on wrestling with God

The following is a testimony I originally gave in March 2022 during the Divinity Pride chapel service at Duke. I’m running it here because I think it’s the best writing I’ve done in the last several years and, though I’ve tried adapting it into a pitchable essay form, I think part of the power comes from the form. I’m also posting it because there are a lot of bad summaries of this testimony on the internet, and the original video of the service is no longer publicly available (for reasons that are truly too dumb to get into).

So, picture me saying this in my rainbow-striped button-down and scuffed sneakers, holding onto the pulpit because my legs are shaking so hard I can barely stand.

Marcella Althaus-Reid’s famous question in her book The Queer God is “Where would God be in a salsa bar?”  What is God doing, she wonders, in the spaces that are holy to the people excluded by the church? Where might we find God, we who are always leaving part of ourselves behind? 

In my thinking with Althaus-Reid, my own question was this: where is God in the trans body?

To answer this question, I have been contemplating the story of Genesis 32:22-31. If you haven’t had to speed-read the Old Testament in the last six months, here’s a refresher: before reuniting with his estranged brother Esau, Jacob spends the night on the banks of the Jabbok river. In the night, a stranger arrives, and they wrestle until sunrise. Jacob is beginning to prevail, though, so the stranger wounds him in the hip. But Jacob will not let go until the stranger blesses him. 

 In the Christian tradition, the stranger is usually understood as God or an angel, an emissary of God. I have heard the story of Jacob wrestling the angel used to help explain everything from struggles with depression to the futility of being a Texas Rangers fan. Here I would like to suggest the story of Jacob wrestling with God as a trans text: as the story that locates trans people at the heart of God’s story. Jacob enters into an intimate, fraught relationship with the divine and on the other side, he is transformed in both name and body. 

 I was thinking about Jacob, and Althaus-Reid, and my own fraught relationship with the divine while I sat in Duke Regional Hospital, waiting to be called back for a consultation with a surgeon about top surgery. The things that I have chosen to do to my body as a trans person are so often framed as violence: as a form of physical and moral injury. But in Jacob’s wrestling I see an example of a negotiated body—a trans body, which has been both momentarily injured and fundamentally blessed, in a way that transforms Jacob and the community around him. 

David Carr notes that in this story “the community of Israel, as descendants of [Jacob], is depicted as a group that successfully strives with God and humans.”  The new name is a community-defining blessing, but his new name cannot be disconnected from Jacob’s changed body. The story of Jacob’s new name is bookended by verse 25, telling us of Jacob’s injury at the river, and verse 32, which explains that Israelites do not eat the thigh muscles of the hip socket in memory of this story. The holiness, we are reminded, was not in name only. It was in the touch of God to a mortal body, one who dared to wrestle with the Almighty. 

I wonder how Jacob felt, after the angel had gone and he was left alone in the dawn light, with a bruised hip and a new name. I wonder if he felt the same way I did, on the clear October morning when I learned to give myself a hormone shot. 

My point here is that transition can be framed as a choice, or an inevitability, or even as a violence. But in my life, and the lives of many other trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming Christians, transition is better framed as a calling. It is a calling to wrestle with God, and not let go until we receive a blessing in our own bodies. And it is also a calling to bring our communities alongside us, trans and cis, gay and straight, to claim our identities: as children of God, descendants of a god-wrestler. 

I am here, as so many others who have stood in this pulpit were, because I have strived with God. Today, I have a bruise on my right hip from imperfectly injecting .6 mL of testosterone. The bruise is about the size of a thumbprint, blue and turning green. Tomorrow the bruise will fade; even now, I feel the blessing.