Agnostic Care

The Deep Belief in Love

My life with God.

My life, with God?

I’ve spoken before of how God was turned into a weapon against me, against we who are Queer. How God, particularly in the name of Jesus, is still fashioned as a weapon aimed at the heart of Queer people.

For decades I defined myself as atheist (occasionally), as agnostic (more often), and as spiritual (as a norm). My faith in God stolen by a society and the so many churches that refused to see me as I am, the so many who refuse still. I had dreamed of being a priest as a child, but I saw more and more clearly that a girl could not be a priest. That a Queer girl (though I didn’t know those words) like me was not even welcome in church.

My spiritual formation happened with the guidance of atheist, agnostic, and spiritual people in my life. And in that guidance, I learned the core values of welcome to all, love unconditional, and getting out and doing the work to fight against oppression. Values that should always have been Christian values, but too often aren’t. I learned that people we so often call “non-believers” are people who believe deeply in Love.

But let me speak now of the specific care that helped me move forward in this life, that helped me survive and helped me thrive. Pastoral care through an agnostic lens.

When I was a teen. And in my early 20s. I saw suicide as my natural salvation. I had no hope. I had learned, by the time I was in kindergarten, to hide my entire existence. I tried so hard to take the center of me, to take the girl that I was, and set her aside. Out of sight.

I could never do that. Not fully.

My church could never have heard me. Churches today, still, have prayer circles beseeching God to save me from my truth. I am on a list of Queer people who are prayed over, in hopes of a monstrous God who stops Queer people from existing in this world.

But my wife, agnostic and caught unaware by my truth that I’d tried so hard to deny, was the one who gave me the healing care that allowed me, slowly, to learn to accept the fullness of me and now, to come out into the world as my full self – Woman. Queer. Transgender.

And she did this by the radical act of listening, not just to words, but to the full truth of all that we said and all that was left unsaid. She gave care in ways that I can only hope to learn from.

Please do not believe for even one moment that this was easy. I could hardly say words to hint at my truth. But despite being faced with unexpected truth – her husband was feminine. Her husband dreamed of being a woman? Her husband, full-bearded, tall, big, looking so manly – he was a woman? He is a woman?  No. She is a woman. And always was.

My wife heard not just in the caring way of listening with clear attention. She heard in the way that understood my unstated need. She came to me, with gifts. A skirt to wear in secret. Camisoles that I could wear under my button down shirt, unseen. And she came to me with plans – elaborate sketches of a compound, shipping container homes in a cross, forming an internal courtyard where I could be fully me outside.

When I finally came to understand that I might need to come out with my truth into the world, she was the one that said, “Might? No love, Must” We will come out. And we did.

It took years. It took decades.

Pastoral care, I think, is just exactly like that. Listening yes. But also hearing the unsaid. And actively coming forward with ideas of what a world made whole might look like. Maybe in dreaming together with whomever I am giving care with.

I learned pastoral care far from the world of church. But it is my mission to bring pastoral care to all who feel harm using that powerful lens to love that my wife gave to me.