You can't tell that there are Catholics among the ranks of the transgender. Certainly not if you look at the attendees at Southern Comfort or IFGE. Nor can you tell by going online and visiting TGC or Emergence on Yahoo, where I often hang out.

But we're there. I know because I'm one. One of those invisible Catholic trans-persons.

And I tell you from firsthand experience that being Catholic has been more help than hindrance to me when it comes to being trans.

There are several reasons for this, chief of which are the Mass, the Eucharist, and the Scriptures.

The mass is what we call our primary worship service. I came to the Catholic faith when I was still very young and almost knee high. Back then, in the late 1950s they were still saying the mass in Latin, which, to me was even more foreign than the German language I picked up during that time; my dad was a solider for the first two decades of my life and when we three kids were baptized my family was on our first German tour of duty. So my first exposure to mass was filtered through a foreign language that I didn't understand, and I wasn't yet smart enough to ask such questions as why we had to pray in a foreign tongue--didn't God understand English?

Yes, God did and does understand English. And German, and Vietnamese and Spanish and Japanese and Chinese and a whole slew of other languages. I even suspect God understands computer languages too! Maybe She's a universal computer geek!

As to having to pray in a foreign tongue, the church is an old institution. Latin was to the ancient Romans what English is to New Yorkers. Most people in New York speak English (even if they do have an accent!) But when the Roman empire fell the church kept its old language using it as a universal medium of communication. Even today Latin is still the official church language. But since the middle of the 1960s after the smoke cleared from Vatican II as we call the second Vatican council, mass has been said in the language of the people of God And for me, that was the most wonderful thing that could have happened. I could finally begin to understand what liturgy was all about. And would marvel that something as powerful and glorious could have been kept from us by having to filter it through a foreign tongue.

Shortly after we kids were baptized, dad too became a member of the church and mom often attended mass with us. I guess mom might have been called a Catholic sympathizer, (I'm glad they didn't arrest people for that!), and supported our religious education and saw to it that all of us would even have interludes of Catholic schooling. Among my precious childhood memories strangely enough was not so much those interludes as much as remembering dad taking us kids to mass. Sometimes it would be three of us, and sometimes it would be just my sister Barbara and I. Sometimes mom came with us, and we would go the snack bar at one of the nearby casernes and have hamburgers and French fries. (The Golden Arches of McDonald's hadn't yet conquered Europe). Sometimes we might take in a movie and call it a Sunday. Or other times we might go for a ride in the country. And that was memorable even if the country was Germany to me.

And out of that understanding of liturgy grew questions that dawned on me. Like, for instance, if God is a loving parent, how come he chose such a bloody, humiliating way to save the world and put His own child in the middle of all that blood, humiliation, and pain? Surely as God, the all knowing God, could have chosen some other way to save the world. How could a God of love do that to His own child? I haven't figured that one yet.

I would understand that we are all made in the image and likeness of God. That includes women and other marginalized people. But the church still insists on an all male priesthood. And a celibate one at that. Why? What was and is so wrong with women on the altar? Sometimes, it seems like, although the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit, sometimes it still makes stupid mistakes. Sometimes, the humanity of the church leadership gets in the way and we have stupid things like mandatory celibacy and a male only clergy.

Which is why, today, at every mass I attend I wear the purple stole, the international symbol of women's ordination in the Catholic Church. On my stole I wear two buttons. One says Priestly People Come in Both Sexes. The other one says Women's Ordination YES. And I wear a small rainbow cross pinned to the stole, a gentle reminder that God still loves us no matter where we are on the gender spectrum.

Such questions made me think for myself and realize that God would not strike me dead for disagreeing with the Pope on some issue or other. And I would learn that that the Catholic Church, contrary to popular mythology, is not a monolithic beast marching in jackbooted lockstep with the Vatican. Catholics have a variety of opinions from A to Z.

Another reason my Catholic faith was more help than hindrance was the Eucharist. That's what we call the Lord's Supper, as our non Catholic brothers and sisters would call it. The Eucharist is often seen as the source and summit of the faith. Here was Jesus , the Lamb of God who was sacrificed for our sins. We come to Him with all the reverence we have within us. We realize that the son of God humbled himself and became one of us giving himself up on a cross and become a simple piece of human food for us. I always get a sense of awe realizing that this simple gift of bread and wine is Jesus being present to us JUST AS WE ARE. And so I learned to come to him JUST AS I AM. And when my gender issues came to the fore, I would bring them with me to Jesus too.

So, although our non-Catholic brothers and sisters may not realize it, the Catholic faith is also Christocentric. To understand the Catholic faith you also have to have some understanding of Jesus and what he preached and did. There's a gospel story I love, about this wedding feast at Cana. Mary, Jesus' mother, saw they were running out of wine and told him so. Jesus goes: "Oh woman, what has this concern of yours to do with me? My hour has not yet come." Mary goes: (to the wine stewards) "Do whatever He tells you." It dawned on me one day that Mary, even in this little story, was pointing us to Jesus. You can't have one without the other, I surmised.

And a lot of what Jesus preached and did is found in the Scriptures. But not everything. There is much we don't know. For instance, although we know Jesus got lost for three days and was found in the temple in heavy discourse with temple teachers, we don't know how Jesus occupied himself or whether he shot hoops with his friends when he was a teenager. We don't even know if he HAD any friends! Was he a lonely only child? Did his grandparents spoil him rotten? There is much the Scripture doesn't tell us about Jesus. Yes, contrary to popular misconception, Catholics DO read the Bible. We just often don't take it literally. Some of us don't even take it as the inerrant Word, but rather as the Inspired word.

Now, before you think I'm going around trashing the Bible, hear me out. Take the word "Gay". For centuries, a gay person was a happy person, a joyous person, somebody enthusiastic. But over the last century or so, the world has come to mean a person who finds members of his or her own anatomical sex attractive.

Now how old is the Bible? Say about 3000 years? If one word in one language can radically change its meaning over so short a span as nearly a century, how many words in the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin languages have been changed and have different meanings? Yes, the Bible is a translation --it was not originally written in English on a PC and copied at Kinkos but from the Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. So we have to pray the Spirit of divine inspiration gifted the translators to get the translation right.

Those of you who've studied some foreign language know the difficulty of trying to translate one for one. Having studied a little Spanish in my time I learned that the hard way; there are some Spanish idioms and expressions that don't translate well into English. The most you can do is an approximate idea and hope that it captures the flavor of the original. That's why I'm not convinced that we can say for 100 per cent certain that this is exactly what Paul meant when he said this, or this is exactly what Jeremiah meant when he said that when first they set pen to parchment.

But the Scriptures did help me get a grasp of Jesus and give me some inkling of the Old Testament. I remember studying the history of the Old Testament in college and it was there that I discovered the book of Lamentations , which I though at the time was the most beautiful piece of poetry ever written by a suffering humanity And I decided that I was going to read the Bible from cover to cover.

I never succeeded. Because the Bible is a book that can be tedious at times. I learned that there is a lot of bad stuff in the good book. I've seen idolatry in the Bible, I've seen genocide in the Bible, I've seen adultery in the Bible, I've seen murder in the Bible. For something called the good book there is a lot of bad stuff tucked away in there.

And somewhere in there, I got sidetracked and never picked up the Bible for maybe five years. Until I met a Franciscan priest who actually gave me a Bible and encouraged me to read it. Only he didn't recommend reading it from cover to cover like a cheap novel. I learned that there were Scripture readings for each day of the year that are incorporated into each celebration of the liturgy. So Catholics get at least four doses of the Bible in church. Not just Sunday, but every day. The Old Testament for the first readings, the Psalms for the responsorial psalm reading, an Epistle, and a Gospel. And I found I didn't have to be at church to read and meditate on the Scripture.

In fact, the Bible was a help to me as I struggled with my disabilities and later with my gender issues. One of the greatest helps to me was Jesus saying that the whole law was synthesized in two sentences. Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. And the second commandment was just like the first. I was to love my neighbor as I loved myself. It's tough enough to be black and then have to deal with Christians who don't like black people . You see, I'm black people. And Trans to boot. Being a Christian is not for wimps. As I said performing at my first talent night at Southern Comfort, you've gotta be tough if you're gonna be T and you wanna lay claim to the victory!

Or you will not survive. I know of a girl who didn't. And of another one who came close to not surviving.

Not only was I supposed to love my neighbor, bad as he or she sometimes was. I was also to love myself. And it was John 9, in the story of the man born blind, that I found the realization that we are as we are for the greater glory of God. "Sic transit gloria!" I could say in triumph. Thus for the greater glory of God. So I never had to battle that sense of shame and guilt that a lot of Christians battled as they came to the realization of their true selves. I am fearfully, wonderfully made, someone here for the greater glory of God.

I learned you can use the Bible to help you meditate on the various stories and see what God is trying to say to you through those Scriptures. You can actually visualize and put yourself in the middle of the action and think and pray and let it soak into you. And sometimes, the Scripture can move you. As it sometimes does for this T girl who just so happens to be Catholic.

I should also mention the Sacraments. They too are spiritual helps. A Sacrament in a nutshell, is an outward sign of an inward reality. The Lord's Supper, or Eucharist as we call it, is a Sacrament. The bread and wine are the outward signs of the graced moment when Jesus made his ultimate sacrifice. Baptism is also a Sacrament. The outward sign is the water, the inward reality is the graced moment when we become adopted children of God.

Although there are many helpful things in the Catholic church, the church being brutally human, has its share of problems for trans folks. One of the first things is that the official church leadership recently promulgated a letter in 2002 that, among other things, forbid bishops to change the gender marker on baptismal records, prohibit clergy from having SRS, forbid trans people from entering the clergy, religious life, and marrying in the church. But it did not explicitly prohibit trans people from attending mass and receiving the Eucharist.

Yet many of us are still there. Many of us have decided that this is just as much our church as it is anyone else's church. And so many of us are doing what we can to make a home for ourselves in that sometime troublesome church.

And many people in my parish have slowly come around to accepting me as I am, even as some have not. God is good; many people in my parish have become used to seeing me as my true self and are still friends. Some days it isn't easy. Didn't I tell you being Christian is not for wimps? People in my church have tried me. But there's a song, I've forgotten who wrote it, called "Gather Us In."

Love,
Joy

Email me at:   Joy_girl@bellsouth.net

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