G*d lives here - A reflection for Trans Awareness Week
Obviously the photo above is a little humorous, not particularly serious, but it is important. Why? Because I am sick and tired of people telling me that it is not ok to be trans because ‘the body is a temple’, writes OTN Co-Chair Alex Clare-Young.
Let’s start with scripture. What does the Bible say about temples?
Ezekiel’s temple has a river flowing through it. The temple in 1 Kings is decorated with gold and horticultural imagery, not to mention multiple angels. The body in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is described as being one body with many diverse parts.
Bottom line: temples are not unadorned, static, dead things. Temples are decorated, changing, and alive. If God is the ground of all being, as many people of faith believe, then God resides within each of our atoms, each of our thoughts, each aspect of who we are.
I am treating my body as a temple when I choose comfort and ethics; relishing a euphoria-inducing visit to the wonderful Lucy and Yak shop. And I am treating my body as a temple when I choose to don a suit, collar, gown and preaching scarf out of respect for colleagues and out of recognition of tradition when preaching at a college evensong.
More to the point, but less appropriate for a blog image, my body is a temple when bare, a fleshy dwelling of God in all its contradictions, all its scars and - yes – all its tattoos and piercings. Even more to the point, God is in the synapses that fire messages of maleness, queerness, complexity, creativity and more every moment that I think.
God is in the thoughts that I label ‘good’ and the ones I label ‘bad’. God is in the words that I mutter in frustration and those I sob in grief. God is in the affirmations that I offer myself and others and God is in the criticisms that slip out unbidden. No part of me is outside of God, the basis of all that is.
So what does it do to God’s body when I read that over 350 trans people have been murdered this year? What does it do to God’s body when the Vatican suddenly announces that trans people can be baptised (hang on, could we not before?!)? What does it do to God’s body when a trans pastor dies by suicide? What does it do to God’s body when a famous author would rather go to prison than use a trans person’s pronouns? What does it do to God’s body when a trans child harms themselves because their school and family are not safe spaces to express their pain?
