Get Her Words Out

Stickies

I've been told that I need to post more, which is going to be difficult since I can't do it from my own computer anymore. (I usually write these in Word and then copy them over to TypePad.)

I have been writing things, but most of them have fallen into the "things that are too crazy to post" category.

What I have been doing is keeping a sticky on my desktop to keep track of things that I might post about, and lately it has gotten full.

So what I am going to try to do is write the posts from the sticky here at my mother's house and then when I get a chance to get to an Internet connection, I'll transcribe them over to here.

Some of them seemed a lot more important and profound when I wrote them down than they do now, so bear with me.

Sticky #1

"Living out his death."

I was watching the movie "De-lovely" one day a few weeks ago when I was stuck on my couch with a bad back.  This line struck me.

The movie is about the life of Cole Porter, and about mid-way through he has a horseback riding accident and shatters both his legs.

In the hospital the doctor tells Cole's wife that Cole's legs need to be amputated, that there is no way they are going to be able to fix them.

Cole's wife, played by Ashley Judd, demands that they try to fix his legs, that amputating them might not kill him, but it would destroy his spirit and he would only be "living out his death."

It was probably because I was in pain and all drugged up, but right at that moment, that seemed terribly profound.

How many people spend their lives living out their deaths?  How many people are just filling out the time until they die, waiting without passion without hope?

I have also wondered about Christians who spend their entire lives not living them but worrying about whether they have been saved or not, always focusing on the end of their lives.

For me, one of the most important ideas of the Reformed tradition is that salvation comes first;  it's not the result of something we do, so it is not something we need to worry about.

Ideally, that should mean that we are freed from living out our deaths, and can live here and now with out fear for the future.  We can be present in the world, doing what God has called us to do for God's children.

Leaving...

I've spent the last three days emptying out and cleaning my dorm room.  It's nowhere near as clean as it should be, but I'm done.  I'm just exhausted and I have to drive 12 hours each of the next 2 days.

I've reached the point where I'm willing to just give up on the deposit, just so I can be done screwing with it.

I'm saying good-bye to Columbia, at least for a while.  It's been a great home for me, and I don't want to leave, but I have to.

The biggest problem with leaving is that I don't have any idea where I'm headed.  The image that comes to mind is letting go of one side of a swimming pool without knowing I'm going to be able to swim across to the other side.

I'm going to drive to my mother's house in Colorado over the next couple of days, and then I have to come back to Birmingham for General Assembly in the middle of June.  Then I don't know what.

The hardest part about staying at my mother's house is that she has no Internet access.  I'm going to be dependant on libraries, it's a real comedown, I've had broadband for 7 or 8 years now, and I love being able to always check stuff online no matter what else I'm doing.  This is when I really wish I had bought a laptop, because it would probably a little awkward to take the iMac down to Starbucks

Updating the Profile

'm a 40 year old transgender seminary student graduate of Columbia Theological Seminary.  I have just started coming out and doing some transitioning in the last year.

Before coming to seminary I worked at a number of regional theaters as a carpenter and a welder.

I read just about anything: theology, science fiction, physics, engineering, history or what ever else presents itself.

And the one-liner:

I'm a transgender Presbyterian ministry student  woman slowly working my way through the Presbyterian ordination process.

Every little step helps, and today is a huge step.

10 Days to Graduation!

By this time on Saturday the 20th I will have received my M.Div from Columbia Theological Seminary.

Am I thrilled to be done?

Am I excited to be starting out on the next stage of my life?

Well, let me tell you everything I know about my future.

1) I have to be out of my dorm room by the 24th.

2) Someday I am going to die.

I had hoped, just maybe, to have a little bit more knowledge and security by this point.

On the plus side, I guess this gives me more opportunity to live into that trusting God to provide thing we talk about.

Backdrops and sermons

I had a fairly good time a week or ten days ago painting a drop for the  seminary’s spring dance.

I’ve never been much of a painter, but it was fun to get to reach far back into my skill set and pull out something like that for a little while.

While I was working on it, I got to thinking about my scene painter friends, an eclectic bunch at best, and I remembered a story about one of them.

Kym was the Scenic Charge at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival when I started working there as the Master Welder.  We worked together for about five years before, sadly, she was killed a few months after her thirtieth birthday.

Kym had painted many drops in her time, not dinky little eight foot square things like I did the other day, but big old 60’x30’ scenes of various kinds.  A lot of them were skies.  Sometimes they were great expanses of graded blues with different kinds of white clouds and sometimes they had the reds and oranges of sunrises and sunsets.

The story happened before I started working with there, but our mutual boss shared it at an in-house memorial for her: one day after she had spent eight or nine hours working on a sunset drop for some show, she was exhausted and headed out of the shop to go home.  We usually left the building through the loading dock, and as she stepped out that evening, the trees at the end of the dock were silhouetted in front of the most gorgeous Gone With The Wind sunset you have ever seen.  Here shoulders kind of drooped and she shook her head and said, “Look at that, it’s beautiful, but if I painted it, no one would believe it was real.”  They’d say, “there’s never been a sunset with those colors, and even if there was they wouldn’t blend like that, and look at those clouds, those are real clouds.”

I think about that sometimes when I think about preaching.  Preaching is not just about telling the truth, but about telling it in a way that people can hear it and take it in.  I think that just like the reality of a sunset is too much for an audience member to believe, so too is the full truth of God’s love and grace too much for a congregation to hear and absorb.

Sermons need to point towards the full reality of that Good News, need to represent it, and remind people of it.  But, our words can never paint the full picture of the Gospel, because no one will ever believe it without the direct experience of it. 

About the picture

I always wanted to be Dr. Who.

I think we've already established that I'm a geek.