MINISTRY

My ethic is that of a commitment to care first and foremost, and to a rigorous relationship with and iterative and adaptive understanding of what that means for different bodies, (eco)systems, human and nonhuman kin, entities, etc.

This ethic of care is informed by our collective responsibility to all bodies, including our own — to commit to the survival and thriving of all sentient beings and the continual capacity of the universe to continue its work. However, it is also informed by an awareness that we cannot, by our nature, not be universe, and that the nature of our experiment in iterating here as flesh is to navigate the challenges and suffering of consciousness — and so that care which is first and foremost existential and all encompassing begins to take more pragmatic form within human systems even as that care itself serves as reminder to not mistake those forms as fixed or permanent. Part of our interdependent, little-m-ministry care ethic of and for ourselves and others is therefore the care of our psychic and conscious relationship to narrative hyperreality, even though it will also be largely through the technologies of language and cognition that we push back against the illusions of our invented frameworks as a priori existent.

Within human systems, this ethic of care is driven by a commitment to lead with curiosity and humility, remembering always the diversity of not only narrative / human identity-driven phenomenological experience but also of spiritual and energetic experiences beyond the immediately perceptible realms.

This ethic asks that I am always leading with an awareness of the limits of my cognitive, spiritual, and somatic capacities, and that I enter all rooms, interactions, ecosystems, relationships, institutions, and processes with curiosity about all I do not know — and to a certain extent not only a willingness, but a desire to be “wrong,” insofar as I understand my own conditional human-system, narrative, both quantitative and qualitative “knowing” as only ever an iterative, temporary set of data delimited and biased by my experience.

Compassion and humility are central to this ethic: I seek always to move with compassion for myself and others, in particular around the challenge we face as simultaneously immensely powerful but delimited / conditioned actors seeking to meet our charge of being / stewarding / understanding and evolving ourselves and this planet, using tools that both facilitate and at times appear to stymie that work.

To hold ourselves and others to this sort of rigorous standard, not only in theory but in practice, requires more than discipline, compassion, humility and grace — it asks of us a sort of courage. For to move in integrity, and especially to ask others to commit to change that requires existential grappling is often a deeply unpopular position. And yet — in the seeking of justice in the name of the end of suffering and the liberation for all people, if (as Dr. Cornel West explains) that same justice “is what love looks like in public,” then this fierce love that refuses oppression does not always come in sheep’s clothing.

In Radical Dharma, when rev. angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens and Jasmine Syedullah invite us into a practice of ”insurgence rooted in love, and all that love of self and others implies,” they let us know that it “takes self-liberation to its necessary end by moving beyond personal transformation to transcend dominant social norms and deliver us into collective freedom.”

But it is in that moment of queering, that trans/cendence of social norms, that the existential resistance holds so firmly — and this is where my ethic of courage as love is steeped. Countering the comfortable passivity of illusory neutrality as even a possible stance, my work is shaped by a commitment to integrity in not only action and/or word, but also infrastructure as I seek relational,  (m)inisterial movement towards liberation. And here is what I sometimes name as the perhaps reticent but realistic ministry of being misunderstood: a recognition and open-eyed surrender to the discomforting conditions — and at times alienation — caused by courageous position, speech, and /or deed.

Dorothy Day refers to this as the long loneliness, while Lama Rod Owens will continue to go deeper into this grief state as to-be-expected yogas of “the New Saint” — those who become so not by exceptionality but persistence, showing up day after day, making mistakes, and ready to be disliked, but committing to finding what one’s work in the world is and then doing it steadily.

Showing up with courage — being resourced, informed, speaking on behalf of the oppressed, refusing supposed neutrality, and ultimately modeling and embodying liberatory ways of moving and being in the world is a personal ethic for me — and one that is inherently part of the trans experience, a lighthouse from the future in which all feel free to write their own stories without fear. But this courage also looks, in my practice, like holding a line against liberatory politics’ equally polarizing purism, and being a bridge for the hard conversations. While I believe in the right to resist by any means necessary, I do not believe freedom is born by force.