11/16/2023
Take This All of You and Eat It: Week 2 of November Writing Challenge
I am thirteen. I am in a church with stained glass windows that are older, bigger, and more beautiful than I will ever be, despite how much I yearn to be older, to be bigger, to be beautiful. The room is large and hot and quiet save for the shuffling wood of the pews, the dull hum of the unused organ, and the priest some fifteen feet away. The priest holds up a wafer and promises to make it into the flesh of a man. To make it real. I ring my little bells when it’s time and try not to fidget in my massive altar server’s robes. The priest, the man, is wearing long silk vestments in bright green. He looks like a stained glass window. Striking. I break the commandment about coveting my neighbor’s goods. I see this priest, his color and his silks. I covet. “This is my body.”
Growing up Catholic taught me a lot. The mysticism, the iconography, and the rituals all gave me the intoxicating feeling of being dropped like a single daub of paint into a millennia long portrait of blood and art and tears and prayers. I felt like I was part of something rich and gorgeous. Until, of course, I didn’t. Until, of course, it meant Catholic school and uniforms and confession and shame and sin and perdition. Until, of course, it meant looking up at the half-naked painted Savior and looking away, tasting his body on my tongue and struggling to swallow. I couldn’t dress like a girl except in the shadows and the trouble with shadows is that, without the light to see, everything looks like a sin.
Reading over my poetry throughout the month I've begun to notice a sneaky new theme slowly emerging throughout a good many of them. My Catholic upbringing rears its perpetually bowed head in, at this point, the majority of the month's labor. I reference rosaries and prayer and saints and transformation. So much of my journey into my flesh, my true flesh, has felt like making a Eucharist of myself, transubstantiating my boy into woman. I can take comfort, at least, in knowing I’m not alone in this. Writer Eve Tushnet, in her essay “Velvet and Pus: A Catholic Queer imagination,” writes:
“Even before I became Catholic I noticed this insistence on the meaning of the body—“meaning” in the sense that the body could be interpreted, that you could not only feel it but understand it (or misunderstand it). But also “meaning” in the sense of importance: the body means a lot.”
The saints explore their body’s relationship with Divinity constantly, a phenomenon explored brilliantly in visual artist Lizz Hamilton’s seminal podcast All Miracles Are Strange. In each episode Hamilton explores how men and women are venerated by disease, by wounds, by indignity.
As a trans woman I know a lot about indignity. My breasts ache. My stubble bickers with me. My newly long hair seems allergic to any kind of containment. My body rarely cooperates with me during sex. So much of me has changed. And yet, with each dose of hormones I feel closer to God. I feel a greater empathy for those like me. I feel the stones of my soft pink tomb rolled away. She is risen.
My transfiguration, pun intended, brings me more closely attuned with the religion of my childhood. Suddenly I am reading the Bible. I am praying the rosary. I am taking comfort in the idea of The Mysteries being the propulsive core of the faith. Too often we search for answers when we should be falling in love with the questions themselves, listening for the all-too-sweet whispers of answers within us. I want suddenly to drink wine with my girlfriends. I want to thank God for my body. I want to pray with every poem I write, and so I do.
Even when my body breaks itself slowly, softening itself and reducing its muscle mass, I am reminded of the holiness of transformative suffering. Psalm 2 verse 9 tells us “Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.” I feel myself breaking. I feel myself dashing to pieces according to a will within myself. I feel the intangible truth of my body. With my first month on hormones I asked my trans friends when I should expect changes. So many of them told me the same thing. I should see results soon. I should let the body and the medicine do their works.
I should have faith.
My work lately has been full of faith. Has been full of gratitude. Has been full of prayer. I have been unchained from the shame and secrecy of wearing women’s clothes after my house has fallen asleep. I don’t need to pray for miracles when I can unscrew the caps on bottles full of them every morning and take them according to His will. Catholicism taught me to love the flesh, to see beauty in the corpse of a man who gave everything for us. Whether you believe in it or not, there’s power in a story of that much sacrifice. I know trans people who sacrifice themselves, who give their all to be saviors and safety for those that need them.
And, like the Saints, we’re not all that popular for our devotion in our time. Our pursuit of our holiest selves, our truest and purest selves, gets us a lot of attention and a lot of distance from those that don’t understand. Radical members of the faith have suffered the same faith. Ascetics, mystics, monks, nuns. We retreat into our little ministries online and in person, we change our bodies. We accept the judgment that comes with it. As Aphrahat says in The Sixth Demonstration of Patrologia Syriaca, “Whosoever adopts the likeness of angels, let him be a stranger to humans.”
I know women who howl like dogs at the moon and feel more joy in the howling than I ever have in my life. I know women who cover themselves in tattoos to feel closer to God. I know women who worked with surgeons to scar their bodies into their best selves. These are holy women. These are angels. They are strangers to humans. They are no strangers to God.
Yours with an open mouth,
-B
