Category: Episcopal Church

Communing on Transgender Day of Remembrance

12/6/2018

by Deacon Zeb Treolar, Episcopal Diocese of Iowa

I have been going to the reading of the names and secular spaces to reflect on trans identities and our hopes since I came out in 2012.Two years back, I considered a requiem mass for the the dead at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Des Moines, where I worship. But I was concerned about how to reach out to the community and bring people in. I advertized an interfaith prayer service in our chapel that year, and a group of six faithful people came together, read names, and reflected on these lost lives. But the service still felt incomplete to me. I had to admit that what I desired, what I longed for, was communion.

Fast forward to 2018. My friend Lizzie has just become the coordinator of our diocesan young adult ministry, Breaking Bread, a ministry we helped co-found along with our friend Lydia. Breaking Bread focuses on radical hospitality and celebrating the Eucharist outside of parish walls. We met together to talk about her new role and how we might do things differently. We examined the November calendar and I brought up the sacred day of TDOR. Her eyes lit up. Yes. Where to have it? Where else but the gay bar, a natural community gathering space. Could we partner with others? Of course. The Downtown Disciples seemed a natural group for us us to team up with. This Disciples of Christ congregation had a rainbow flag chalice as their symbol and two of their members were also involved in the ministries of our diocese. Their pastor, Debbie Griffin, was up for anything. So we dreamed together. We prayed. Lizzie got in touch with The Garden Nightclub and set it up for us to use the space. My bishop, Alan Scarfe, was free that night and desired to preside at the table. I developed the liturgy, adapting from our own liturgies in The Book of Common Prayer.

Finally the day came. We were in a cozy seating area of the nightclub, and we set up two chalices, wine and grape juice, and our two patens, homemade gluten-free bread I had baked the night before with my friend Kaitlin, a Disciples pastor. Pizza was set on tables to the side. Four of us read the names, my heart breaking as we went through the pages and pages of people. I left the phrase “unknown name” on the page, and as we read those, we naturally began changing up how we shared them, “Beloved Child of God”, “Name known only to the Divine”, “Name unknown, but forever loved”. We shared a moment of silence. We ate.

Then we began our liturgy. It was one of the holiest moments in my life.We sang together, Pastor Debbie prayed. I shared a reflection on Rachel weeping for her children. “She shall not be comforted, for they are no more.” We had more silence. Then we began the Eucharistic prayer. Watching my bishop preside, using the words I had adapted for the day, seeing the bread and cups become the body and blood of Christ, the holy food for God’s holy people, holding the chalice and declaring “The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation” to transgender, nonbinary, and cisgender people who cared deeply about our community was everything I needed. As the community continued conversing and slowly filtered out the door, sharing the moment and enjoying each other’s company, I knew it was everything they needed too.

Afterward my bishop came up to me and stated, “We should have more liturgies here.” To which I replied, “Amen.”

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Celebrating Our Baptismal Identities: A TransEpiscopal General Convention Wrap-Up

7/18/2015

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by the Rev'd Dr. Cameron Partridge

As we hit the two-week mark from the ending of the 78th General Convention of The Episcopal Church, I look back on those nearly two weeks in Salt Lake City with a sense of gratitude for what the Church accomplished. We elected Bishop Michael Curry the new Presiding Bishop. We passed legislation in support of the rights of immigrants and refugees. We passed a new initiative on racial justice and reconciliation. We began the process of shifting our own structure as a General Convention. We passed legislation moving us clearly into the path of liturgical marriage equality.

We also passed several trans- affirming resolutions. In fact, all of the resolutions that TransEpiscopal was there to support (a list of which you can find here) passed. Two of these looked beyond the borders of TEC: A051 (“Support LGBT African Advocacy") and D028 (“Oppose Conversion Therapy”). Another pair, A073 and A074, called for “the creation of inclusive policy and practices in regard to LGBTQ and gender variant individuals" as part of a broader update of TEC’s call for an update of TEC's Model Policies & Resources for the Prevention of Sexual Misconduct and Abuse of Youth and Children.

The two resolutions on which we focused the most strongly were about name changes: D036 ("Adding Name Change Rite to the Book of Occasional Services”) and D037 (“Amending Names in Church Records, Registries and Certificates”).

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Religious Vocations in The Episcopal Church

3/28/2007

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What do you think when you consider vocations in the church? About priests, monks and nuns? Many people, when asked this question, will describe a person who is inhumanly pious, clean of all sin, and the ideal of perfect in every way, like someone straight out of a Roman Catholic "Lives of the Saints" collection.

It is rather surprising to most people when they find out that the image of saints gliding around grand cloister hallways in their strange-looking robes, at peace with everything and everyone could not be further from the truth. On the contrary, the monastic vocation emphasizes the humanness of each person, rather than their piety.

The word "vocation" comes from the Latin word, meaning "call". For those pursuing a religious vocation, there has been a call from God, and most times, this call catches the most unsuspecting people. Ask any priest about their discernment process leading up to the priesthood, and they might illustrate to you a long and grueling process in which they had many arguments with God.

Over the years, I have spoken with about 100 monks and nuns, and have heard countless times the phrase "Why God picked me, I will never know." Weather they are rich, poor, educated or not, straight or gay, each one of them gave a similar comment concerning their vocation. It seems that God chooses the most unlikely people in order to keep us on our toes.

One of my biggest fears when I felt the call to monastic life was that I would never find a community that would "let me in". I was sure that I would be doomed to wander outside the circle of those who were blessed with an outlet to pursue their desire to make prayer their full-time profession. In fact, just the opposite has happened. I often asked myself "Why did God have to pick me?"

It was surprising to me to find out that about 75% of all vowed religious I have spoken with (that's not to say that the ratio is accurate for all vowed religious) are self-identified as gay or lesbian. Many monastics have commented to me that Religious Orders have been safe-havens for LGBT people through the ages, despite what the public thinks.

I have also noticed that monastic houses are safe places for people who don't otherwise fit into the rigid categories of gender found in secular society. This shows both in the taking of religious names (For instance, Br. Christopher-Mary, or Sr. Barbara-John) and in the treatment of monks who are effeminate and nuns who are masculine. Often times these characteristics are never made fun of, and often encouraged, many times being seen as one of many forms of personal integration.

One of the principles of a monastic vocation is self-knowledge. This leads to a better understanding of our relationships with others and with God, and allows us to grow continually into the person that God had in mind when each of us were created. (This principle is often applied in therapeutic relationships as well.)

Being someone who is transgendered, this process is all to familiar. The feeling of personal integration has been a very healing, spiritual thing, although the process leading up to it can be quite treacherous. That being said, both the process of transition and the process of continual conversion have been great instruments in deepening my relationship with God and with others, and who can find fault in that?

I don't think that we will ever know an accurate set of statistics concerning gender-variant or gay and lesbian people who have pursued some kind of vocation within the church. From an "inside perspective", I'm not sure such a statistic is really relevant, considering most monks and nuns actively choose a life of celibate chastity and thereby make gender mostly a non-issue.

In closing, it is an important fact that people's perceptions and reality are very different from each other. Almost every one of us can identify with that, weather we are secular or monastic, ordained or lay.

So, next time you consider yourself outside the sphere of God's love, or unwanted by the church, remember that much of the glue that holds the church together is made out of people who may be in your very same position.

-Bear

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A Statement of Purpose for TransEpiscopal

3/13/2007

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We wrote this statement of purpose as part of our process of applying to join the Consultation shortly after the 2006 General Convention. It was posted to our original blog on Tuesday, March 13, 2007.

TransEpiscopal is a group of transgender Episcopalians and our significant others, families, friends and allies dedicated to enriching our spiritual lives and to making the Episcopal Church a welcoming and empowering place that all of us truly can call our spiritual home. Our group was started in January of 2005 and initially served as an online, nationwide community of support. After several informal gatherings in various parts of the country, we held our first Advent retreat in 2005 in New Jersey, sponsored by the Oasis Commission of the Diocese of Newark. In January 2007, several of us attended the first Summit for Transgender Religious Leaders co-sponsored by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Ministry at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. Having met with leaders, lay and ordained, from various denominations and religious traditions, we are inspired and galvanized to support a new chapter in transgender advocacy that is spreading across the country this year; a window is now opening in which transgender people have an opportunity to secure civil rights protections that long have eluded us, and to win an increasing degree of acceptance and welcome in this country’s religious denominations.

As Episcopalians we are proud of those times in our denomination’s history when the Church has supported and empowered those who historically have been marginalized or “othered” within and outside the life of the Church. We are grateful for the gains made by the groups that have entered the wider Church conversation before us, and we look forward to helping to sustain and to build upon those gains. Because we also recognize that this is a time of continued conflict in our denomination’s life, and knowing that our voices may intensify and add complexity to an already challenging debate about human sexuality and gender, we seek to enter that wider conversation with awareness and respect even as we look forward to more change. Knowing that none of us is nearly as strong singly as we are in concert, and recognizing that many of us embody multiple identities represented by different groups within the Church, we seek to collaborate with other progressive groups, that together we may ever more clearly embody God’s transformative love for all people.

As a group of transgender and allied Christians, we represent a range of gender identities and expressions. “Transgender” is an umbrella term referring to people who transgress the sex/gender they were designated at birth. Some of us physically and medically transition from one gender to another (a complex, multi-staged process that various individuals define in different ways, but which traditionally has been called transsexualism). Others of us believe that our bodies need not take on any particular characteristics in order to identify as male or female. Still others of us do not identify with traditional gender categories. All of us ultimately see gender as a spectrum of multiple lived possibilities. Trans people and our partners also do not necessarily identify as heterosexual. Some of us who identify as male, for instance, are partnered with other men. Others of us who are now female are partnered with other women. And while several of us have found that our previous relationships weren't able to survive our emerging identities as trans, others of us remain with the partners we had prior to transition. One couple in our group has been married for 30 years. Indeed, those of us who are married can witness to a denomination already struggling with marriage, showing that we are already living into its new forms and expanding its dimensions. Many of us are single, and several of us have children and grandchildren. Indeed, some of us are raising children as single parents. We live out our vocations in various ways within and outside of the Church, some of us as clergy, some of us partnered with clergy, some of us as laypeople quite involved in our diocesan or parish governance. Others of us limit our Church involvement to Sunday morning, and some of us are searching for the right community. All of us want to be able to count on the Church to support us and lift us up just as they would other individuals and communities.

Coming out as trans is a time when, for many of us, our faith becomes even more important to us than ever before. As we have come out, some of us have experienced profound difficulty with Church leaders who view us negatively or in condemnatory ways. Others of us have discovered that we are seen as potential sources of controversy. Still others have found an inspiring and at times surprising support, given the widespread lack of information in the Church regarding transgender people. In order to increase that support throughout our denomination and beyond, we encourage the Church to commit itself to learn about transgender lives, not simply as social, medical or psychological phenomena, but most importantly as people on powerful spiritual journeys that uniquely embody a lifelong human path of transformation and authenticity before God.

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Transgender Episcopalians Form Organization

3/11/2007

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This was the first post we ever made on our blog just after TransEpiscopal joined the Consultation on March 11, 2007.

Transgender Episcopalians Form Organization, Seek to Ally With Progressive Groups in ECUSA

Transgender Episcopalians and their significant others, families, friends and allies have announced the launch of TransEpiscopal, an informal organization dedicated to “making the Episcopal Church a welcoming and empowering place that all of us truly can call our spiritual home,” according to its statement of purpose.

The group, which began as an Internet listserve in January 2005, now has dozens of members, including both lay and ordained people. TransEpiscopal has just been accepted into the Consultation, the collaborative organization of progressive organizations within the national Episcopal Church.

The formation of TransEpiscopal represents a deepening and formalization of work on transgender issues that has been under way in the Episcopal Church for several years. A number of dioceses, including Michigan, Newark and California, have done significant educational work about transgender people. In December 2005, the Oasis Commission of the Diocese of Newark sponsored a weekend retreat for transgender people and their friends and allies, the first of its kind.

Since 2004, six dioceses (Newark, Michigan, New York, Maryland, California and New Hampshire) have passed resolutions at their annual conventions expressing support for the ministry and civil rights of transgender people and their supporters.

“Inclusion and equality are the common denominators in all of the parables of Jesus about the Household of God,” said Jim Toy, a TransEpiscopal member who was the first gay Episcopalian to come out in the Diocese of Michigan more than 30 years ago. “We are called to reaffirm and expand the scope of our commitment to inclusion, equality and nondiscrimination for all individuals and groups who are devalued and disempowered. To oppose discrimination and prejudice and to support equal opportunity and protection is moral, Christian and just.”

“There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God,” said the Rev. Michelle Hansen, an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Connecticut who transitioned from male to female four years ago. “Transgender people are equally loved of God. It is time the institutional Church comes to terms with God’s people of all sorts and conditions.”

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Communing on Transgender Day of Remembrance

Celebrating Our Baptismal Identities: A TransEpiscopal General Convention Wrap-Up

Religious Vocations in The Episcopal Church

A Statement of Purpose for TransEpiscopal

Transgender Episcopalians Form Organization

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