A Mystic's Journey

(A prologue to my upcoming Book, "Reflecting the Divine")

"First comes the fall, then the recovery from the fall, and both are the grace of God" — Julian of Norwich

I grew up in a fundamentalist Calvinist household. We went to church every Sunday and took the Bible very literally. My parents chose to home-school their 12 children, me being the eldest, in an attempt to shield us from outside influences: the works of Satan to draw away their children from Christ. Homosexuality was not just a choice but a deep sin, committed intentionally and shamelessly for years on end, setting it apart from many other sins.

Interestingly, I never heard about trans people until I was an adult, out of the home, and finished with homeschooling. As a child, I read the Bible cover to cover many times. This reading was a key part of my devotional routine. Yes, I even read the long lists of genealogies, searching for the little diamonds hidden in those arcane records. I constantly looked for myself in those pages. My favorite book of the Bible was always the Song of Solomon. As I read it, I could see myself in the Bride of Christ. Jesus became more than a friend. Through that book, he became a lover. In hindsight, my connection with the Bride of Christ despite my assigned gender was an expression of “transgender theology” before I even understood what being transgender meant.

We had a very literalist creationist perspective on Genesis, insisting that God created the world in 6 literal days, about 6000 years ago. At the same time, my father instilled in me a deep love for outer space. He gifted me a 10-inch telescope at the age of 12. I still have and use that telescope to this day. The unforgiving mathematics of stellar distance contrasted sharply with my fundamentalist education, as stars from the nearest galaxy, the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, fling their photons on journeys toward us that last around 25,000 years. I learned about Galileo, and how the church arrested him for suggesting heliocentrism. This sowed the seeds of a realization that would later challenge both my interpretation of the Bible and my understanding of God: the Bible could be wrong sometimes.

In my early 20s, all that tension rose to a crisis of faith that lasted several months. As I studied more about the origins of the New Testament, I became exposed to critical biblical scholarship for the first time. This included exposure to a prominent conservative theologian, N.T. Wright. Then, as I researched more about what my New Testament was actually saying, I found the work of critical Bible Scholar Dr. Bart Ehrman. These ideas challenged me to consider the complicated origins of the New Testament. I started to learn that these writers are often anonymous, the original manuscripts themselves are lost - totally patched together from fragments of texts that we’ve discovered. This exposure led me to question my strict literalist interpretations and, eventually, the very foundations of my faith.

My faith took on a more mystical quality right around then. I engaged in some extremely unusual forms of asceticism. I believe I adopted these practices from the Bible itself, as my denomination did not endorse acts of ascetic penance. These practices included fasting from all food and drink for 3 days at a time, wallowing in mud late on rainy nights, and adorning myself with ashes—all in an attempt to convince God to show me Themself unmistakably somehow. I was met with silence.

That silence was deafening, and all but confirmed for me that God wasn’t there. Then, I picked up "The Dark Night of the Soul" by St. John of the Cross. I don’t remember how that book came into my life. After reading his descriptions of profound spiritual dryness, I came to learn that what I was experiencing was this dark night. I also decided it was time to let go of God entirely. I trusted that if God were real and loved me, I could not help but find my way back.

Then, this decision started a 10-year hiatus from anything related to any religion. As I learned more about the flaws in my fundamentalist upbringing, I became severely disillusioned with spirituality altogether. This disillusionment made me want to throw the whole thing away. This period of spiritual dryness looked like a complete and utter rejection of all Christian Theology. I spoke of Christianity disparagingly in almost any context. I threw away and burned all my bibles, theological books and the journals I had written over the years. While I had a strong inclination to hate it, I still secretly harbored a simultaneous inclination to love it. I even desperately missed it. It had shaped me after all, whether I liked it or not.

During that distance, I felt many things. I felt jaded towards God, my community, and my parents, feeling abandoned by them. I also felt the weight of sin and guilt lift off my shoulders. That loss of a sense of sinfulness was when I could, for the first time in my life, figure out why I longed to look feminine, why I was drawn to femininity, and the femininity I saw in myself. It was no longer a sin to have these thoughts. I started by dressing quite provocatively: a half-shaved head with long hair streaming down the other side, a killer handlebar mustache, and a cute pink A-line dress that I had found at the local thrift store. Then a friend of mine transitioned. My exploration of gender, which was very much my own, suddenly had a mirror in the world. I remember thinking, "You can just do that?" I was too scared to come out yet, due to pressures at work and in relationships. Still, I held on to hope.

During this time of rejecting my faith, I discovered the freedom to explore my gender identity without the moral constraints or the scrutiny of religious doctrine. My understanding of sinfulness, deeply ingrained in the 'symbol system' of my youth, prevented me from safely integrating my gender identity with my spirituality. This period was marked by immense difficulty, including repeated rejections from my community, homelessness, and isolation. Surviving my transition was a harrowing experience; its aftermath thrust me into situations more perilous than I could have imagined. My spirituality, once a cornerstone of my existence, became a relic of the past, overshadowed and abandoned in my quest for personal truth. Yet, like a dormant seed, it persisted subtly beneath the surface. Despite my resentment towards Christianity for its condemnation of my gender and sexuality, a deep-seated affection for the divine endured, overshadowing any residual shame or the haunting notion that I had 'lived in sin.'

As I began hormone treatment and my body started to change, the people I surrounded myself with became a supportive community. They accepted me for who I was and gave me the strength to discover myself when I needed it. Around this time, I had a profound vision that symbolized my journey. I dreamt of all my friends standing around me, bare-breasted, with crowns of silver with nature motifs. One of them led me to a closet, inside which lay a baby, lifeless, with a gash in its side. Gently, I picked up the baby, its soft eyelids closed in eternal rest. Following my friend’s instruction, I produced milk from my breast, spitting it into the baby's wound. Miraculously, the gash healed, and the baby stirred back to life. My friend revealed to me that the baby symbolized my own being, suggesting a rebirth or renewal within myself. At the time, I didn’t realize this was my first vision, marking the beginning of a profound spiritual metamorphosis alongside my bodily changes.

At the end of this 10-year hiatus, I found God in an Ojibwe two-spirit sweat lodge. This is a ceremony and sacred space where people, particularly gender-non-conforming people, can commune with each other, the ancestors and spirits. What happened there was subtle, but profoundly moving in a way that I couldn’t name. It started a secret but earnest exploration of religions, to see if anything spoke to me, but nothing did. I looked into the practices of the Blackfeet tribe, the only tribe I have any familial ties to, having been all but erased by the more traditional Christian attitudes in the family. I looked into Judaism, Buddhism, and New Age spirituality, and none of them seemed to stir anything within me.

One day, my Ojibwe friend said to their Cherokee friend, "You need to find the practices and symbols of your own people; they will mean more to you." That stopped me in my tracks. The symbols and practices of my people were Christianity. That was a hard pill to swallow, given my personal history, and Christianity’s history of oppressing and marginalizing transgender people like me to this day. Still one question sat in my mind like a rock in a shoe. Could I still relate to Jesus? Could God love me as Rose? I began my search for a new Christianity in earnest.

I started by looking up related works to St. John of the Cross and quickly came across Julian of Norwich. She stood out to me as reflecting God's love in such a full and accessible way. In one of Julian's visions, Jesus transcends gender, embodying the role of a mother loving her children, a concept that resonated deeply with me as a trans woman. One late night on a drive, this culminated in a vision of the infinite ocean of the love of God. That was finally the answer to the prayers I had begged God to answer 10 years prior. I felt God, unmistakably, inexplicably, and ecstatically. I was so thankful. And God didn't wait for me to detransition. God came to me as I was.

In my life, Scripture was wielded at me like a sword pointed at a cornered animal. It pretty much made me want to throw the whole thing away. Reclaiming the Bible has been like taking that sword out of the hands of pastors and parents. I point it back in their faces to say, "How dare you." I hope that other transgender Christians can glean something from the inner work that I have done to make faith my own. This is despite the loud voices that say I'm an illegitimate Christian or an illegitimate woman. It's very much a work of frustration, love, and rebuilding my own sense of relationship to Jesus.