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âSo in Christ Jesus you are all children of GodâŻthrough faith, for all of you who were baptized into ChristâŻhave clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free,âŻnor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.â (Galatians 3:26â28)
Regular contemplative practice allows us to maintain some measure of non-dualism whenever we are asked to move beyond our comfortable binaries. It seems that everything we put in a neat and tidy package must eventually be allowed to come undone, including our understanding of our bodies, gender, and attraction. This awareness, too, is a part of Godâs incarnation in Christ! In this passage, transgender and Christian author Austen Hartke dialogues with Lynn Young, who identifies as non-binary, Native American, and Christian, about the significance of this passage from Galatians.
âOne of the many ways Iâve tried to explain my gender journey to people who donât get it is to say that, as I began to really dig into it and explore it and find the meaningful points for me, I felt like I was given this dirty floor and a toothbrush. As I started to scrub this floor I started seeing things, and as things were revealed, it turned out that this floor was an amazing mosaic, even though each piece by itself didnât seem to be anything in particular. None of those pieces are unimportant because they all have to exist together to create the whole picture. So Iâve arrived at this place of knowing myself as a Two Spirit person, and that Two Spirit [1] is my gender. Thereâs a feminine part of me, and a masculine part of me, and there are also parts of me that are so intertwined that are both of those and then some, and they donât have a name that fits within European gender constructs. . . . We have all these shards of identity in us, whether itâs our sexuality, our gender, our faith, our age, our cultural identity, our personal trauma historiesâall of those things that are part of who we are combine to create our whole identity. Iâm not just one pieceâIâm not just the Christian, or just the Native person, or just Two Spirit, or just the survivor, or just the grandmaâthat small piece isnât me; only the whole reflects who I am. I am all of this.â
Austen continues:
âSo what was Paul thinking about these different pieces of our identity when he penned Galatians 3:28? And what does this verse mean for our understanding of gender? Was Paul saying that gender was no longer importantâthat through our baptism in Christ our gender identities were all erased or irrelevant? I very much doubt it. What Paul said about gender in this verse was revolutionary in that it confirmed that there was no patriarchy or misogyny in Godâs new kingdom; it broke down the barriers between genders and between people of different genders and God. . . .â
Richard Rohrâs Daily Meditation
From the Center for Action and Contemplation
ARTIST STATEMENT
As a Canadian fine artist, I am passionate about painting a unique, contemporary expression of the interplay of light, colour, shape and texture. I am inspired by the sense of balance and design I discover in creation and am intrigued by the seemingly infinite variety of lines, spaces, textures, shapes and vibrant colours I find there.
I take several photographs of a subject and return to my studio to transform the scene into an abstracted and transfigured composition. I want the viewer to be excited by the textures, colours and shapes in my paintings. To create varied painting surfaces, I often use a mix of natural and created materials, including modelling paste, gels, silica sand, photo and stencil inserts in conjunction with acrylic or oil paint.
Together with a love of colour and a passion for design, my paintings evoke a sense of contemplative spirituality. The concept of âflourishingâ and what it means to thrive in life is a prominent theme in my artwork as I seek to create âcontemporary artwork for a transfigured state of being.â
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