Embody me.
Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours
Father Richard invites us to know and honor ourselves and others in all our complexity:
For you who have loved Jesus, do you recognize that any God worthy of the name includes and transcends creeds and denominations, time and place, nations and ethnicities, and all the vagaries of gender and sexual orientation, extending to the limits of all we can see, suffer, and enjoy? We are not only our gender, our nationality, our ethnicity, our skin color, or our social class. These are not the qualities of our true self in God! Why, oh why, do we allow temporary costumes, or what Thomas Merton called the “false self,” to pass for the substantial self, the soul, which is always “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3)?
You are a child of God, and always will be, even when you don’t believe it. And so is everyone else! God created us all. We are all God’s children. [1]
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that social identifiers don’t make a difference in our lives. We must be in relationship with and value the “other” in all their individuality and uniqueness, before we can see ourselves as “one.”
God loves and creates each one of us as a unique being with different gifts and challenges. If we stay small and “hide our light” under a bushel basket, there is almost no place for God to move in, through, and with us for the sake of the world! [2]
Episcopal priest Elizabeth Edman recounts a story of challenging expectations as a child:
I was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas in 1962. The world I grew up in was defined by rigid binaries: white/black, capitalist/communist, north/south. Oh yeah, and male/female. That one didn’t work for this tomboy.
When I was five, I had to drag my mother into the boy’s section of the shoe store to look at sneakers. “Mama, c’mere! Let me show you the ones I want!”…
When I presented the shoes to the clerk, he said, “Those are boys’ shoes.”
My mother cut him off: “Yes, size four, please.”
My mother was a singer. Being who she was meant having the courage to witness God’s presence in the sacred music she loved. You could see her put her whole trust in God, entering into this space between heaven and earth where her best voice, her best self, emerged.
Christianity is all about being who you are. That’s what Jesus was trying to tell us: Orient your whole being to the sacred, he insisted. Not because I’m telling you to, not because it’s what Scripture demands; do it because it’s who you are. It’s who God created you to be. God made us to be complex creatures, every one of us, for a reason. So if you want to honor God, here’s the first step: Know who you are. Be who you are. Be the person God created you to be. Amen. [3]
References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Believe (Convergent Books, 2021), 36–37.
[2] Richard Rohr, “True Self and False Self,” Daily Meditation, October 24, 2019.
[3] Elizabeth M. Edman, video companion to the book Queer Virtue: What LGBTQ People Know About Life and Love and How It Can Revitalize Christianity (Beacon Press, 2016).
Image credit and inspiration: Beth Macdonald, untitled (detail), 2022, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. An estuary reveals a world that is more than just land or water, but something beyond them both.
Story from Our Community:
There is no manual for surviving what I’ve survived, but birds save me day after day…. While I’ve walked these bosque paths for years, I feel like the scales have fallen from my eyes now that I notice the birds. The calls I find so soothing actually drop my blood pressure and heart rate…. I long thought birding wasn’t for Black queer folks like me but … through studying history, I’ve learned the ways Black and Indigenous folks have long been in kinship with birds and their connection to the rhythms of the planet.
—Lazarus L.
