What if the Gospel Really is Good News?
My message for Evangelicals
I have a tattoo. OK actually I have several and am looking forward to more but there is one in particular that I want to talk about today. It’s a quote from Joy Davidman Lewis and it goes like this.
If we should ever grow brave, what on earth would become of us?
I am curious as to whether or not reading that did something in you. If not, maybe read it again. I first encountered this quote through my friend (the best C.S. Lewis scholar I know and a soon-to-be-published fantasy author) Kat Coffin who had it as a tattoo before I did. The quote also appears in Patti Callahan’s Becoming Mrs. Lewis who attributes it to an essay Joy wrote titled On Fear and which appears in Smoke on the Mountain as The Sin of Fear. The book itself is written to Christians by a Jewish convert to Christianity and is a study in the ten commandments. Here is the quote in it’s fuller context:
The words of Jesus [“Don’t worry about the future”]are timeless. What worked for other frightened men will work for us. But our society refuses to listen; this injunction about tomorrow is precisely the one thing we will not accept. Our whole economic system, our civilization, our American way, is built on worrying about the future! Our life is based on fear; if we should ever grow brave, what on earth would become of us?
She points to an answer at the end of the essay:
“Thou shalt not” is the beginning of wisdom. But the end of wisdom, the new law, is “Thou shalt.” To be Christian is to be old? Not a bit of it. To be Christian is to be reborn, and free, and unafraid, and immortally young.”
Has the question done something in you yet? I recently had someone read my tattoo and ask my what it meant to me, what it was about.
The media critic (and trans woman) Emily St. James recently published a review of the indie movie I Saw the TV Glow in Vulture. In the review St. James introduces the term “egg cinema”—for my cisgender readers, an “egg” is a term we use in transgender circles to describe a trans person who has not yet recognized or accepted that they are trans. Here is the paragraph in which she introduces the term:
I Saw the TV Glow is in conversation with a loose grouping of films I have previously dubbed “egg cinema.” These films capture — usually accidentally — the experience of being an egg. In brief, they are interested on a cursory level in questions about gendered existence, but only up to a point. They typically feature a portal between one world and another, and they are often written about as though they are, wow, so wildly inventive. (A few notable examples: Being John Malkovich, Midsommar, Poor Things, and, yes, The Matrix.)
I want to press into this concept and highlight a particular theme that is, I think, omnipresent in egg cinema and which accounts for at least some of why egg cinema is so frequently compelling even to cis people: a particular shade or experience of sehnsucht. Broadly, sehnsucht is an intense or deep longing for “we know not what”. Sometimes it is described as a longing for a home we have never found or for what is over the horizon or for a place we left without ever having been in. Notably, C. S. Lewis is often cited as one of the best English language expositors of sehnsucht which he often just called joy. My favorite of his descriptions of it appears in The Weight of Glory
In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter.
But I have said that I am talking about a particular flavor or form of sehsucht. What I am interested in here, and what I think egg cinema tends to capture so well is the moment when we glimpse what it is that the sehnsucht is for and are faced with the question of grasping it. There is something in us that both understand and shrinks back in horror, shame, or fear from the all to easy option of refusing the call—it is a very very dangerous call.
My egg cracked three and a half years before I came out and began to transition. That is to say that for three and half years I knew that I am a woman and I continued to choose to live as a man. I had my reasons for that and not all of them were at all illegitimate. I am not here to shame closeted queer folk—remember this essay is about the Gospel—there are real and valid reasons that many of us stay closeted. And it hurts so so so badly to do so.
To choose to grasp at the object of sehnsuch is to risk it all. If we should ever grow brave, what on earth would become of us? As Tolkien put it:
“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
in choosing Joy there is a loss of control. The object of our Joy may well be good, but He isn’t safe.
What is safe, is what we already know. What is safe is the version of us and the version of reality that we have already built in our imaginations in and which we have lived (maybe not with any great excess of delight, but well enough, I mean we are here now aren’t we? we made it this far?) until now. Who knows, who can know, what it will cost us to choose that shining path that our troublesome soul won’t stop telling us we were made for.
We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. - The Weight of Glory
To be trans is, at some level to be a person haunted by sehnsucht. But then to be human at all is to be haunted by sehnsucht.
But I promised to write about the Gospel.
Very well then, I believe that the Gospel is good news. I believe that we are made for Joy and for belonging, and for beauty, and for Goodness. We are told that it was for freedom that Christ has set us free. We are given, in the Gospels, and great drama of redemption in which God, the All-Loving Creator chooses to be joined to humanity in the form of a human man among a colonized people. We are told how he grew in wisdom; we are told that he taught us a Way of being and that those closest to him recognized his teaching and called it “the words of eternal life” they asked him to “show [them] God” and he told them “whoever has seen me has seen the Father”. We are told that we are also invited to follow this god-man along his Way, that it means loving God and it means loving one another. We are told to broaden our concept of “neighbor” and to love even those who call us enemy.
But “there’s no knowing where you might be swept off too”. One thing we are told is that this Way leads to death. Only it is not a way to death, but a way through it. We are told that the God-man embraced death, dove into its heart, and made a hole through to an eternal life on the other side of death. And because it was God united eternally with humanity who made this way through death into life, all of humanity is now able to follow this Way, not to death but through it into life.
But the descriptions of what all of that is going to look like. Well they are too vague. We were given a way and a teacher, but we were not given any map. We are invited to follow but we haven’t really been told what to pack; in fact we have been cautioned against trying to pack for this journey.
The day I decided that I was going to come out, I did not know what it would cost, nor did I know where the journey would lead. I knew that something would die. I had to choose to die to “the old man”. The persona I had built so carefully over 39 years, the one people liked and respected—he was so carefully and artfully crafted—would die.
I knew that staying where I was would lead to nothing but the slow death of everything I was trying to protect; and I knew the call of that “far off country”; I knew that Something in my soul was longing to breathe and be free.
But you see, that is the thing about encountering Truth. The one thing we do know is that accepting it is not going to let us be. To accept Truth is to be contaminated by it—transformed into something new without being able to know in advance quite what it is that we are becoming. It is a scary scary thing if we should ever grow brave, oh what on earth would become of us?
I know that I am an unusual duck. I’m a Christian trans woman. I am proudly, gloriously queer. I am not alone but there aren’t a lot of us. And it isn’t at all uncommon for people (usually people who call themselves Christians) to try to get to me renounce my faith. They don’t like that I’m trans, they don’t like that I’m queer, but they really don’t like that, as a queer trans woman, I am also a Christian and that I will forever insist on talking about all of those things and conflating them. But you see, that is just the problem. I have to conflate them. “I am in love and out of it I will not go.” The story of how I came to peace and joy in who I am is so wrapped up in the story of my walk with Jesus that I can’t really tell one without telling the other.
What is the Gospel? Well it is one great truth; but it is a great truth that can be told in as many or more ways than there are people, and my experience of the Good News has been one of transforming ever more into who I am and who I am made to be and who I am always ever more becoming. Sanctification, in my life looks like like the fruit of the spirit; it looks like learning to embrace the Beatitudes, but it also looks (and this is true for everyone) like become more and more the person I was made to be. In my case that has a delightful physical component to it. For me to follow the Way of Jesus means that I am writing the story of my life in the direction of the Joy that has been (and is being) prepared for me.
So to end with a message to Evangelicals (I never forgot that I was writing this to you): I want you to hear, I want you to know that the Gospel really is good news. I want you to hear that God came that you might have life and have it to the fullest. I want you to know that God really, actually, honest-to-God is love. I want you to know that that part of you soul that it longing, yearning, stretching, despairing for Joy is not a temptation but is the very echo of God’s Holy Spirit in you longing to be united in life to Christ. You desire, your sehnsucht is not a distraction from following God, it is the voice of God’s love calling you out into the place of Wild Magic and unforeseen delights and suffering where there is life and that to the full. I want you to stop choosing the safety of rules and repression and for you to choose the One who is life. I want for you to live. I want for you to grow brave.
Fin
P.S. Passing the Hat
We are looking at a financially tight summer due to a few unexpected costs and the peculiarities of Baltimore City Schools’ salary system. We will be OK but if you have been considering upgrading to a paid subscription to my Substack and you can afford it, that would be really helpful. I will continue to make all of my essays free regardless and I am so so thankful for everyone who reads and engages with my writing.