To Be Seen, Known, and Loved

One of the great fears I hear from the transgender community (and the wider LGBTQ community, though I can mostly only speak to my own experience) - when it comes to the Church - is that there is no safe space to talk about their experiences; that there is not a wider community to talk through feelings, to be understood and known. There is an understandable fear that you are just supposed to "carry your cross", and keep your mouth shut while bearing it.

A big part of this fear comes from our experiences during much of our lives; when we found rejection and shame in living even any small part of our experiences openly. We discovered that we lost people when we were vulnerable, so we adjusted.

We hid - which is a tragedy of enormous proportions. As I said before, you are a gift - and the whole world missed out on your goodness while you remained hidden.

Now, I know that none of these experiences of rejection, fear, and hiding are at all unique to those who have experiences on the LGBTQ spectrum - but the stigma has historically been such that even the "being" was enough to be shameful, even without any "doing".

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A few weeks back I went to the inaugural retreat hosted by Eden Invitation, a relatively new Catholic ministry whose tagline is "original personhood beyond the LGBT+ paradigm". The title of the retreat was "Come Out of Hiding" (which, as I explained above, is appropriate).

Anyone who has any experience with Christian LGBT ministries knows they have a tendency to move toward one of two extremes - either "you need to be changed" (more commonly known as "conversion therapy"), or "everything is fine". To put it bluntly - neither of these attitudes is particularly helpful for anyone struggling to live faithfully according to the teachings of the Church.

Which is why this specific ministry is so important - being grounded in Saint John Paul II's Theology of the Body, the founders are quite uninterested in changing desires, but are instead focused on the hard work of reminding people of their original goodness, their capacity to love, the need for intimacy, inherent dignity, and the universal call to holiness.

To be totally transparent, I was the only one there who experienced gender dysphoria (everyone else was on the LGB side of the alphabet). That being said, asking around everyone else was looking for the same thing as me - to know they weren't alone, and to be understood and loved exactly as they are. Speakers talked about authentic friendships; how and why to "come out" and explain your experiences; about the need to recognize yourself as gift; reaching out and asking for support; that God is working in and through every single area in your life.

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I understand the fear of those who think the Church wants people to remain in the closet. When the closet is all you've known - when you've known the relief of being "out", of being able to be truly vulnerable and unafraid in your existence - these poles are so distant and yet it's hard to imagine there is anything in between. Either it's wrong and sinful and you should bury it away, or it's good and beautiful and you should totally embrace it.

Or maybe it's both and we're just like everyone else? Maybe the broken areas in our lives are also the ones that God makes beautiful? As Christians, we say the Cross is to be embraced, because it a gift - the means by which we become saints. That doesn't make it any less ugly, vulgar, and painful to go through - but God has walked that road to death and called it the way to life eternal.

As it turns out, everyone has a closet - something they fear letting out into the light. The most painful part of the closet is the silence and darkness. But we aren't meant to remain there - we are children of light. That fear doesn't come from God, who loved us before we were conceived - who Loved us into existence - and knows every past and future moment of our lives.

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We all need support in walking this broken path called life. There's no possible way I could make it without reaching out for help. There are too many "bad days" for me to even attempt to carry my dysphoria myself - and the Church is not asking me to do so.

We all desire unconditional love, and we should - that is what we are called to receive, and give in return.

We all wish be seen as beautiful, and we should - that is how we are called to be known, and have eyes to see in return.

You are not alone.