Twilight and Tide Pools: Beyond the Binary

A sermon by Sarah Prager — Writer, Speaker, and UUSA Member

I want to start off talking a bit about history.

I came out as queer 25 years ago when I was 14.

If you do the math, you’ll see I still have 5 months left where I can say I’m in my 30s, but the kids already say being “born in the 1900s” means that 2004 is ancient history. I hope you’ll agree it was recent history… but in terms of queer history it was actually a very different time.

In 2004, marriage equality wasn’t legal in any U.S. state until Massachusetts became the first in May right before my high school graduation. Two thirds of Americans opposed that right becoming law.

Sodomy had been decriminalized nationally just one year earlier. Hardly any celebrities were out besides Ellen DeGeneres. Facebook hadn’t even been invented, let alone Instagram or TikTok for finding other representation—just seeing another queer person was something exciting and relatively rare in my life.

Because of what I couldn’t see reflected in the world around me, I didn’t want to come out to myself as queer because I thought it would mean I couldn’t get married and have kids, never be normal. Now I know families are not made by laws and blood but a shared commitment to each other. But at the time I believed those messages I was getting from the world around me. I couldn’t see representation of what was possible.

When I started to seek out my community’s history, I started to find that representation. I could see myself reflected in the stories of other women who loved like I did. I could see a piece of them living on in me.

When I read love letters between two women from 100 years ago, 200 years ago, Sappho’s poetry about loving other women from over 2,000 years ago, it gives me a sense of belonging, of ancestry, of rootedness. When I read that as a teenager, it blew my mind open to realize that I wasn’t the first one to ever feel this way, that I wasn’t alone, that other women had had these feelings through all of time and that I had an infinite network of women across history with me. We existed. We always have. We always will.

Our community here at UUSA is sacred as well, and has a place in history. Our congregation has existed for over 100 years, in different buildings and of course with different people—people with shared traditions that we carry on today. You have a bond with those worshippers of First Universalist Parish 139 years ago who we never met, like I have queer people from 139 years ago I never met. To know those people had something intimate in common with us is a hauntingly beautiful thing to ponder.

The history of organized religion and queerness is often not a harmonious one—but religion and God have their own distinct relationships with queer people. Though the Church was a negative force in queer people’s lives for centuries before a relatively recent turn in which millions of people of faith like our congregation are now welcoming and affirming, God never hated queer people. Whether you believe in God, or not, or another spirit or force or energy that comes from us or nature or somewhere unknown, that divine is what I mean when I say God here.

Our reading from Genesis describes God’s creation of the world in categories and binaries—earth and heavens, day and night, sky and land and seas, fish and birds and livestock… man and woman—according to the Torah, the Bible.

But God’s creations are not so simple. There is not only day and night—there is dawn and dusk and light in the night from the stars and the moon, and darkness in the day from shade, and fireflies at twilight, and sunrise and eclipses. There are fish that fly and birds that swim. There is not only land and sea but marshes and swamps and bogs and islands and beaches and shallows. So, while the holy books may describe God’s creations in binaries, God did not create us that way. The text leaves out the twilight and the tide pools, but the reality exists anyway.

Nature knows no binary. We are transitioning to spring right now, however bumpily. Animals can change sexes or have more than one sex. Animals can show bisexual or homosexual behaviors. They can engage in sexual acts for pleasure instead of procreation. Males can carry pregnancy and be caretakers, females can be leaders and hunters. There is an infinite spectrum of color and size, combinations of feathers, scales, and fur.

And humans’ natural state is nonbinary, too. Before European Christians exported their ideal of the gender binary around the world, many indigenous communities had three, four, five, or more genders in their cultures as the societal norm. In North America, the umbrella term Two-Spirit holds hundreds of nonbinary genders of Native peoples under it. Two-Spirit people and other nonbinary genders around the globe were and are seen as holy and treasured. As having a special gift to transcend which makes them natural spiritual leaders. The gender binary was created in part to keep women in their roles, in part to further destroy and villainize indigenous peoples, in part as a misinterpretation of the story from Genesis.

In our story this morning, Not Quite Narhal, Kelp learned he could honor both sides of himself—the sea unicorn and the land narwhal—instead of having to choose one or the other. Kelp figured out there was not a binary choice of staying in the ocean or leaving the ocean and chose to live fluidly.

We can all learn from Kelp’s realization that the binary is a false choice. Think about a balance you’re trying to strike in your life right now, maybe about work, or parenting, or rest, or identity. How are you seeing it as a binary choice and how can you expand your thinking to be more fluid, more expansive, recognizing that binary choices are untrue.

No one is winning or losing as you try to flow between the beach and the sea—you are a sea unicorn. You are doing both. And you can do more than two things, too. Be a baker and a sibling and a knitter and a spouse and autistic and UU and an activist and an immigrant and a runner and a friend. Don’t judge yourself for trying to “have it all.” Celebrate that you’re an expansive, fluid being who is doing all that you can, no matter how imperfect by your or others’ judgements. You are not right or wrong, or good or bad—you just are.

I can think of few things more holy than my trans family. They mirror the transition of trees’ leaves from bud to bloom to a colorful death, the sun’s masterpieces across the setting sky transitioning from day to night. They embody nature and art. I am in awe and reverence of their ability to mirror the natural state of the world and constantly change like the water at a point in a stream.

Author Julian K. Jarboe wrote:

“God blessed me by making me trans for the same reason he made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine: so that humanity might share in the act of creation.”

What a gift. Injections, pills, and scars can be tools of the divine—Creation in action.

My spouse and my child are nonbinary. They would be blessings in my life without being trans, but that part of who they are only enriches my life.

I deeply respect their ability to help me see outside of binaries in all parts of life, always finding a third option when I might see two. Not only do they show me how to see another way, but they also show me how they share in continuing the Goddess’s acts of creation, as Jarboe wrote.

LGBTQIA+ people have been part of that for all time as creators.

A gay man created the computer. A trans woman created the microprocessors inside our phones. A gay man created the high five. A trans woman created satellite radio. The children’s books Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are and Frog and Toad were created by queer people.

Queer people’s contributions to the world are in everyone’s everyday lives, not just queer people’s.

We can thank queer people for Swan Lake, the Nutcracker, West Side Story, Sweeney Todd, A Streetcar Named Desire, A Raisin in the Sun, the Mona Lisa, the David, the lyrics of America the Beautiful, and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

LGBTQIA+ people of faith have been part of that history, too.

Christina ruled Sweden in the 1600s as a Lutheran-turned-Catholic. They were raised as a girl but tended towards hunting instead of painting, the equivalent of trucks instead of dolls. They were fluid with their clothing, and dating, and relationship to gender, but being queen required them to marry—a man, of course. In Christina’s words, they would rather choose death than a man.

But it was required. What could they do? Christina thought outside the box and didn’t accept what felt like the only choice in front of them. At the age of 26, they abdicated the throne, negotiated a salary for life, moved to Rome, and lived out their life expressing their gender fluidly. They died happy, free, and old, and are buried in the Vatican.

They found another way.

Juana Ines de la Cruz lived at the same time as Christina but without Christina’s power, privilege, or money. In 17th century Mexico, called New Spain then, women weren’t allowed to get an education or to work, so they needed a husband to provide for them. Getting married was the ticket to food and shelter. But Juana, like Christina, didn’t want to marry a man… and she was far from a wealthy queen.

But Juana also found another way. She became a nun, and the convent provided her food and shelter. She spent her time there studying and became the most educated woman in the country.

She also became one of the most prolific poets of the Spanish language and some of her poems were romantically directed towards Maria Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga, the queen of New Spain. Today, Juana is an icon of Mexican history and appears on the 20-peso note and Mexican stamps.

She found another way.

So, even as the Church was undoubtedly a negative force in the lives of LGBTQIA+ people for centuries—often a deadly force—there is no binary here either. Queer people of faith are part of the story, too.

Our UU history is one to be proud of. We were among the first religions to begin performing same-sex unions… in the 1970s… ancient history, right? In 1984, before I was born, the UU General Assembly passed a resolution formally affirming this practice.

UUs made up half of the plaintiff couples in the Goodridge v. Department of Public Health decision that legalized same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. The first same-sex couple to receive a marriage license in Massachusetts was a UU couple and married in the offices of the UUA.

We have been—and still are—part of every community. A final example of our presence within communities of faith comes from the Jewish tradition. Kalonymus ben Kalonymus lived from 1286 to 1328 in France. They studied philosophy and rabbinical literature and became a prominent writer, translator, and poet. In one poem, they curse being born a man and wish they had been born a woman. I’ll read an excerpt:

Father in Heaven who did miracles for our ancestors with fire and water.

You transformed the fire of Chaldees so it would not burn hot.

You transformed Dinah in the womb of her mother to a girl.

You transformed the staff to a snake before a million eyes.

You transformed Moses’s hand to a leprous white, and the sea to dry land.

You transformed rock to water, hard flint to a fountain.

Who would then transform me from a man to a woman?

Kalonymus ben Kalonymus, Philosopher (1286-1328)

 

However you might believe in the Divine, I have no doubt that Spirit smiles on this transformation and any time we are our true selves. No matter your gender identity, you can learn from the lessons of our nonbinary siblings.

Live in that spirit—questioning yourself, complicating your thinking, continuing to transform yourself over your whole lifespan. Refuse to get stuck in either/or thinking and stay in the “both/and.” Both, and, and more. Find a third, fourth, fifth way. Be a sea unicorn. Look for the twilight and the tidepools.

Your own metamorphosis from child to teen to adult to senior, from single to married to divorced, remarried to widowed, from unemployed to working to retired, from walking unassisted to walking with a cane, from pregnant to postpartum to menopausal… we all have transitions in our lives.

Handle them with openness, fluidity, expansiveness… and beyond the binary.

 

“I believed, and still do, that our bodies are ourselves, that my soul is the voltage conducted through neurons and nerves, and that my spirit is my flesh.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, American author, journalist, and activist

 

Photo by Brice Cooper on Unsplash

The following is a video of this sermon.