A friend asked me recently for my thoughts on Leeland’s song “Carried to the Table.”  (Click for lyrics, or listen by clicking on the video below.)

This is how I responded to her:

Over the last several years the communion liturgy has really increased in significance to me, to the point that today I cannot receive communion without weeping.  I’m worshiping now in a church where each individual leaves his or her seat and approaches the altar to receive (unlike my Baptist tradition, where the norm is to have it delivered to you in your seat), and where we celebrate communion at every worship service (the norm in my tradition being monthly or quarterly).  I’ve found there is something so powerful in walking toward that sacred place each Sunday as a whole person, hiding nothing, unafraid and unashamed, knowing that I will truly be received “just as I am.”  Thinking about it as I write makes me realize that I imagine God there, smiling at me, ushering me forward and into a supernatural intimacy with him that is beyond my words to describe.  The experience nourishes something important in me, such that I can’t imagine going back to a less regular observance of the sacrament.

My understanding of what separates me (or what once separated me) from God has also changed in profound ways.  Before I came to terms with my trans-ness, I imagined that I could draw significantly closer to him if I would just overcome my desire to be a woman.  Now, having realized that my femininity never was a barrier between us, I’ve also learned that there was never really any action I could have undertaken that would have drawn me closer to him in any significant way.  Only God is able to make up the distance between God and humanity, and he has made it up, “once for all,” in Christ. 

All this has made me feel closer to God than I ever thought possible.  In fact, it has completely altered my paradigm of proximity to the divine.  Finally I think I understand–and really believe–what Paul meant when he said, “Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38-39).

Real Live Preacher has written perhaps the most compelling modern parable I have ever read.  Please take a minute or two and read it.

If I were going to be preaching this Sunday, I’d scrap everything I’d prepared to this point and just read RLP’s parable.

There is something insane about a lack of doubt. Doubt, to me anyway, is what makes you human, and without doubt even the righteous lose their grip not only on reality but also on their humanity.

Academy Award winning actress Tilda Swinton

(And with a comment from me: I like this one so much that I would have posted it even without Swinton’s history of accepting gender-variant roles.)

Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. 

13th century Persian poet and Islamic mystical theologian Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi-Rumi (thanks to Krista Tippett’s December “Speaking of Faith” interview with Dr. Fatemeh Keshavarz)

On the spiritual journey, disillusionment is as important as enlightenment.

Real Live Preacher, AKA Gordon Atkinson, who recently returned to blogging.  The quote is from the first post in a series entitled “The Disillusionment Chronicles.”