What I’d been told when I was younger was that God loved unconditionally. However, as I grew up and grew into myself, I realized that humans, under the guise of “God”, tend to put conditions on that love. People who can’t imagine a world where I exist say that my God can’t love me as I am. They say, “God created man and woman, there’s no other options”. What they fail to recognize is that biology, life, and God rarely ever deal in absolutes and binaries, they deal in spectrums.

Now what I mean by this is that the very human people who wrote the Bible said man and woman because it was easy – it fit the pattern. For example, when God made light and dark. In creating light and dark, they also had to create EVERYTHING in between. They had to create the sunrises, sunsets, dusk, dawns, twilights, noons, eclipses, solstices. When they separated the land and sea, they also created EVERYTHING in between like bogs, marshes, wetlands, coasts. They even created some animals like frogs who live in between these two places. So why wasn’t this mentioned? Because it would be a REALLY long list if it said “God created light, dark, sunrise, sunset, bogs, land, sea, frogs…” on and on. So, when God created man and woman, they also created everything in between.

In Their Image

They created me, exactly as I am, in their own image. From the words of someone much more eloquent than myself, God made me trans “for the same reason [they] made wheat but not bread… because [they] want humanity to share in the act of creation.” (Julian K. Jarboe) This may seem a tad contradictory to my earlier statement that God created me as I am. Is it possible for both statements to be true: that God created me AND that I created me? Creation is a partnership that transcends more than just one existence. Yes, God created wheat so that humans could turn it into bread. In the same way, God created sand so that humans of one generation could create glass, and then the next generation could add colour to that glass, so on and so on until we have the beautiful products of stained-glass windows that grace our own, beloved, sanctuary at St. Mary’s.

If we did not take an active part in creation, humanity wouldn’t be where we are now. And so, when God created me, and then I created myself, I formed that partnership and that bond with God. This is a partnership that I hope will transcend the generations and inspire the future of our world. Maybe, it can even inspire our world today to love as unconditionally as God loves and to embrace the spectrum of life.