I read it, I thought it was important to show the contrast and reflect on that for a minute. The original title was Minding Mortality. I felt like that needed to change too, so I changed it slightly as you can see.

One unexpected realization of practicing mindfulness has been that I am more mindful now of my own mortality. That’s probably due to my coming to the practice at this particular age; I’m fifty-five. I used to tell people that weight, not age, was my worrisome number. There have seldom been days in my life when I did not think about how much I weigh. Still do. I am happy to report that with the discernment that has come with getting older–and with having a generous life-partner–I now have a more peace-full relationship with my body. I have healthier reasons for wanting there to be less of me. But, age. I didn’t mind turning 50; in fact, I was proud that I didn’t mind. I was traveling, meeting people, enjoying life. That year I had an extended episode of cognitive dissonance–a mid-life crisis, if you will–about the meaning of life. Not just “the meaning of life,” but the meaning of my life. That is why the title of this blog is so important to me. It indicates a moment at the crossroads when focused, deliberate thinking was imperative. I remember distinctly the day when I took a different path that led to here. I didn’t know then that it had to do with thinking about mortality, but I see now that it does. If I had been content that my life had been meaningfully well spent, the dissonance would have been a lot less jarring.

Three years later, at fifty-three, I began grappling with the awareness of not having as many years left as I have lived. I started expressing my consciousness of it in small ways at first~making joking references to being put in a nursing home by my kids as my parents had done. Confirming my beneficiaries. Then one day I told Sarah that I would really like to get a diy project done so that I could enjoy it before I was dead. And it wasn’t a figure of speech. 

So that was last year. Since then, some imbalances have righted themselves after a good deal of grieving, and I had a bit of re-adjusting to life to do. Once again, I felt like I was emerging from a cocoon to a new day of opportunity that beamed the question, Who do you want to be? Except this time, the question was not out there alone in the universe for me to orchestrate a response to it. The question that settled on me like a warm sweater is, Who does God want me to be? I gotta tell you–when a question like this is put in the way it was put to me–well, I commenced to find the answer. Trust me, I’ll work through more of it here; the way the path opened up is, at least to me, fascinating–sometimes a little scary.

What is a good ending for the post from a year ago? As with most things, age and one’s location on the continuum of birth-to-death depends on how you frame it. And for me, it’s the difference between the two questions, above. Lived for myself, each day, each week, each month would be “one less.” On the other hand, resting–existing, thriving, living–in what Marcus Borg might call the more-ness of God illuminates the moreness of life.

For Tracy. Remember:
Marty Robbins The Master’s Call