By ordinary human standards not many [who have joined the church] are wise, not many are powerful, not many are from the upper class.
But God chose what the world considers foolish to shame the wise. God chose what the world considers weak to shame the strong. And God chose what the world considers low-class and low-life — what is considered to be nothing — to reduce what is considered to be something to nothing. - vv. 26-28
I am again struck by the queerness woven into the Church’s very foundations.
To queer as a verb is to constantly question and subvert The Way Things Are — in other words, to declare the world’s wisdom, its status quo, foolishness, uplifting instead what the world considers foolish, weak, “low-life”!
Queer God, Jesus Christ, attune our hearts and minds
to the foolishness of your cross.
We will celebrate the holiness, find the sacred wisdom in
the parts of ourselves we’ve been taught are shameful.
We will scoff at so-called “powers” of wealth and domination
in favor of the power in softness, solidarity, and compassion.
We will seek out the outcasts, the outlaws, the overlooked
and in so doing, find you.
The rising flood of anti-trans messaging, legislation, and violence has me floundering in grief, rage, fear, hopelessness…but still, still I thank God for making me trans.
I thank God for the unique insights, particular ways to participate in my own creation, and beautiful community that my transness opens me up to.
I thank God for the incredible diversity of those She made in Her image — how only all together does humanity come close to mirroring the infinite vastness of the Divine.
I thank God for all who join in solidarity with the trans community.
We are not alone.
We cannot be legislated out of existence.
We have always been here, we will always will be here, and we are holy 🏳️⚧️
Dionysus was born from the womb of a woman that had loved a man who’d left, with wide eyes and a curious tongue peeking from between pink lips. Curious she was at first, and curious he became with age, then they learned to give as much as they took, to become everything and nothing all the same.
She first learned the taste of smoke in the foster home, along with the sounds of love and pain that money could buy. The mothers used to put her in the corner to play while they shared a cone of bittersweet herbs at the window. Then, down in the streets, she learned the shouts and the taste of candy – her nails grew sharp but the sweetness never left her tongue.
Then came school. It wasn’t easy at first, children were curious, but they weren’t curious like her. They prodded and poked and giggled when things were in place they thought they weren’t supposed to be. She learned the difference between the him and the her in that school, learned what the walls had never hidden at the house. The mothers didn’t care, after all, bodies were bodies – only the touching changed.
He put the her on the side during a cold winter night, and put a him in her place.
The next summer, kids played in the park at sunset with sweat gleaming down their backs and dampening their hair. They were bright and wild and so vivid, he followed them everywhere they went, drank every breath of life and youth on the edge of their laughter. One night, they poured beverages like amber in a can for him when it was dark and warm and humid, and he learned to like the taste of it too.
At the house, the mothers drank from fine glasses of red, and they said why not share with him after all? Isn’’t he old enough?
Youth didn’t linger in these places, but neither did innocence.
The first kiss he received, he cherished it like a treasure, like the sweetness of the candy and the heady taste of the ambers. The boy was shy and in love, later the girls were the same, just like the other boys were. He wondered where he fit between them, though, their shapes were clear and beautiful even though they weren’t finished just yet but he – he wasn’t like them.
His edges were blurry, her mouth was too thin, their face didn’t match, their hair was too long, too short too red or blue or black or golden. Her waist was too small, too wide, too thick, too skinny, but his legs were too long, too strong, or not enough. When it wasn’t his body it was his mind – why don’t you like dresses? why do you wear make-up? why don’t you close your legs? why do you paint your nails? – it didn’t have an end, and he wondered, and she suffered, and then they gave up.
Now Dionysus is everything and nothing at once, she laughs and he dances and they kiss the lips of those worthy of their love through the taste of smoke and the sweetness of alcohol on both hair and skin.
At night, when the party is loud and wild, children ask why, and he smiles. They ask again – they’re young, small, never cease to be children with starlight in their eyes and wonder at the edge of their lips. They ask and he laughs because it’s not about the wine, not about the fizz, not about the warmth, not about the feeling, not about the freedom – he doesn’t care, and that’s why.
Careless he is, careless she lives, and carless they drink to commune with the stars. Careless seems like a word for fools, for children, for idiots, but she isn’t a fool, he isn’t a child, they aren’t stupid – they’re careless, they’re alive.
"God of Many Faces," a queer hymn from
Songs for the Holy Other (2020)
By Amy Cerniglia, set to the tune of "Be Thou My Vision"
God of many faces, we offer our praise,
singing your glory through all of our days,
Hear ever-growing voices, once fragile, now strong
carrying melodies in expansive new songs.
God of many genders, our world reflects you,
sunrise and sunset uniting our hues
woven into a city with jewels of all shades,
houses of ruby and walls rowed with jade.
God of many names, we invite you to show
us the new names that reflect our true souls.
Breathe your Holy Spirit to give us the Word
that will in-dwell dry bones, granting new life once heard.
God of many bodies, abide within ours,
shifting more each day through time and through scars.
Come sanctify our bodies, all fashioned by you,
holier every day, still becoming more true.
Madre Juana de la Cruz: a 16th century nun who lived & preached gender-fluidity for humans & for God
During an era infamous for its severe measures against any hint of unorthodoxy, one 16th-century nun managed not only to write about but actually preach sermons on how God — and human beings, as made in the Divine image — both encapsulates and transcends gender.
Madre Juana de la Cruz (1481-1534; note, this is a different figure than the probably more famous & also queer Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz) believed that every person contains both feminine and masculine attributes within themselves; that God the Father and God the Son are pregnant with one another; that Christ comes to us in many forms, be it husband or wife, father or mother, brother or friend; and so much more than I can fit in this post.
I’ll include sources for further reading at the end, but for now, let’s start with Juana’s personal experience of gender.
A PRENATAL TRANSITION
According to her own testimony, Madre Juana experienced a transition in the womb: “God was already forming a male child when the Virgin Mary intervened. Needing a woman who would eventually reform a convent dedicated to her, the Virgin persuaded God to mould the embryonic Juana into a female instead” (Elphick, p. 94).
Surely enough, Juana was assigned female at birth — however, as an adult she had a prominent Adam’s apple and was able to pitch her voice very deep. She would point to her throat as a sign of the miracle of her pre-birth transition.
Many scholars find a parallel here to transgender experience; I believe this story may also resonate with intersex persons, who often naturally develop secondary sexual characteristics that society does not assign to the same binary category as the sex they were assigned at birth.
I can imagine a teenage Juana, upon developing an Adam’s apple and finding her voice lowering in a way her world considered masculine, musing on why such a change was happening to her — and envisioning that prenatal transition to conclude that God simply made her that way. She came to understand her Adam’s apple not as monstrous, but miraculous!
Both trans and intersex persons can be uplifted by Juana’s affirmation that existing outside of binary sex & gender expectations is holy. As Kevin Elphick puts it in his 2021 article “Juana de la Cruz: Gender-Transcendent Prophetess”:
“Mother Juana de la Cruz (d. 1534) offers a medieval model for modern LGBTQ people, exemplifying radical authenticity to the queer and holy truth of her own identity. Juana’s gender combined masculinity and femininity, and she proclaimed the presence of God she found inherent in that identity. Her sermons invited her listeners, too, to discover God in their own experiences of gender” (Elphick, p. 87).
[ID: an icon of Madre Juana by Lewis Williams. Juana wears the brown robes, knotted belt, and habit of a Franciscan, with a halo behind her head. She holds a brown hen in the crook of one arm, which symbolizes St. Francis; with her other hand she points towards her throat. / end id]
FURTHER TRANSITIONS
Her prenatal transition is not the only time Juana experienced gender fluidly: her call story also involves shifting between genders. One day as she prayed before a picture of St. Veronica, Juana witnessed Veronica’s face miraculously shift into that of Jesus. Jesus proposed marriage to her, and then returned “to the former likenesse” of Veronica, reverting “back to a woman’s guise” (Elphick, p. 95).
continued under the readmore...
Inspired by this holy fluctuation from female Saint to Christ and back again, Juana dressed in men’s clothing when she fled the heteronormative life of marriage and motherhood her family planned for her for life in a monastery. When she arrived there, she put women’s clothes back on to introduce herself to the abbess (head nun); but it wouldn’t be long before she put on the outfit she’d wear for the rest of her life: the habit that all Franciscans wear regardless of gender — fitting garb for this gender-fluid figure!
Juana understood all of humanity in this gender-shifting way, in which femininity and masculinity mix and mingle in each person, as opposed to a rigid binary. Playing with gendered elements of language, she once said:
“...With respect to the soul, [men and women] are equals and compeers. Because if a woman has a soul (anima) which is by name female, likewise man too has a soul […] by name female, so that every man and woman can be called female. And conversely, man and woman can be said to be male, because if man has a living and everlasting spirit (espíritu), likewise woman has a living and everlasting spirit.”
As Elphick explains, “For Juana, the grammatically masculine spirit and the grammatically feminine soul transcend gender categories, each indwelling and residing in the other so that the name of each is proper to the other” (p. 90).
A WOMAN PREACHER
Eventually, Juana became abbess of the monastery and preached 72 sermons in the course of 13 years. The fact that she managed to preach as a woman in the midst of the Spanish Inquisition is extraordinary:
“The voices of contemporary religious women in Spain, such as Francisca Hernández and Francisca de los Apóstoles, were silenced by the Inquisition. Juana’s compelling sermons were instead embraced not only by her community and local parishioners, but also attended by both King Charles V and Cardinal Cisneros, Minister Provincial of the Franciscan Friars” (Elphick, p. 88).
I’m not sure what enabled her to preach while other women were forbidden, but I’m glad her sermons are available to us today, for the rich theology of gender found therein. Juana’s sermons support gender equity that was “in marked contrast to the patriarchy of her day,” but not that surprising for a nun of her order:
Franciscan tradition included teachings of “spiritual transcendence of gender boundaries” (ibid.), including various visions of Jesus as a Mother, St. Francis’s self-identification as a Mother Hen, and friars like John of Laverna envisioning themselves as the Bride of Song of Songs with Christ as their spouse (pp. 91-93).
Juana de la Cruz expanded upon this existing Franciscan foundation of “gender liminality,” preaching that “God renders gender-transcendent those He calls, giving them attributes of the opposite binary gender, and ultimately recreating them to be like Him, apophatically transcending gender (Elphick, p. 94).
I’ll close this post with information from one of Juana’s sermons.
SERMON ON THE INCARNATION: A TRIUNE SEAMSTRESS &
A PREGNANT GOD WITH CRAVINGS
In Juana’s sermon on the Incarnation, of God made flesh, we discover a God who is both Father and Mother as well as Son — and a seamstress too!
After emphasizing the necessity of Mary’s consent for the Incarnation to even happen, Juana imagines what it meant for God to “overshadow” Mary. Her sermon depicts “the entire Trinity entering Mary’s womb and beginning the work of making the Second Person of the Trinity incarnate. [Juana] highlights the Second Person [Jesus] as Lady Wisdom/Sophia, using the language of Proverbs 8:12: ‘and then came wisdom and discretion, which are the Son, and gave birth to the Word’.
“Uniquely, Juana herein casts the Trinity in a female guise, as being like a seamstress (‘lavandera’) constructing a shirt, as the Trinity weaves together divinity and the fabric of humanity in the Incarnation. She attributes the actual sewing of this fabric directly to the Holy Spirit. Throughout her sermons, Juana uses these familiar domestic images again and again to convey the Divine to her audiences, counterweighing traditional male images with balancing female metaphors.” (Elphick, p. 99)
After the Trinity sews Divinity into humanity, Father and Spirit leave Mary’s uterus, so that only the Second Person of the Trinity remains. This fetal Christ is “as happy and delighted inside...the vientre of Our Lady as in the seno of the Father.” In Spanish, vientre = belly or womb; meanwhile, seno can be translated either as breast or womb (among other things). Thus Juana envisions Christ either on the breast of the Person of God she calls Father, or even within that Father’s womb! — before being passed down into the womb of Mary.
According to Elphick, Juana is alluding to a much older church doctrine:
“It was the Church Council of Toledo in 675 CE that had declared that the Son was begotten and born ‘from the womb of the Father’ (‘de Patris utero’), on the basis of Psalm 110:3. Juana was clearly evoking this image of the wombed and birthing Father” (p. 99).
Juana also imagines this wombed Father experiencing sympathetic cravings once Jesus enters Mary’s womb: as heaven’s angels celebrate the Annunciation, God surprises them by saying, “I feel like eating now” — something that, the angels proclaim, they’ve never heard God desire before. “Ironically, the Virgin Mary is the one who is pregnant, but it creates in God a sympathetic craving!” (Elphick, p. 100).
In a parallel to the fruit that occasions humanity’s expulsion from Eden in Genesis 3, God craves a fruit — a pear that, Juana eventually reveals, stands for Mary. God tucks the pear/Mary inside God’s own seno or breast/womb, so that:
“Juana leaves her listeners with an image of God reminiscent of nesting Russian dolls. Enclosed in God is the Virgin, and enclosed in the Virgin is the Christ.
...In response to the patriarchal society of her day, Juana crafts a salvation parable in which the story turns upon the actions of the otherwise ‘weaker sex’, and the Almighty is recast in female guise, complete with womb, bosom, and gestational cravings.
...By unsettling the supposed fixity of gender, Juana presents a God who transcends all human boundaries and categories. This vision offers a fluid mode of imitatio Christi, a call to inhabit one’s authentic identity in all its God given complexity.” (Elphick, pp. 100-102)
JUANA IN THE PRESENT DAY
While Juana has been venerated for centuries in her native Spain, she’s yet to be officially recognized as a Saint. However, recent scholarship and new publications of her sermons in the past couple decades have renewed and expanded interest in her. Near the end of his article, Elphick writes,
“In anticipation of her cause for canonization, the Vatican re-examined all her sermons and found them consistent with the Catholic faith, allowing for Pope Francis to declare her ‘Venerable’ in 2015. Mother Juana in turn has gifted the Church with language, metaphor, tradition, and precedent to articulate new understandings of God, the human person, and gender. It is my hope that as her sermons become newly available to the English-speaking world in Boon and Surtz’s translation, and her cause advances toward canonization, she can increasingly become a catalyst for dialogue and convergence on issues of faith and gender” (p. 103).
FURTHER READING:
Sources used here:
The main source used in this post is Kevin Elphick’s “Juana de la Cruz: Gender-Transcendent Prophetess” in the 2021 book Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography. Message me if you’d like a PDF copy.
Another source I drew from is Brother Francis Bell’s Historie of Juana de la Cruz from 1625, translated from Antonio Daza’s Spanish Historia (1613). You can read it free online here.
More on Madre Juana:
Kittredge Cherry has a great article on Madre Juana through a queer lens over on QSpirit
Ronald Surtz’s 1990 text The Guitar of God: Gender, Power, and Authority in the Visionary World of Mother Juana de la Cruz (1481-1534)
Some of Juana’s sermons were translated into English for the first time by Jessica A. Boon and Ronald E. Surtz in 2016
Beyond Juana:
See my website blessedarethebinarybreakers.com for more trans readings of figures throughout Christian history
See this post for more on 16th century understandings of the Divine, featuring a Belgian painting of Jesus with breasts
Trans Jesus: gender nonconforming Mother Hen; self-identified eunuch; God beyond gender assigned male at birth, who longed to be truly known by those they loved.
I was honored to be invited onto Kings and Queens, a podcast hosted by Joseph & Nicole Peterson, to talk about Jesus through a trans lens! The full episode is over on their podcast and includes more of my own personal story as well.
Meanwhile, if you only want to hear the stuff about trans Jesus, give the clip on Blessed Are the Binary Breakers a listen wherever you get podcasts! For links + a transcript of this episode, click here.
“To try to define the Divine
in human words is a fool’s errand –
but luckily for us, God delights in making the foolish wise...”
I wrote and recorded this Affirmation of Faith in a Queer God, with its joyful affirmation of God’s queerness -- from God’s soft spot for outcasts to Jesus’ gender nonconformity -- for my church’s upcoming More Light Sunday service.
More Light Sunday is celebrated by many PC(USA) churches every October on the Sunday nearest to National Coming Out Day, as a chance to celebrate LGBTQA+ persons and lift up how important their full participation in the life of our faith communities is.
I figured I’d share this piece here for two reasons:
First, to invite you to come worship with us this Sunday!
This service celebrating the LGBTQA+ community is at 11am CST on October 11, on Facebook live.
Several really cool people -- Rev. Erin Swenson (who was the first openly trans pastor in the USA), Michael Adee (former executive director for More Light Presbyterians), and Trice Gibbons (on the More Light board for many years) -- will be sharing their reflections in place of a sermon. I’m pumped!
And yeah, my affirmation will be shared :)
There will also be communion, for any who wish to partake -- our congregation does not gatekeep God’s table.
Second, I wanted to let y’all know about my new website, Binary-Breaking Liturgy!!
Its purpose is to share worship materials that use inclusive language for people & expansive language for God.
(Basically, it’s where I’m compiling all the liturgy I’ve written over the years)
I’m gonna start posting some of my poems there too, and all my sermons, just so all that will be finally in one place
You can find the full text of this Affirmation of Faith in a Queer God here.
O World’s Restorer, Status Quo’s Demise,
you look into our minds, survey
our assumptions and our plans
and you throw back your head and laugh.
You do not reveal your Wisdom
to the ones the world calls wise.
(They would not know what to make of it, anyway.)
Rather, Wisdom dazzles children’s minds;
She scoops up outcasts in a heady dance,
swaps secrets with the stranger and the fool.
Incomprehensible God!
The ones we call “unwanted”
you call Beloved.
The ones we call “broken”
you call whole and holy.
Impossible to think you look upon
our frail flesh and even frailer hearts
overgrown with greed and desperation
and fall in love with our potential!
Deepest desire of our hearts! Come!
Lift our burdens from our shoulders
and take us in your arms as your Beloved.
