The Other Brother

 I, a sinner held up by grace, led on my unique path to holiness by the hand of the Creator, to my brothers and sisters, in whom God delights to grow all the diversity of virtues. I had the opportunity this summer to see a garden of lotuses in bloom. Lotus flowers are beautiful in their own right and steeped in religious and cultural symbolism. The plants grow in marshy pools, but the leaves and petals are hydrophobic so they shed all the muddy water. When the buds open, the robust flowers seem to glow of their own accord, standing in stark contrast to the entropic murk all around. It is as if to say, life is messy, but we can be pure of heart . Yes, this message impressed itself strongly upon me. For one thing, it harmonized with another lesson I have been learning the last few weeks. I decided to be active in LGBTQ issues soon after falling out of the vocation program out of a natural passion to help future generations of trans would-be-religious. And yet tied up in this is t...

AMDG I, your brother in Christ, united to you in love and in the mercy of God, across lines of politics or race or creed, to you, my beloved brothers and sisters. Grace and peace to you. I wrote last about a very rich weekend I had. Besides my time amongst the Jesuits, I was able to meet up with another vowed religious friend, who gave me a gift. He had been speaking with a member of the Society of St. Francis, a community of vowed religious brothers in the Episcopal church, and found out that this brotherhood was not opposed to admitting a transgender man. So he passed on the brother’s contact information that we might connect. I have never really church-shopped. As a cradle Catholic, I am as much at home in the church as I am amongst my family, and I bear the difficult aspects of the church the way I might bear the difficult aspects of my family. Other churches that I have visited with friends or passed on the street were lovely but never held any attraction. When I got my “no”...