hope in the dark

It’s halfway through Advent—half a year since I sent a dispatch, I realized. Every time I thought to write something down, it seemed already out-of-date, or a little obvious, or a little trite, and anyway I was tired of newsletters and memoir and political urgency.

My exhaustion didn’t make the political situation less urgent, of course; but it’s been somewhat helpful in clarifying my own response to ~our times~.

This past Eastertide I started volunteering at a local prison. First I just went with my church, and now I’m also involved with an LGBTQ+ affinity group. This didn’t feel like a political response so much as a response to the way my church asks me, particularly, to live out the gospel message. But politics intervene because of the nature of a prison: listening to people say true things about God in a prison becomes necessarily political. I was tired; I chose to let visiting prisoners exhaust me rather than the many other ways I could become politically and physically exhausted.

I was thinking about this when one of the chaplains suggested I give a short message during the affinity group’s Christmas party. The last time I had visited the group, we had talked about hope. It was the week after the election: I wasn’t feeling hopeful. But by the week of the party Ordinary Time had ended—Advent had begun, this quiet season of darkness in the world and candles lighting our sanctuaries.

This is what I said to our group on the occasion of Christmas:

Christmas is a time of hope. And I don’t mean a false or manufactured Christmas cheer or pretending like everything is a Hallmark movie for a few weeks. The story of Christmas is the story of hope in the dark.*

When Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus, we are celebrating a child born to poor parents, who were part of an oppressed people, who lived in a country occupied by an empire. There was no reason for anyone to believe that their child, born in a manger on a cold night, was anything special. No reason, except for what God had promised to Mary, Jesus’s mother.

Mary is the part of the Christmas story that is giving me hope this year, as I thought about the potential, scary futures for women and for LGBTQ+ people in our country. In the Christmas story, the very first story of the Christian faith, God speaks to a young woman—Mary might have still been a teenager—and asks for her to carry God’s own being inside of her.

As a woman, Mary would never have expected to see God or angels face to face: that was reserved for the temple priests, all cis men, who very carefully entered into the special space where God lived. In other words, God didn’t choose the temple priests or a ruler of the Roman empire or anyone in power to bring about God’s plan of redemption for the world. God chose Mary, someone who was ignored and oppressed because of her gender. The angel says to Mary: “Do not be afraid; for you have found favor with God.”

And Mary says yes. God asks, and Mary answers, and so she enters into an act of co-creation with God: the Holy Spirit ‘overshadows’ her and Mary’s body begins to create Jesus’s blood and bones inside of her womb. God begins to live outside of the special place in the temple: God begins to live in Mary’s body, and eventually, in the world, with us.

 This is a powerful hope: that someone who was not allowed to enter God’s presence, someone whose gender and body marked them as lesser in society’s eyes, becomes God’s partner in creation.

As a trans person, this story makes me feel closer to Mary. Trans people have also been invited by God into a new way of living—and we have said yes to holding God’s presence in our bodies in a new way, as God does a new thing.

That is what I mean when I say Christmas is a season of hope in the dark. It is a story for our people: for women, for queer people, for trans people, for the oppressed and the incarcerated and everyone who has been told that God is not for them. Right now, we are still waiting to see what God will do. God is inside of our bodies. God is growing in the dark. God is here with us, telling us not to be afraid.

*The phrase originates with Rebecca Solnit’s book “Hope in the Dark” (written after the election of George W. Bush!).

Three Things

I’m borrowing this section from my friend Amy: here are three things I’ve been enjoying recently.

1. Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People by Tiya Miles—My church’s book club pick for December, it truly changed the way I think about Harriet Tubman.

2. Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality by Lyta Gold—she’s right and she should say it!

3. This knitting pattern for a quilt-like cowl—my first attempt at stranded colorwork ever! I’ve already made two.

Texas forever,
CJ