"Mum, boys don't have boobs, do they? It's only girls, isn't it?"
This was a couple of days ago. I was towel drying my four year old daughter after her bath and I thought to myself, 'Are we having this conversation, already?'
So I decided that we were 'having that conversation already', and responded as I reached for the moisturiser, "Yeah, that's right, because God made us different, didn't He? So we have some things about our bodies that are different and that's what you've noticed, yes?"
"Yeah."
But I'm not going to leave it there, so I pass Mary her pyjamas and add, "We have some things that are the same too, don't we? Like, we both have two eyes, a nose and a mouth."
Mary smiles and says, "Two legs, two arms!"
"Yep. So there are some things the same and some things different, right?"
"What about this?" Mary points to a large freckle she has on her leg.
"Oh", I say, "Well, that's special for you. God gave you that one just for you, because there is no one exactly like you, with your freckles, your body, your mind or your personality, and He made you so beautiful."
"Yeah", says Mary, "Like, I only have two freckles and you have them all over your arms."
True story.
I was thinking about the significance of these conversations and how everything I say and do, whether I pause or answer straight away, means something. Everything about my demeanour in this moment, the way I breathe, the way I speak, is creating norms about how to understand gender and sexuality, and where the line sits between creating privacy and boundaries to keep us safe, versus instilling shame and fear about the power of sexual feelings, which will inevitably emerge in due season. These moments are setting the bedrock for what will be built upon in my daughter's later years, as her understanding becomes more detailed and layered. How do we feel about differences and similarities between boys and girls? How do we understand gender? How do we approach nudity?
What did I want to instil in that moment? I wanted to model a healthy balance, hopefully, between acknowledging the differences and similarities between boys and girls, as well as couch the conversation within the broader framework, that all human beings are unique to all others, because our personhood is jam packed with detail, from the freckles on our bodies to the DNA twisting and turning in the cells that we can't see. This is a place for awe and wonder. It's a place to celebrate being a woman, as well as to let little Mary know, that as much as she is woman, she is also human, and us human beings, boy or girl, are ultimately the same species, despite catchy titles about Venus and Mars and eye-roll questions about what planet women come from. It's the same one as the blokes, by the way, and we came into it in the same way. Shared humanity can be overlooked by those of us in the Church, in our, at times, frantic attempt to defend our belief that, "Male and female, God created them."
Of course, we want to defend that belief. I want to defend that belief. But I'm tired of feeling defensive. I'm tired of watching the defensiveness. I'm tired of watching people on television, in an attempt to honour what is sacred to them, dismiss what is sacred to others. In the lead up to the Same Sex Marriage Plebiscite, it was painful. I couldn't watch another episode of mud slinging, as people talked about the issue as though they weren't talking about the deepest and most sensitive part of their humanity. Who we love and how we experience love is the worst thing we can dismiss or judge in another human being. For me, a Christian, the deepest love I have known is with God. Every time the Bible is patronised and the story of Adam and Eve is rubbished as though it is an antiquated or sexist document, it's like telling me that my love is wrong, or imaginary, or the result of some kind of mental health issue.
And that is equally what has been said all too many times to the LGBTQI+ community. It hurts. Can we just stop doing it to each other?
I'm not saying we don't need to interrogate our understanding of love or of the Bible. I'm not saying that the differences between how we all understand marriage or gender are reconcilable. They're not. Some of the ideas Christians have about sexuality will never be reconcilable with other cultural norms.
What I have simply felt for some time, is that adversarial debate is the worst starting point for this conversation, because we're not just talking about public policy. We're talking about the most sacred moments in people's lives, from towel drying after a childhood bath, to our first kiss, or the way we felt about ourselves as we looked in the mirror at age 15, 25 and 65. We're talking about the relationships and religious experiences that have shaped our entire identity. You can't just throw mud at that and expect truth to prevail. All the mud slinging does is hurt people.
So, I was wondering, if there might be a way to have this conversation honestly, where healing rather than hurting could be the main agenda? Healing can be a painful process, like removing the splinter or setting the broken bone. I get that. But I wondered, is there a way we can stop breaking each other’s bones? Ideas aren't always reconcilable, but relationships are. Isn't that the heart of the Gospel? This question was turning over and over in my head in the lead up to piloting The Peace Builder's Conference at Trinity College. I wondered whether it was authentic to promote peace building as an Anglican Minister, without addressing an area where it is most urgently needed: relationships between LGBTQI+ communities and religious communities. I offered the question to God. Then I met Jordy.
Jordy is a queer, non-religious woman, who works for an organisation I'm also connected with: Initiatives of Change (IofC). After talking for about 5 minutes only (like, we had just met), I casually put the question to her: Could there be another way to have the conversation about religion and sexuality? Jordy is a bold, beautiful woman, with gorgeous blue eyes that 'pop' with intelligence, a funky nose ring and pink hair. She looked at me with her wide, hungry eyes, half smiled and said, "I reckon we could."
So, it was on. After a couple of get-togethers, some long phone conversations about everything from time management to heartbreak to why menstruation shouldn't be a topic of shame (hence, including it here); and after a few glasses of wine, some laughter and some pretty direct questioning, we started to bond. I think I love this woman. By the time we got to the conference we were in a pretty good place of understanding about where we each were coming from. We presented a workshop where we employed restorative justice principles to create A Better Conversation. I was so proud of us. We took turns to tell our stories, uninterrupted, from early childhood to today, and the key influences that had shaped our understandings of love and sexuality. I talked about God and I felt respected. Jordy talked about coming out, and I believe, felt respected.
Then came the moment where I needed to have a bone reset in my thinking. It was a sudden 'snap' moment, where I realised a brokenness in my own system that needed to be reset. It happened when Jordy described the differences between how people, especially religious people, would respond to her relationship if it were with a man, compared with a woman. If she wanted to marry a man, she said, everyone would be happy for her and everyone would celebrate that happening. "Nobody would ask me, is he abusive, or is he an addict or does he gamble?" In contrast, a relationship with a woman would be more open to scrutiny, whilst marriage to a man, even if it was abusive, was always greeted with default approval.
In that moment, I saw my own and my Churches' wounding with a new kind of clarity. The reason that conservative views of gender and marriage are being silenced, isn't because it's so hard to hold such views without being hurtful or bigoted. It's actually pretty easy. The difficulty goes back to towel drying at bath time and to Adam and Eve. It goes back to the reason why I pause and take a breath when my little girl asks me about the differences between boys and girls. I don't want her to know a world where male domination and control is normative, or where violence or abuse in marriage is more common than not. I know that world exists and I know it exists as much within the Church as outside of it, and that to add insult to injury, we have spiritualised the treatment of women as property to be Colonised and functionalised, misappropriating the God-given name that I wear with honour, as "Helper".
This might sound harsh, but if it weren’t at all true, the world would be asking us, “Church, could you guys please teach us how you do marriage so well? Could you tell us the secret to being so whole and alive as men and women?” We just don't have that kind of credibility.
Don't get me wrong. My best experiences of men have been within the Church, not outside of it. My best experiences of being a woman, have come from living within the love of Jesus, not outside of it. I do seek to hold to the truth of scripture, even where it is inconvenient and counter-intuitive. Yet in this search, I can't ignore that the context of Eve being named as Adam's "Helper" is nakedness. It's intimacy without shame. It's love. It's marriage. It's a marriage that submits itself to love and dies to itself. The context is nothing short of this.
I'm not every man's helper.
I'm not every man's subordinate.
I am nothing less than a sister.
And I am a sister to Jesus, not his 'help'. Chosen. Called. Beloved. I have a home with Him, where I don't have to earn my keep and never could anyway.
As Anne Zaki phrased it, “Two thousand years ago there was a Middle Eastern man who took courage, to relate to women in a way that was not acceptable; to give them a value that was not given to them before; to include them as his disciples as no other Rabbi had done in the history of Judaism.”
His proposal was and is marriage; nakedness again, with God, without fear or shame.
And because of His nakedness, I am able to shed the layers of self-protection and self-definition, that keep me from knowing who I truly am as a woman, a wife, a mother and as a sister to the men who I love and serve.