A Breath of Air

On Talking to Jesus, Owning my Transness, and the Spiritual Weight of Choosing

I have held off on publishing this story for quite a while now. Properly it fits most clearly with the series I wrote when I first came out: My coming out letter, an account of what it was like to feel my divided self beginning to integrate, and the story of my first big emotional healing breakthrough after coming out. This is the story of my spiritual life leading up to and culminating in my decision to come out as a transgender woman. It’s a story I have told in-person to quite a few people but never quite got around to publishing.

There are, I think, a number of reasons for that. For one thing I was considering (and still am) writing a book and this seemed like a natural chapter for it; for another, this is in some ways an even more intimate and therefore vulnerable story than the other three. Finally, I think I have hesitated because of the nature of the story itself. It is dear to me. I cannot tell this story without relating much—not all, there are things I choose to keep my own—of my spiritual life, of the source of hope, joy, and affirmation my current life is built on. This story matters to me and it matters on a level that I know others, whether because of diverging religious beliefs or an innate skepticism, are far more likely to reject. It is also a sacrifice to share. When we (or when I) have spiritual experiences of a certain sort they happen as a sort of blend of imagined sensory experience and pre-sensory impressions. I will be relating, in this story, things I felt God was saying to me. But none of those relatings will be quite right because what I “heard” and “felt” I did not so much hear or feel as I experienced them prior to the involvement of the sensory parts of my mind. The hearing came only on reflection as I tried to take what I now knew and put it into words and feelings.

The problem with memory is that, once I had done that, and with each repetition of the exercise, I have become more and more inclined to remember the translation-into-words-and-feelings and less and less able to access that immediate pre-sensory knowing. I have heard others say similar things about their more mystical experiences so there is plenty of room for skepticism. Suffice it to say that, while I chose to share this experience with friends and family, and now with world, it is not the only experience of it’s type that I have had and treasure and some will remain between just God and me. And I think that is right.

So let me tell you the story. After I had graduated from college but before my egg had cracked¹, during the Vineyard years, I was introduced to a method of prayer that we called Imaginative Prayer. It is pretty much what it sounds like, mostly Ignatian spiritual exercises for charismatic evangelicals with a dash of Eastern Orthodoxy added for spice. There are a number of prayer and listening practices associated with all of this but the basic method I adopted is to begin by imagining myself in a place that feels secure and comfortable and then asking myself (or be asked) where Jesus is in my imagined space and trusting God to be really present in some way. My habit was, and still is, to begin by repeating either The Lord’s Prayer or the Jesus Prayer a few times while breathing in the sort of measured way that helps me to focus. From the first time I prayed this way I have always imagined the same starting space; I imagine a comfy basement room in my own heart. The symbolism there is a little too on the nose I know but the first time I prayed that way that was sort of what came to mind and I liked it enough that I didn’t really ever change it.² 

The first time I tried praying this way was a serious trip. On the one hand I do believe that God communicates to us and that the Holy Spirit hears and responds to us as a person; on the other hand, despite a few powerful experiences throughout my life, I have always been skeptical that I (or anyone else honestly) is actually experiencing God at any given time. I remember starting this exercise with a sort of “well let’s see what happens” sort of attitude. The two things I remember distinctly are that Jesus was there and then the chain and manacles. Jesus…seemed real to me. What I mean by that is that my first reaction was not to screw up my focus to make Jesus seem more real or anything like that, it was to just start talking about the manacles—I had a lot to say on that subject—and then Jesus responded in a different direction, one I don’t think I would have anticipated or guessed before I started praying.

I am getting ahead of myself though so lets step back and imagine the room. This comfy “good place to grab a beer and play video games while you eat nachos and talk to a few good friends” sort of room. In my prayer is has old 80s wood paneling on the walls—the thin kind that splinters really easily—and over in a corner about chest high is this giant U-bolt on a metal plate bolted on to the wall. The second thing I noticed after I entered the room (Jesus was the first because I think that was sort of the point of the exercise right?) was that I had a manacle on and that the manacle was chained to the U bolt on the wall. For years, every time prayed that way the U bolt, the chain, and the manacles would be there. Sometimes the manacles would be on my wrists and sometimes on my ankles but they were always there. The chain was long enough that I could go anywhere in the room, so it didn’t really get in the way or anything but it was so obvious and the imagery or metaphor of it was so strong that I just felt like it had to be dealt with.

So I started off with confession. It seemed to obvious thing to do. On some level I was dreading the “operation” it would take to get rid of the chain and the manacles and all. It had to be my sin right? And I mean at that point in my life I was pretty sure it had to be my “struggle with lust”³. So I sort of turned to Jesus and before I could mentally compose a solid confession Jesus just grinned and cracked open a beer then invited me to sit next to him on the couch. I sat down—you don’t just disobey Jesus in these circumstances—and again before I could get anything out he said “I know. Don’t worry about it right now. We will deal with that when the time is right. For now you need to know I love you, I’m right here, and I’m so proud of you.” Then I hugged him.

I heard somewhere that you never really see Jesus’ face in these prayers and that is my experience. And as I said above, I didn’t really hear Jesus voice, not even in my “mind’s ear”, exactly. It’s more like I have a knowing or an experiencing at a level more basic that perception. It’s like Jesus is communicating directly with the part of my brain that processes meaning and then, in order to think about what was communicated to me, I have to put words on it just because that is how I am so used to thinking about thinking. So Jesus didn’t use words, he communicated a thing and the words I put down are sort of what I came up with so that I could store the memory.⁴

Anyway I didn’t cry or have an ecstatic experience or speak in tongues or anything like that. It was just a really nice, really comforting experience and, when I finished, I had a deeply renewed sense of my connection with God. I still thought of my “struggle with lust”⁵ as a sin and I could admit that I wasn’t in a place to even begin to know what to do with it or about it, and I didn’t think Jesus was saying it was unimportant or anything but I also knew that Jesus wasn’t worried about it and that it wasn’t going to be allowed to come between us. I wonder a lot whether one of the problems with Evangelicalism isn’t that they don’t believe God is actually more powerful than sin, and whether that drives them to act more out of a fear of sin (real or perceived) than of a love for Jesus.

After that I decided I wanted to keep praying that way. I liked the experience. If I remember correctly for about a year after that the room-Jesus-chain dynamic didn’t really change. Sometimes Jesus would *say* other stuff but any time I started to bring up the chain he just sort of interrupted and assured me that we would get to it when I was ready. One time I even got the terrible and horrifying idea that this Person I was interacting with might be a demon or something because I was worried that the real Jesus wouldn’t be that flippant about my sin. I tried (successfully) to say both the Lord’s Prayer and the Jesus Prayer right there in the room and when I looked up He was still there laughing and communicating something along the lines of what He said to Thomas.

It all contradicted a lot of what I had absorbed about how a relationship with God is supposed to work. Do you remember those sermons where it was all about defining sin as “missing the mark” (it’s a archery term you know) and that when we sin it is us turning our back on God and that God is always there to welcome you back as soon as you turn from your sin, and then there would be an altar call or something where we would be invited to renounce our sin because Jesus was waiting “like the Father in the Prodigal Son” to welcome us back as soon as we repented? This was confusing because it seemed like Jesus was saying that He was going to be with me anyway even if I hadn’t repented and that He wanted me to trust him for when it would be time to address my “sin issue” but that the chains weren’t keeping me from being with Him, the only thing that would do that would be me choosing not to acknowledge His presence. That was big for me.

After a year or so as my relationship with God got healthier and some of the more toxic elements of Evangelical culture fell away I noticed that I wouldn’t always be wearing the manacles in my prayers. I can’t tell you the first time I was in the room and not wearing them because, by then, I had learned to not always pay attention to them and, as a result, the realization that I wasn’t wearing them anymore was a gradual one. I remember that back then my wife and I were still at the Vineyard and we were thinking a lot about the difference between knowing Jesus just because Jesus is good to know and knowing Jesus as a way to get free of sin⁶. Freedom from sin is a great thing but when you make getting rid of it the reason for your relationship with God you make the mistake of displacing the most important thing—being in relationship with God. It would be like marrying a woman in order to overcome compulsive porn use rather than marrying a woman because you loved her. Getting a compulsive behavior under control is great but if that is your primary reason for marrying someone you are going to end up in a loveless marriage and, likely as not, go right back to the compulsion to numb the feelings of loneliness and isolation. C.S. Lewis called it the Law of First and Second Things: If you put second things first you won’t get the first things or the second things; the only way to get the second things is to genuinely put the first things first. We decided to focus on knowing Jesus and trust that he would take care of the rest. And I found that when I prayed out of a desire to just experience Jesus and see what He had to communicate to me, I would generally show up not wearing the manacles (they would be sort of piled on the floor under the U bolt) whereas when I prayed out of a desire to deal with my “sexual sin”, I showed up wearing the manacles.

The next big development came just after my egg cracked⁷. I want to tell you that the first thing I did after that great big realization was to pray but lying about praying seems like a generally bad idea. I think it actually took a few days before I prayed in an intentional way about it. They weren’t easy days for me and, yes, it would have made sense to go to Jesus pretty quickly with the heavy heavy stuff I had just realized. By then I didn’t have any fear that God would reject me for being trans; I was already several years into my active apologist for LGBTQ+ affirmation in the Church phase. I think I was afraid that talking to Jesus about it would require me to do something about it and in 2017 I was definitely not ready to do anything about it. Mostly I wanted to figure out how to be sure I was right in what I was thinking about myself and I wanted to work out what that would mean for me going forward. I was scared about what it might mean for my family and my relationships too. 

I was afraid Jesus was going to tell me I had to transition. Granted that is probably not the first fear that would come to mind for a lot of queer people who were raised evangelical—generally you run more into the fear that God will want us to distance ourselves from our queerness—but I think it makes some sense at least in my case. For one, I have always had an overdeveloped sense of a duty to act on my convictions. I don’t know if I picked it up from reading too many chivalric fantasy novels, or from my family, or if it is just one of those bits of my personality but I don’t tend to sit well with myself when I feel that I am behaving or speaking in a way that is out of sync with the ideas I hold. I was afraid that being honest with Jesus about being trans would sort of cement my trans-ness—my womanhood—as a fact. I think I was also afraid that Jesus would tell me I wasn’t trans—it was a confusing time OK? But when I did finally go to meet with Jesus again I was taken aback.

At that point I had been confident that the U bolt, chain, and manacles represented my “sexual sin” in some way and until the day my egg cracked, even though I had stopped believing that there was anything sinful about queerness years before, I hadn’t stopped thinking of my own desire to be a woman as a giant component of my sexual sin. When I entered into my basement heart room it was on a day that I was feeling really low and really scared about the future and I was right in the middle of my first⁸ giant dysphoria spike. It was probably the intensity of the pain and stress I was feeling that drove me back to prayer. When you are hurting enough you will sometimes go even to places that scare you if you also associated them with healing and acceptance. I went right in for a hug on Jesus and he bear hugged me back. At first all I got was comfort and a large sort of nebulous sense that “it’s gonna be alright” without the sort of specificity that would make that pronouncement either ominous or encouraging. But that was really what I was there for so I lingered in the hug for several minutes and just cried on the inside (my ability to cry on the outside had already started to fade though I hadn’t lost it altogether yet). 

When I looked up and looked around what I noticed was that the chain and the manacles were gone. On that day Jesus didn’t directly confirm to me that I was trans. I had already begun to know it but acceptance took…longer, and came more like a rising tide on advancing waves than as a moment of baptism. But the manacles were gone and so was the chain, and the moment I saw that I knew that they were gone because what I had taken to be sexual sin had actually been my own confinement under the delusion that those thoughts and desires represented something wrong or broken in me. Once my egg cracked that delusion wasn’t protecting me from anything anymore (it had been keeping me from recognizing my own queerness) and it turns out that sometimes our deepest questions and concerns don’t need so much to be resolved as they do dissolved.

The chain and manacles were gone but the U bolt was still affixed to the wall. I don’t really know now whether or not I knew what it was or specifically what it represented the first time I saw it there without the chain. I honestly just wasn’t ready to think about it and, like before, Jesus didn’t seem interested in rushing me. He was excited about the manacles and chains being gone. I think what I remember is something along the lines of “I’m so glad you can see” and then when I started panicking about what all of this might mean or have to mean I just got that hug and an invitation to sit on the couch with him. “We will deal with that when you are ready”. 

Then, three and a half years later, came the day I came out properly to Ashley. You will remember I did it at night after a date and before we were supposed to go pick up the kids. And like before I didn’t pray about it until a little later; but I need to back up a touch. 

After I had started therapy and we had discussed all of the other issues that I had hoped were to blame for my, by then constant, anger we started talking about my gender experience. I had described the sadness to her and after some back and forth I was convinced that coming out and probably transitioning were pretty much the only way I would have any chance of ending the sadness⁹.

As it stood I decided, and then informed my therapist of my decision, to take Lent and to pray and think very specifically about the question of whether or not to come out. I did get a lot better about my prayer life that month; I had asked a priest friend of mine to do some spiritual direction with me a while before and I now I called him and we scheduled our first session. This time I didn’t dodge the issue, honestly I think it would have been a relief for Jesus to have told me to do anything at that point. “No, transition would be selfish right now, wait until later and you will be yourself at the resurrection—won’t everyone else be surprised!” would have been a welcome message if only because it would have given me confidence that the “know it but don’t do anything about it” path I had tried to choose was going to be walk-able. I could have rested at least a little in the knowledge that Jesus would be giving me strength. 

All during Lent I was unable to get any sense of Jesus telling me what I had to do in any way. Early on, maybe even before the Lenten prayer sessions, I had asked Jesus to confirm who I understood myself to be and that had always been met with a joyful sense of an embrace and affirmation of me as His daughter. That certainly continued through Lent as Jesus would sort of welcome me and call me daughter or Billie¹⁰ and embrace me before I sat down on the couch next to him or on the carpet near the couch he was sitting on and asked him what I was supposed to do. And every single time the response was the same. It amounted to Whether or not you choose to come out and live as who you are, you will not lose my love, you will not be sinning with either choice. There is great joy and a great fullness of life for you if you choose to come out but I will not tell you that there will be no danger or hardship or that everything will work out—it will be hard as well as free. And if you decide to stay here I won’t love you any less or be disappointed in you. I will be here with you as you try to walk that road. And on the one hand, while that was beautifully and wonderfully affirming but it didn’t really help me to make a decision.

And honestly I think that a lot of us, especially those of us in the evangelical and charismatic traditions, have a tendency to do what I was doing. I wanted Jesus to take the responsibility for my decision from me. I wanted Jesus to tell me that I had to come out, that I had to transition, or that I shouldn’t come out and shouldn’t transition because if He did then I would avoid responsibility for any of the consequences. Any pain, especially the pain of the people I love the most, or broken relationships I would be able to blame on Jesus. I wouldn’t have to carry them. Honestly I wonder whether we think often enough about the fact that there are fewer universal commands in the Bible than we tend to want. Really I think the only two universal ones are “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength” and “Love your neighbor as yourself”; if everything else hangs on these then everything else is subject to exceptions if and when following them would contradict those two. And I also wonder if we spend enough time thinking about how much of a grace it is to have rules to follow, they carry so much of our emotional and relational weight. But Jesus didn’t take the burden of this choice from me. And neither did my own psychology. I was miserable but I was not suicidal, and misery can be endured if only we keep taking the next step forward, it doesn’t (or at least it didn’t to me at the time) qualify as requiring an action.

In the end it took the realization that the steps I was taking, the psychological and emotional knots I was tying myself in in an effort to stay closeted were going to end up costing me the very relationships I was staying closeted to protect. I realized that in trying to “stay a man” I was becoming someone I wouldn’t want to subject my family to—someone who could experience no emotion but anger and no real connection, only detachment. Writing a few years later I can say that I don’t believe any trans person should have to justify being out or transitioning; those things are justified simply because they are acts of Truth. But that is where I was at the time.

So it wasn’t my prayer life that convinced me to embrace the journey towards becoming who I am; but it was my prayer life that confirmed that decision.

I am not sure how long it took me to pray after that night when I came out all the way to Ashley. It couldn’t have been more than a few days and I think it was probably the next morning. But when I did it was…dramatic. I started the same as always, with a few repetitions of the Lord’s Prayer while I steadied my breathing in time to the lines of the prayer, and then I traveled down/inward to the room in my heart. As soon as I entered, before I could even begin to formulate a question or anything, Jesus launched Himself off the couch smiling like a maniac, strode right past me to that U-bolt on the wall, and just wrenched it off the wall in one motion. The U-bolt and the panel it was joined to pulled away a massive section of the wall paneling with them and Jesus immediately got to work clearing away more paneling to reveal a door set in the wall. That is when he came over to me, gave me a giant hug, and then walked me over to the door. I opened it and outside light came bursting into the room from a set of stairs that led upwards. I really couldn’t see past the first few steps because it was all so bright but the light and the air from the door felt like trees and the wind blowing on a summer day. Then we went back and sat on the couch together as that basement room began to air out. 

The meaning of the doorway and the stairs were pretty obvious to me (this is not high allegory or anything, the symbolism is direct right?) and I already knew that I would be going through the door but I also knew that I didn’t have to just yet. I don’t remember Jesus communicating anything new in that prayer session after we sat down together. He was just so glad for me and so excited for me. This was still going to be big, this was still going to be difficult and painful—nothing had changed there—and there was no but to add after those statements, only two ands. It was going to be big, difficult, painful and it was also full of life, full of the presence of God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit, and I had already chosen it. 

That was over two years ago now. I don’t think I want to share much of what I have found in my journey up that staircase. For now that is something for just God and me to know. But I will say that it really has been full of God’s presence and joy. For all those years when I was praying in a basement room in my heart, I only ever experienced myself in communication with Jesus, the Second Person of the Trinity. Since leaving that room I have also met God as the First and Third persons and always always always I have met Them as myself: a daughter of God freed now from the largest and most pervasive lie that was in my life and walking forward in the journey of life that we all walk.

1. To “crack ones egg” is to realize or admit to yourself for the first time that you are trans,

2. The cynical reader will be inclined to notice that all of the imagery in my experience could readily have been drawn from popular texts and media at my disposal and they will be absolutely correct. The imagination has little more to work with than what it has been furnished already and it seems to the most natural thing in the world to me that my blended imaginative prayer and spiritual experiences would manifest with furniture already available to my imagination and best suited to frame the experience I was having.

3. circa 2012 nearly every male identifying Evangelical was very very concerned about the “struggle with lust”.

4. None of this analysis of the brain and mental mechanics of transcendent experience are original to me. I encountered them first in the much under-read C.S. Lewis essay Transpositions and then again in Mike McHargue’s book Finding God in the Waves

5. I wrote more about my experience of “struggling with lust” and the way in which I used that ubiquitous Evangelical malady to mask my transness from myself HERE

6. This was the “starting to understand a little bit of Dallas Willard” stage of my Christian life.

7. That story can be found HERE

8. While I had experienced gender dysphoria to varying degrees all my life, from middle school or so until my egg cracked, it had generally been masked and muted. Once my egg cracked, beginning about a week after my initial realization, dysphoria came raging out into the open as great waves of existential sadness that would peak and then diminish only to come raging back again.

9. At that time I experienced dysphoria as a great suffocating sadness that still came in waves though, by then the tide had come nearly all the way in,

10. One special joy of that experience was that I was able to know in the same moment that he was calling me by my name, that he was also spelling it B-i-l-l-i-e.