On Shame and the Gender of Souls

The Fishhook

This may seem to be a bit of a heavy topic, but I assume writing is like fishing: the line doesn't go very deep until you put weights on it. It may also seem controversial, but, as in fishing, the pointy part is right down there with the weights, and it does no good to drop a line if there's no chance of it sinking into something and sticking there. 

I could probably hyperextend the analogy to include how the topic is sort of slimy and dirty, how you have to wash your hands after you deal with it, and maybe how you can buy it in styrofoam bowls from overgrown convenience stores, but suffice to say, this bit has been the bait, the worm if you will. I don't know what fish see as appetizing in worms, but I hear it's just the movement that attracts them.

Wiggle, wiggle.

Big Question: Do Souls have Gender?

My Problem

There is a question with which I have struggled for years (the question, not the actual content, to be clear), a question for which I have never heard a satisfactory answer until a few stars recently aligned: What is a Christian response to the intersex person? How does the existence of hermaphroditic person fit into a Biblical worldview? And what should we make of people who claim to be "women in men's bodies" and vice versa?

This fact, for me, seemed to contradict the creation account of humans in Genesis 1:27:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Where is transgender in that list of two? "and"? It doesn't seem to be included. Should we deny the issue (impossible) or deny the accuracy of scripture (possibly more impossible)? We seem to be borne down by the horns of a furious dilemma, and it is intent on causing is great injury.


First, let's look at why God created them male and female. In the detailed creation account in Genesis 2:19:

Then the LORD God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him."

In the big picture, we realize that marriage, while good for us, was given majorly to teach us about God, or in a less human-centric manner of speaking, to display himself in his creation. Elsewhere in scripture we see the union of a man with a woman as intended to stand for Christ's relationship with His Church, (Eph 5), and even in the creation story, God says "let us make man in our image." God is, within himself, a relationship. (this is the trinity, and I talked about that already.) Marriage was given for us to recognize and feel the intimacy with which God knows himself. The paradox is made abundantly evident in Gen. 2 when God tells them that "they shall become one flesh."

Soul Sex

This raises the question, then: how is a person male or female? One would think the answer lies within (or without, depending on the gender and the temperature of the room), but this is obviously not the case when we include intersex people. The question then is, what is a person really? In most people's worldviews (those with whom it seems profitable to reason at all), a person is not their body, but something other, something more mysterious and etherial, a soul or spirit. To say, then, that a person is a man or woman (even more directly stated when a person claims to be a "man in a woman's body"), is to say that the soul has a gender. But is this so? 


To address the problem scripturally, let's go to Jesus for the inside scoop. In Matthew 22:30, Jesus was in the middle of another sticky dilemma posed by some wily Pharisees, concerning to whom a woman would be married if she had seven husbands in succession and a "series of unfortunate accidents" happened to occur. (I frankly think that in this situation, the third through seventh husbands should have thought a bit harder about jumping on that train in the first place, but this is tangential.) Jesus makes the statement:

For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.

Interesting, considering the fact that (a) God said, "it is not good for man to be alone", (b) male and female were created by God for companionship and to illustrate His image, and He called them good in Gen. 1. What could this mean? 


The paradox is alleviated when we recognize that souls do not need (or, I believe, have) genders. In heaven, the intimacy of sex is not required, for we can fully realize the intimacy of God in spirit and in truth. The image of God portrayed by marriage is unnecessary, being only a dim image of the true God who will be as present and ubiquitous as light in heaven. And rationally, souls don't need to reproduce (they're eternal), so why in light of all these reasons, would a soul need to have a gender or a sexual orientation at all?


This leaves us with saying that the core of a person doesn't actually have a gender, but that their gender is defined by their physical body. Not just transgendered people, but you, me and my girlfriend. We don't have genders, but our bodies do.

Shame and Self

By now, we should be realizing that the problem is less fundamental than we thought (or possibly more). That is, less physical (soulal?), and more a problem of morals, or sensations. It's not the case that a "female soul" is born into a "male body", because no such female soul exists. The question is, why does it feel that way? For a Christian, the answer to this should be obvious: according to Biblical Christian doctrine (and from self-examination), a person can feel this way because the body is flawed. 

We know that chemicals in the body can alter sensations. This is nothing more than the physical inducing sensations to the conscious part of us (the soul), same as when you drop a brick on your foot. And nobody said that this body itself was right. In fact, it's very clear in scripture that it is not, it is very flawed. Our sinful self-worship brings about new evil into the world every day, and through Adam's sin, death came to every man and a curse over the whole world.

So does this mean that some are flawed more than others? Nope. If a person is flawed in any way, they are flawed. There is no talk of "more flawed." If the human race were a building, there would be beams broken halfway through, and some with tiny cracks. Some may look better, but they'll both fail when the building is loaded. 

Whether your struggle against the physical is being stranded between genders (physically or emotionally), being attracted to the same sex, to children, having misplaced attraction to the opposite sex, having a penchant to lie, being a kleptomaniac, being unable to focus, rage, anything, these are all flaws, and they all have the same effect. No one person is more flawed than another. We're all broken, and we need to look to God for healing.

Who are we, really?

I believe the one most crucial thing we learn from this investigation is that we are not defined by our inherent sinful tendencies, nor by our physical forms, but by our spirits. Our culture tells us that we, if attracted to the same sex, are homosexual or bisexual. That we, if gender-confused, are intersex. It also tells us that if we have a compulsion to steal we are kleptomaniacs, that if we lie habitually we are compulsive liars. Compulsive eaters, pedophiles, psychopaths, perverts. It claims these things are part of "us". This is a lie. "We" have none of these traits, but the body we inhabit is twisted towards these things. 

The sin is not in feeling these things, but in defining ourselves by them. If I feel attracted to men, it's no different from if I feel attracted to lying to save face: if I recognize it as wrong and turn from it, seeking God's hand to pull me out of it, nothing comes of it. But when I say, "Well, I must be a liar, and I can't deny myself. I suppose God made me to lie," when we accept it as who we are and justify our actions through that, this is when it begins to be sin. 

Christ has promised to save us from such sin. In my own life, I struggle a hard struggle against lust for women to whom I am not married, a perversion of the attraction which I am to feel towards my wife, to be intimate with her and know her in every possible way. But by the grace of God, He is encouraging and empowering my soul and renewing my mind to resist this temptation, and become more aware of the "way of escape" referred to in 1 Corinthians 10:13. He has promised salvation, not only from guilt of the crimes we have committed, but freedom from the slavery to the ones we feel are inevitable. Praise God!

Transgendered, gay, liar, thief, murderer, adulterer, all are equal in the sight of God: condemned if they haven't accepted Christ, but fully justified and washed clean from sin if they have. Romans 8:1-2 says

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.

You are not a sinner. You have been set free. Go be free! 


Thanks for reading this far. I almost didn't expect it.


-Seth

How To Find Things Interesting

Everybody has a camera these days.

My girlfriend's mom has a Canon Rebel which never leaves her side (or, rather, stomach). It mostly documents the important moments in her daughter's lives, and contains more pictures of said moments than there were actually moments. (She applies burst mode liberally.)

My brother has a big fancy Nikon with all the lenses, filters, buttons, bells and whistles you could ask for. (But apparently not all HE could ask for.) He carries it around in a forty pound bag, and uses it to document anything but people. Buffalo, trees, interesting sunsets, anything he sees.

I have a camera now, too. It just came from Ebay, and will document all kinds of things once it has a memory card. Interesting things, I hope.

I used to think photography was a silly passtime, attracting people through the sole virtue that an 18-45 mm lens is the thickest rim you can fit around your glasses. It was the purview of introverted art students, the refuge of people that didn't do things worth photographing.

But now I have a camera.

Why do I have a camera? To document interesting things.

This is a girl named Hannah F. She's an art student.

I thought she was interesting, so I documented her. 

I asked first.

Big Question: What Single Activity Defines "Art"?

Pizarro and Picasso

Pizarro was a conquistador, which means he went places and conquered them vigorously. His job was to sail to uncivilized parts of the world and civilize them the Spanish way before those dratted Portuguese got there. He was to find land and gold for Spain and kill any interfering indigenous. He went places no man had gone and brought back things no man had seen: sculptures, monkeys, Incas, all sorts of interesting fare.

Picasso was a cubist, which means he saw things and painted them wrong. His job was to paint portraits with scrambled faces and illustrate atrocities through the monochromatic deformed people and agonized horse triangles. He was to find shapes and colors and was authorized to disregard trivialities like proper proportion and realism. He painted things no man had painted before, and showed people what they hadn't seen.

This is Guernica, by Picasso, courtesy of www.pablopicasso.org. 

If asked for one single activity with which to define "art", there would be as many answers as answerers. Expressing emotion, teaching truth, displaying pleasing images, all these are valid, and there is certainly some art which does all these.

But what works do which? I saw a video in the Art Institute of Chicago in which the artist (whose name escapes me) filmed himself in bust painting himself black. At the Indianapolis Museum of Art, there's currently an installation consisting of a string nailed to the floor and taped to a window. No explanation, no reason is given. 

What emotion does this video express? You could argue that it makes a racial statement, that it expresses a desire of the artist to reflect his soul on his skin, that it inverts common images, where the dark color of the subject causes him to lose clarity as he applies more and more paint. The string could be an expression of hope and rising, or entrapment and falling down.

I believe that the purpose is simply this: That if the artist hadn't done this, nobody else would have.

Because Art is exploration.

Art can be finding new perspectives. 

For example, this is how my friend Michael Abshier sees the world.

Art is...

In the Art Institute of Chicago, there's several pieces where an artist paints models. Most of them actually look like the models. But one particularly stuck out to me because the artist literally painted the models, then rolled them on the canvas. I wondered, "why would he do this?" This gives him a reason.

Painting women and rolling them around was his New World: A place nobody had been, and in fact he probably discovered by accident. Being an artist, he realized his job: To explore this world and bring back the prize gems he found there. 

Picasso explored a world where people were angular and their eye were on their chins.

Spielberg explored a world where aliens healed by touching and loved Reeses Pieces. 

Pollock rode a hedgehog through a world made entirely of paint-filled balloons.

Lots of modern art seems to be focused on exploring, not the natural world as artists classically have, but worlds designed by the process by which the art is made: rolling people, throwing paint, hammering nails, even now including everyday touchscreen tasks and retweeting patterns. (For more cool stuff, check this out. Kinda mind blowing.)

I'd like to end by complaining. I don't think that people are judicious in their choices in what to bring back. Modern art has become the equivalent of a National Geographic photographer returning from Nepal with the a hard drive full of pictures of the airport. Everybody can paint, everybody can take photographs, but not everybody is an artist.

But I'm pretty sure everyone can be. 

Mirror Me

I've been writing a lot of songs lately. Half-writing, really. I'm going through a lot of notecards and little tiny notebook pages, and basically wearing the letters off my keyboard. I've been working really hard to push as many lyrics as possible out of my head, inspired by a talk by Amena Brown in which she suggested that we do this.

I've gotten a few finished, like Sixteen Dollar Dress, which was inspired by my friend Logan's story of his junior prom date, who had beautiful green eyes, long brown curly hair and looked better in her sixteen dollar dress than the other girls did in their two hundred dollar gowns. I'm working on one about snowflakes inspired by a line from my friend Allan, "If I'm a snowflake, baby, tonight's the night that I will fall for you."

Point being, I've been looking for inspiration in every place possible: I've been walking in the woods hacking back the matted mass of weak analogies in search of the undiscovered El Dorado in a manner of speaking. I've been taking pictures of everything I can see, and haphazardly placing words one right after another to see if they sound good together.

And I may have been wrong to do so.

Don't get me wrong: disciplined writing is a beneficial enterprise. It hardens the hammers of the wordsmith's forge and stretching rhymes leaves them limber. But I hadn't been simply running drills, but attempting to play entire seasons before practicing at all.

My writing has not been driven by a desire to practice the art, but to produce a shiny finished product. As such, I have felt strained to produce, unqualified to share and unsuccessful in the entire endeavor. I had been attempting to chisel magnificent Davids out of my writer's block, and ended up with gravel. (Had I been attempting to make a driveway, I would have succeeded, but this was not my intent, and so is not comforting.)

It took a divine bait-and-switch to teach me the error in my ways. During our time of reflection, I felt like I ought to wander about in Cool Creek Park, a relatively unspoiled nature preserve by the Walmart (which sentence certainly has contained in it the seeds of a thousand novels I am also undereducated to write.)

During my wanderings, I was taking pictures of the sun. Sun led to light, light led to reflections, and before I could say "ouch, I shouldn't be looking at the sun", I was thinking about how we were created to reflect God's image, and how I was trying to reflect on this, and that they're the same word, and how novel that is, and how I ought to write a song about that. (I think in run-on sentences, deal with it.)

I felt like God was saying, "Mirror me." This, I felt, was the kernel of a great worship song, or just a regular song, or a poem or something creative and verbose, so I started trying to nourish it into accelerated growth. But it wouldn't grow. I wrote a line that rhymed. Then one that was just sort of poetically worded. Then one that wasn't. Before long, I felt that I had written what God was trying to say to me. And it wasn't a poem. Quite the opposite.

God was telling me, "You don't have to write a poem or a song about every tiny thought you think." I had, I realized, been taking my value from how many tracks/followers I had on Soundcloud, or how large the "Writings" folder in My Documents had grown, or how many unfinished projects I have in Ableton.

My value comes from the Lord inside me. No amount of creative productivity, no number of notes or intricate rhymes can give me any more worth than the simple fact that I reflect the Lord by being a thinking, loving, communicating, personal being.

God had given me a tiny thought, and had prevented me from writing about it. Which is in itself a very creative lesson plan. Which inspired me to write what I find to be a fairly coherent article. The Lord has a delicious sense of irony. Touche, Lord.