Forsaking the Normal: Biblical Tales of Transformation

September 15, 2014

DignityUSA

By <a href=https://www.dignityusa.org/content/authors-james-and-evelyn-whitehead>James and Evelyn Whitehead</a> <blockquote> “Surely God was in this place and I I did not know it.” (Gen. 28:16) </blockquote> We go to the Christian Scriptures for guidance in our moral lives. What are the norms we should follow? In search of the normal we instead find the Bible telling endless stories about paradox reversals of fortune and transformation. Yet convinced that diversity represents defect or signals deviance we cling to the belief that the normal will keep us on the straight and narrow. The church conspires in this longing interpreting biblical passages (“male and female God created them”) to insist on a normal that admits no variance. <img alt= src=/sites/default/files/images/FlowerA_0.png style=float:left; height:276px; margin-left:5px; margin-right:5px; width:200px />The Christian Scriptures on the other hand spend little energy on the normal. Instead they tell of unexpected transformations: staffs turned into serpents water transformed into wine Lazarus waking from his tomb. Revelation it would seem speaks to us not of the normal but of startling transformations. In the Bible the ordinary and the normal are repeatedly transgressed in favor of paradoxes and miracles. Two passages in the Hebrew Scriptures celebrate transformations that trump normalcy in a life of faith. In the Book of Genesis Jacob finds himself in combat with an unrecognizable nocturnal assailant who injures him before blessing him. (Genesis 32) Only at first light does it dawn on Jacob that he has been wrestling with his God. Jacob takes away from this transforming struggle a life-long limp and a new name that means “I have wrestled with God and humans and have survived.” For Jacob normalcy is no more. In the Book of Job God appears suddenly in a whirlwind frightening and humbling Job. This divine manifestation reminds us that “there is wildness in the world that exceeds the wish of humanity either to moralize or to master it.” (William Connelly) The epilogue of this disturbing book where we learn that Job’s suffering was just a test seeks to return us to the normal. William Connelly writes this ending “is designed to domesticate the reading of the explosive text to which it is appended.” The epilogue “mutes (but does not silence) the most powerful voice it introduces into the theological register.” In these final passages the revelation of an uncanny frightening God for Job and for us is muted as we return to more “normal” notions of our God as loving father or just judge. The revelations that announce the transforming presence of God continue in the New Testament. Jesus climbs a hill with his companions and suddenly he is transfigured. His disciples are staggered by the sight but then the vision shifts and they are left again with the Jesus with whom they were familiar. But for them and for us the transformation endures in new intimations about this most extraordinary person. A similar transformation takes place for the two disciples on their journey home to Emmaus after the death of Jesus. Plunged in grief they meet a stranger and invite him to share their dinner. And in the breaking of the bread they see in the stranger for just an instant the face of the living Christ. Then the vision passes and Christ vanishes from their sight. Again we see a brief transformation where the normal and the ordinary give way to unimagined possibilities. Strangers should never look the same again. <h3>Transgender Lives and Spiritual Transformations</h3> A life that will not fit comfortably into the binary reality of male or female is not “normal.” But as we have seen normalcy carries little weight in the biblical stories that tell of transformations that unseat our confident grasp of reality. Paradox and miracles are the stuff of Scripture. Does not the odyssey of a transgender person fit in this narrative of grace? Laura Thor describes the task of spiritual guides on such a sacred journey: “to cultivate with our spiritual directee the capacity to sit in awe of what cannot be understood except in God’s time to unveil it.” The awe and ambiguity transgender persons confront for themselves but also for the rest of us may turn out to be assets. “Living with ambiguity presents us the opportunity to let God in precisely because our inability to decipher the marvel before us renders us creaturely once more standing in awe of the mystery of creation.” Scripture scholar John McCarthy reminds us that theological reflection on creation in the Catholic tradition “is not one that puts a lot of attention on creation as the establishment of eternal unchanging laws [i.e. the normal]. The situation seems to be quite the contrary: The tradition speaks of the relationship between created and uncreated as certainly quite changeable.” For McCarthy the essential binary division in Scripture is not male and female but divine and human. And this is a division that is constantly transgressed in the miracles of grace where the divine enters the human and most especially in the life of Jesus where the tension between the divine and human is overcome. In the Incarnation we meet normalcy undone in the life of the very human Jesus who is recognized as also divine. The natural order with all its expectations of normalcy is fractured in this revelation. By being both human and divine “the figure of Jesus becomes ‘strange’ indeed a kind of stranger one who ‘looks like us’ but you can’t quite trust is like ‘us.’” The crucifixion of Jesus sought to extinguish this unlikely vocation but only evoked another transformation. After Jesus’ resurrection where is the normal now?  McCarthy adds: “If creation is eternal and unchanging order ‘the strange’ becomes eternally outside and potentially chaotic. But if creation is itself the relation of constantly transacted ‘betweenness’ the ethical perspective might more authentically develop a poetics of hospitality and invitation to the neighbor rather than continue a certain hermeneutic of divine and natural law.” A “constantly transacted ‘betweenness’” is a fit description of the transgender person’s journey of faith. In his 2005 encyclical letter God is Love Pope Benedict XVI writes of God not as guarantor of good order but as source of transforming love. Love is always about new possibilities where the guise of the stranger may be transformed into the face of Christ. The New Testament tells us again and again that the natural order has been transcended in the person of Jesus both divine and human; being created in God’s image we too can expand our love from that of family to that of neighbor from that of neighbor to that of the stranger in need. Christian faith is not finally about good order but about a compassion that is not constrained by custom or expectations of the nor- mal. <h3><img alt= src=/sites/default/files/images/FlowerB_0.png style=float:right; height:212px; margin-left:5px; margin-right:5px; width:320px />Biblical Transformations: Sacraments of God’s Extravagance</h3> The surprises and transformations that we meet in the Scriptures may be telling us about God’s extravagant ways. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins attuned his artistic eye to this extravagance on display in the beauty of the odd the unconventional and the strange. “Glory to God for dappled things.../all things counter original spare strange.” He was fascinated by “beauty that is irregular unusual asymmetrical untamed.” Hopkins was praising the extravagant diversity of creation. Evolutionary biologists speaking from another discipline remind us of the stunning diversity of species especially their sexual behavior and gender diversity that has evolved from God’s creation. So often this is diversity not as deviance but as splendid variety a sacrament of God’s extravagance. The authors of the volume God Science Sex Gender urge a recognition of this healthy diversity in our gendered lives. “If what glorifies God is creation come fully alive – and if the promise of such life abundant comes with our incorporation into Christ through baptism – and if in baptism there is ‘no male and female’ – Christians might well expect there to be some experiences of diversity and fluidity within human sexuality here and now. One often finds such rumors of angels.” Laura Thor describes her vocation as spiritual guide for transgender persons in their journeys toward wholeness. “Together we tend this liminal space and time through which God will birth seekers into their intended identity.” The task of the spiritual guide – and in fact all in the community – is to “remind our seekers and ourselves that life in all its diversity is welcome in the divine milieu.”   <table border=3 cellpadding=1 cellspacing=1> <tbody> <tr> <td> <h3>Resources</h3> William Connolly’s comments appear in his The Augustinian Imperative: A Reflection on the Politics of Morality. See pages 9 10 25. Laura Thor “Living in the Image of God: Transgender People in Spiritual Direction” Presence: An International Journal of Spiritual Direction Vol. 19 # 4 December 2013 52-59. John McCarthy’s observations are found in his “Interpreting the Theology of Creation: Binary Gender in Catholic Thought” 123-39 in God Science Sex Gender. Also see Frank Fennel “The Triumph of Diversity: Hopkin’s ‘Pied Beauty’” pages 201-10 and Patricia Jung and Joan Roughgarden’s “Gender in Heaven: The Story of the Ethiopian Eunuch in Light of Evolutionary Biology” pages 224-40 in God Science Sex Gender.  </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <a href=https://www.dignityusa.org/content/publications-committee-chair�s-note>Publications Committee Chair’s Note</a>

Forsaking the Normal: Biblical Tales of Transformation

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