October 11 is National Coming Out Day. Coming Out is a process, that often involves balancing feelings of shame, trauma, and fear with the promise of authenticity, freedom, and joy. There is no one right way to come out: it is always an invitation, not a demand.
This article is adapted from a talk I gave on March 3, 2024, to the annual retreat of Fortunate & Faithful Families, an affirming ministry of the Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta for the friends and family of LGBTQ+ persons. Although I had written about my gender identity previously, it marked the first time I spoke about it publicly. It feels especially appropriate to share on National Coming Out Day.
Trauma warning: Please note that this piece includes a description of a serious car accident, including photos of the car after the accident and the injured driver of the car in the hospital afterward. Please take care of yourself as you read this article.
That Your Joy May Be Full: How the Spirit Calls Each and Every One of Us to a Life of Abundant Delight
I am so deeply honored to have been invited to spend this time with you today. Most places where I tend to speak I am often asked to speak about mysticism, contemplative prayer, that sort of thing. I imagine those topics will show up sooner or later this afternoon, since that’s my wheelhouse. But when I was first approached about speaking to Fortunate & Faithful Families, it seemed really important to focus my reflection on something a bit more down to earth, and also maybe a bit more personal — from my own heart. And so that’s what led to the twin topics of joy and delight that I hope we can join together and really consent to the invitation that the Spirit offers us to live with a heart filled with wonder and joy.
I’d like to begin with a bit of my own story — a moment of time from when I was in Graduate School. This would have been probably in the winter or spring of 1983, so over forty years ago now — eek! I pursued a master’s degree in professional writing and editing straight after graduating from college, so I was young and single and for a year I lived in campus housing, which at least back then was unusual for grad students. At the age of 22 I was the old-timer in the dorm. I shared a suite with three guys, all undergraduates who were several years younger than me. They were nice enough, but it became obvious really fast that I was… well, shall we say, different. This might be the easiest way to describe it: they were into football, and I was into Joni Mitchell. If you’re young here and need some context, imagine that next to all these beer-drinking jocks, I was a Taylor Swift fan. Which is not that far from the truth, actually, but I digress.
So on this particular night, my roomies had all gone out drinking, but I stayed in the dorm and eventually went to bed. I’d turned out the lights but hadn’t yet fallen asleep when two of the three guys came in to the suite. They saw I was sleeping so they went into the other room, but they were chatting and I could hear every word they said.
One of the guys was asking the other for advice. It turned out that he had a new girlfriend, and he had mentioned to her that he didn’t have anyone to go to the gym with, to work out together. This had turned out to be a grave tactical error, because the girl had perked right up and said, “I’d like to go to the gym with you.” So now the guy was stuck trying to figure out how to let the girl know he didn’t want to work out with her.
“So what you’re telling me is that you need a work-out buddy,” the other guy replied. The logic was elegant in its simplicity: then the first guy could just tell his girlfriend that he already had a friend that we went to the gym with. “That’s a great idea!” The first guy said. “Would you be willing to go to the gym with me?” The other guy said, “No, sorry, you know I’m so busy with ROTC and all my studies. I can’t commit to something like that on a regular basis.” Then they were silent for a few seconds. And the second guy said, “Why don’t you ask Carl to be your workout buddy?”
The first guy snorted, and said, “Come on! I just got done telling you I don’t like to work out with girls.” They both laughed heartily, unaware that I was lying in bed in the very next room, listening to every word.
Now, I suppose if I were just “one of the guys” — what today we might call a cisgender male — I would have just laughed that off. I would have rolled my eyes and just thought they were a couple of losers. And to be perfectly honest, after more than forty years I find this story somewhat amusing. But the reason why I find it amusing, or should I say ironic, is because, at that moment, those two undergraduate jocks knew me better than I knew myself. Or should I say, they knew me better than I was willing to admit to myself.
But what I remember about that moment, lying in that bed, was that I curled up into the fetal position and my eyes stung with a sense of shame.
At that moment, those two undergraduate jocks knew me better than I knew myself. Or should I say, they knew me better than I was willing to admit to myself.
And like your life flashing before your eyes, I thought about all the other times that I had been told that I act like a girl, I run like a girl, I laugh like a girl, I have feminine mannerisms. I thought about all the times when people would ask me if I were gay, or if word came back to me that this was a topic of conversation among friends when I wasn’t present. And as the years went by, more moments like that would continue to come, like the time in the late 1980s when a woman I was dating confided in me that after her brothers met me, they pulled her aside and told her she needed to dump me, because they could tell that I was either a closeted queer or simply effeminate, and either way they didn’t want someone like that in their family.
Needless to say, that relationship did not last much longer.
For so many years, when those kinds of conversations would get onto my radar, my embodied emotional response was simply one of shame. Burning, miserable shame. Somewhere along the way, I had learned to be ashamed of who I am, and all it took was a little conversation like that to stir up the embers and get that fire of self-targeted contempt roaring again.
So just for the record, let me share how I understand myself today. In the LGBTQ acronym, the letters B and T belong to me. I am a bisexual, and I have known this about myself since I was a kid; but since I do genuinely find women attractive and enjoy being in relationship with a woman partner, it’s been very easy to simply pass as a straight person. Today I am quite joyfully married to a woman and we’ve been together almost 31 years. And for both spiritual and practical reasons my wife and I both believe in monogamy, so I basically function in the world like a straight guy. But the truth is the truth, and while I am the kind of bisexual who leans more straight than gay, it would be dishonest to pretend that I am only or strictly heterosexual.
Then there’s the “T” which stands for trans but better words for my identity would include gender-fluid, gender-expansive or simply nonbinary. If you are not familiar with those words, they all describe, in slightly different nuanced ways, people who simply don’t fit in with the gender classification of masculine and feminine. Yes, I have a male body and I was assigned male at birth, although in 1960 that just meant the doctor saying “It’s a boy!” But I have known since childhood, even longer than I understood my sexuality, that I simply didn’t fit in as a boy. And I spent many many years holding that as what I thought was a closely guarded secret. People like my grad school roommates would occasionally point out to me that it wasn’t as secret as I thought it was. But I still tried to keep it under wraps. With close friends I would say things like “I’m very androgynous” or “I’m really in touch with my feminine side.” But to simply acknowledge that this was how God made me: a little bit bi, and a little bit trans, or nonbinary — I did not really begin to accept that about myself until I was well into midlife.
A friend of mine who is a queer-identified woman, when I came out to her and said something very similar to what I’ve just said to you, she replied by saying, “well, you’re like so many people: you’re just a little bit queer.” And that feels right: I’m just a little bit queer. But the problem with being just “a little bit queer” is that it’s too easy to try to blend in with society as a straight or cisgender person. And that’s what I have done for most of my life and I can tell you, to this day when I’m in a situation that doesn’t feel safe, I put on my straight male mask. How effective it is (or isn’t) is another story.
Here’s the question: Why? Why would a bisexual person who is in a straight-appearing relationship hide their bisexuality? This is actually called bisexual erasure and it’s a topic of concern in the bi community: and the irony is that bisexual people can erase their bisexuality in either direction, either passing as straight or alternatively, passing as gay. Go figure. But the other question matters just as much: why try to pass as a cisgender man, when it’s pretty obvious that I’m not? What would I, or others like me, go to lengths to hide being bisexual, nonbinary, or queer?
And I’ve already given you the answer: we hide because we can. And with me, you can also add, because for too many years, I felt shame.
But our topic today is not shame — it’s joy.
Joy is a gift from God, not in denial of the suffering in our world, but precisely in the midst of real suffering.
Now, one of the dangers of talking about joy is that we can turn into Pollyanna’s1 — if we pretend everything is okay, then we think we can be happy. But that’s not true joy. That, frankly, is denial, or spiritual bypassing. So right away, let’s be discerning about how joy operates at a level deeper than mere comfort or affirmation. Joy is a gift from God, not in denial of the suffering in our world, but precisely in the midst of real suffering.
The Divine Comedy, the medieval Italian poem by Dante, takes the reader on a journey through hell (the Inferno), then purgatory, and finally to heaven. It’s a great metaphor for us today. Our journey into the heart of God’s joy does not involve bypassing the pain, suffering, and trauma of our world, but rather calls us to walk right into the fire, knowing that we are protected by the God who loves us. So let us allow the Holy Spirit to compassionately lead us through the valley of the shadow of death, or should I say, through the valley of trauma and shame, but only for the purpose of deep healing and inner transformation. Our goal is to reach the garden where we can taste the fruit of joy, but we are asked to be brave and courageous as we travel in the shadowy places that represent the wounds and brokenness of our world.
Let’s linger for a moment and take a closer look at both trauma and shame. What do these concepts mean, and how do they show up in our lives?
First, trauma. I was in a car accident in 1992 that left me with my jaw broken in three places. To this day, I live with chronic pain due to the less than perfect way my jaw was reassembled by the maxillofacial surgeon who operated on me. He did the best he could, of course, but it’s hard to put a puzzle back together when it’s that badly broken.
About a year after my accident, I ran in to one of the nurses who cared for me, and she commented on how they still talked about me in the ER at the rural Tennessee hospital where I was taken after my accident She said, “None of us had ever seen anyone who had experienced as much trauma as you but yet who was so positive and cheerful.” That introduced me to the standard of definition of trauma: physical injury. Here in Atlanta, Grady Hospital’s has a reputation as the best trauma center in Georgia — and one of the best in the country. So trauma is related to wounding, to injury. But notice also what my friend the nurse pointed out: it IS possible to pivot from trauma to joy.
But trauma has a larger meaning than the narrow sense of physical injury. We can experience emotional, mental, and even spiritual trauma. Clearly, this is not the same as a broken jaw from a motor vehicle collision, but in the words of Google, trauma is “a deeply distressing or disturbing experience.” Fun fact: Google lists that definition of trauma before the medical definition of physical injury.
Trauma comes in all shapes and sizes. As a middle class white person, assigned as male, with a loving family and no childhood experience of addiction, mental illness or divorce, a present father with a stable job providing sufficient if not lavish income, it’s clear my childhood experience of trauma was actually quite mild. But it wasn’t non-existent. I was bullied as a child, beginning with my brother and later on with kids in the neighborhood. I learned to deal with it through careful avoidance. My sense of my mom and dad is that they trained me in my gender identity through a combination of teasing, humiliation and patiently redirecting me toward gender appropriate toys and behaviors. Did I experience trauma? Yes, even though I recognize that many people have it far, far worse, than I did. Everyone’s story is unique: but we all have a story to tell.
If trauma is the unresolved and unprocessed stories in our bodies, what are the gendered stories of our own but also of our biological parents, and their parents, and their parents before them that we carry in our bones? — Alex Iantaffi
In the world of mental health and wellness, you will run into topics such as psychological trauma, emotional trauma, trauma related to abuse, neglect, bullying, and the witnessing of violence, crime or accidents. Hostile work environments, dysfunctional families, natural disasters and acts of terrorism can all traumatize us. We are all familiar with the concept of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), often experienced by veterans although it can be caused by other factors. The descendants of slaves understand how trauma can be passed down from generation to generation, known as historical trauma or intergenerational trauma. Although not nearly as serious as slavery, I saw a mild example of intergenerational trauma in my own life: my grandfather was physically abusive to my grandmother, my aunts and my mom, and my mom suffered with anxiety and depression her entire life. I am sure some of my own mental health challenges are woven into that. And yes, there is such a thing as religious or spiritual trauma as well: a child brought up in a household where God is seen as punishing but not loving, quick to judge and lacking in compassion, can easily develop emotional scars that could take a lifetime to heal.
In his book Gender Trauma the Italian therapist Alex Iantaffi suggests that one way we can understand trauma is as “the unresolved and unprocessed stories in our bodies.” When we experience pain and suffering, or even witness it in others, we carry the story of our experience in our bodies from then on. But if we do not proactively seek to heal and transform those disturbing stories into narratives that give us meaning, purpose and hope, then we become containers of unresolved trauma. And just like a broken bone cannot heal on its own, emotional and spiritual trauma does not go away if we just try to ignore it.
Now, on to shame. Once again, we can start with the everyday understanding of the word: Merriam Webster defines shame as “a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety.” If someone feels they have done something wrong, or bad, or that they have failed or otherwise acted poorly, shame is the stinging emotion that can arise. But here’s the important part: we feel shame because of our actions, but it’s how we interpret those actions, and not the actions themselves, that cause the feeling of shame. Take for example the shame that comes when you feel that you have failed. But who gets to decide what is, or isn’t, a failure? What if you set a goal to start a business and earn a million dollars in five years. At the end of the five years you only have 800,000 dollars in the bank. You could easily feel shame for your failure, but you could also say, “I got 80% of the way there, that’s pretty good — and I have a lot more money in the wallet than I did a few years ago.” But you could just as easily bury your achievement under a cloud of self-recrimination and judgment.
We feel shame because of our actions, but it’s how we interpret those actions, and not the actions themselves, that cause the feeling of shame.
So shame is both relative and interpretive: it’s linked in with our beliefs, with the stories we tell ourselves. I suspect all of us here in this room believe that horrible crimes or harmful actions, like murder or rape or infidelity, ought to lead to feelings of remorse and shame. That’s evidence that despite our terrible mistakes, we still have a conscience. But shame has a way of showing up when the problems aren’t nearly so cut and dried. For years, I felt ashamed because I was nonbinary (that word wasn’t even part of my vocabulary — but I knew there was “something wrong with me”!). Somewhere along the way, probably beginning in early childhood, I got the message that it wasn’t okay to be genderfluid. And I internalized it, and I punished myself for it — for about half a century.
It’s easy to see how trauma and shame lead us not to joy, but to suffering. In fact, I think we could say that trauma and shame can, if left unaddressed, leach the joy away from our souls. Unresolved trauma is a story about suffering that repeats endlessly, even if buried deep in our subconscious. And shame is really it’s own kind of trauma: for shame is the emotional response to a deep and profound experience of judging one’s self. I’m bad. I’m a failure. I’m a mistake. I cause suffering. My parents are ashamed of me. I should be ashamed of myself. What will the neighbors think?
Now, the story may be entirely bogus, completely inaccurate: as I eventually came to understand my internalized transphobia was completely bogus. But as long as I was under the story’s spell, it kept me in its thrall, and it kept me imprisoned in a jail cell built with self-contempt, shame diminishing my self-esteem like a poisonous IV drip.
Research has shown that chronic shame is linked to depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, suicidal ideation, cutting and other forms of self-harm, social isolation, and risky or addictive behavior. In other words, shame is a gateway drug to a life where joy is in profoundly short supply.
Is it any wonder that so many people who struggle with trauma and shame are at greater risk for addiction? They are grasping for some way to medicate away the pain, but of course, excessive drugs or drinking or other forms of addictive behaviors lead us just deeper onto the hamster wheel of suffering, shame, and acting out. This is why people who have addictions, even though they may cause us incredible suffering, deserve our prayer and compassion.
Clearly, the problems related to shame and trauma are not unique to the LGBTQ community or those of us who love queer people. I suppose that every one of us has our own story related to trauma and shame, in some form. I’ve already mentioned that for some, these stories are more debilitating than others. There’s no point in comparing notes. And for some of us, our stories are more distorted than others. My point here is that shame and trauma arise in pretty much everyone’s lives — which means we all need the healing power of Spirit-given joy in our lives.
I came of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when no one had even heard of words like genderfluid or nonbinary, and the LGBT community simply did not have the public visibility or relative social acceptance as we do today. Frankly, I’m a bit envious of young people today, who are so brave and courageous about expressing their sexual orientation and gender identity. It’s gratifying to see heartwarming stories of young kids who find such acceptance and affirmation from their family and friends. But we all know that we haven’t made it to the promised land. I’m thinking about Nex Benedict, who died in February 2024, the day after being assaulted by three of their classmates in a junior high restroom. Nex was only 16, but identified as nonbinary. It seems like Nex was spared much of the shame that had constrained me when I was a teenager. Unfortunately, though, Nex could not escape trauma — including physical trauma. And while the county coroner ruled Nex’s death to be a suicide, I think it’s fair to believe that the trauma of the assault contributed on some level to this tragic loss.
Those who experience trauma often also experience shame. According to psychologist Heather McIntosh, “Shame is a common response to trauma because it is sometimes easier to believe that there is something wrong with you than to believe that your abuser, often a parent or loved one, could hurt you for no reason.”
Once again, here we can see how shame is built on a distortion of the facts: to feel shame when you have been hurt by someone else is a tragedy, for it’s simply not your fault. But if you think it’s your fault, or even merely assume that it might be, then the sting of shame that you may feel will be very real indeed.
For years I blamed my feelings of shame over being queer on myself — it was my own psychological weakness or moral failing. If I were stronger, or more courageous, or more self-confident, then I would not feel ashamed just for being the person God created me to be. I can tell you, as a child my narrative about myself was that I was a “broken” male, a failure as a boy. I’m sure sexism was embedded in there somewhere: I remember my mom speaking approvingly about my cousin Bette, who was very athletic and had a much tougher demeanor than I did; my mom called her a tomboy. I remember wondering why I couldn’t be a “tomgirl.” But no, in the world I grew up in, people like me were called wimps, or sissies — or something even more derogatory.
“Shame is a common response to trauma because it is sometimes easier to believe that there is something wrong with you than to believe that your abuser, often a parent or loved one, could hurt you for no reason.” — Heather McIntosh
So somewhere — and I don’t know where, and at this point in my life it doesn’t really matter — somewhere I got the message loud and clear that boys don’t cry, boys play sports, boys are tough and self-confident and never back down from a fight. Boys don’t choose girls as their playmates, and certainly don’t show an interest in girl’s clothing or toys. Guess what? I failed in every single one of those markers. The only way I conformed to my gender expectations was an interest in science and math and dinosaurs. But football and guns and military aircraft? Sorry, couldn’t care less.
By the time puberty rolled around, I had learned to carefully police my behaviors and my mannerisms. I played attention like a hawk as to which kids got teased for acting like a girl or a sissy, and I worked hard to make sure my mannerisms were not like theirs. It was only as an adult that I realized that my way of being present in my body really was just like all the other gender-non-conforming kids. But I didn’t give myself the freedom to be my authentic self. Instead, I engaged in hostility toward my own self, all in the interest of fitting in and somehow proving that I was, or would be, “man enough.”
By the time I realized that I was sexually attracted to boys as well as girls, I knew enough to keep that hidden away as well. I spent forty years of my life pretending to be a straight, cisgender male because I was taught that it was simply not okay to be who I was. And while I cannot tell you today who taught me that, what I can tell you is that getting the message that you are fundamentally not okay is an experience of emotional trauma.
I’ve probably said enough about shame and trauma. So let’s pause right now, and ask ourselves a very simple question. In the face of a world where so many people experience different kinds of trauma, and so many trauma survivors are saddled with a sense of pervasive shame, is God more interested in our shame — or our joy?
Does God want us to go through life mired in shame, or radiant with joy? Just set aside for a moment everything you may have been taught about sin, or repentance, or holiness, sanctity, etc. etc. etc. I am not here to argue about theology with anyone. But no matter what anyone may or may not believe about God, this question still remains: Is God more interested in our shame or our joy?
I think the Bible gives us a very clear answer to this question, and we’re going to take a closer look at that. But unfortunately, we Christians often seem to get this one backwards.
Let me just give you a brief example. Take the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Many of you will be familiar with it; it was drawn up during the time of Pope John Paul II, and Cardinal Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI, presided over the commission of theologians and teachers who wrote this text. So it has plenty of weight in the institutional church. It’s not considered an infallible or inerrant text, which is good, because there are some real problems with this book. But it is supposed to represent the party line of church teaching.
So here’s the thing: in the Catechism’s glossary, the word joy does not appear. Not at all. Now, to be fair, there is no glossary entry for shame, either: but shame is not a fruit of the Holy Spirit, like joy is. And even in this entire thick book, the word joy only appears about sixty times. Love and faith both show up over five hundred times. Even sin shows up hundreds and hundreds of times in this book. But joy: only about 60 times.
Friends, I would like to suggest that this is a scandal.
Joy is, according to the Bible, a fruit of the Holy Spirit — and it is not only “a” fruit, it is listed second only to love. Joy comes before peace, kindness, goodness and faithfulness. For the apostle Paul, joy was almost as important as love in the spiritual life of the faithful. It breaks my heart that we have lost this. I do believe we have scandalously emphasized the wrongs things, and ignored some of the more important things, in our faith.
And because of this, I humbly submit to you that far too many people who grew up in Christian communities have been taught to have a much stronger experience of religious shame instead of spiritual joy. This, my friends, is a serious problem.
A loving relationship with God is the best way to heal ourselves from religion that is legalistic and based in fear… Joy — the second fruit of the Spirit — is the antidote to shame. Joy brings us healing and abundance of life.
The self-help writer John Bradshaw, in his book Healing the Shame that Binds You, suggests a distinction between “healthy shame” and “toxic shame.” Healthy shame is the feeling that arises when we have done something wrong and we are stung by our conscience into recognizing this fact. In Catholic parlance, what Bradshaw is really describing here is contrition or remorse. We acknowledge that human beings sometimes do things that are hurtful: we hurt ourselves, we hurt one another, we hurt the earth, and we can even hurt our relationship with God (although God never stops loving us). The sharp pang of regret or remorse when we realize we’ve done something wrong is contrition, and as long as we don’t get obsessed over that sharp feeling, it can be a gift to us. It is meant to point us back to God, which is to say, to point us back to love. Feelings of contrition or remorse are never meant to be an end to themselves: they are always invitations to return to love.
What I mean by “shame” Bradshaw calls “toxic shame.” Unlike contrition, which is a feeling that intends for us to find healing and reconciliation with God and others, toxic shame does not move us toward grace. Instead, it causes us to turn in our ourselves. It cuts us off from joy and from trust in love.
Another writer, Rick Doblin, once said that “mysticism is the antidote to fundamentalism” (I told you I would mention mysticism sooner or later!). In other words, a loving relationship with God is the best way to heal ourselves from religion that is legalistic and based in fear. I mention this because I believe joy — the second fruit of the Spirit — is the antidote to shame. Joy brings us healing and abundance of life.
So what exactly is joy? Let’s turn to John Bradshaw again: John Bradshaw: “Joy is the exhilarating energy that emerges when all our needs are being met. We want to sing, run and jump with joy. The energy of joy signals that all is well.”
So joy is an emotion, but it is also an energy. Bradshaw believes it emerges in us spontaneously, when all our needs are being met. From the place of faith, I would frame that slightly differently: joy is a fruit of the Spirit in our hearts. When we are aligned to love, joy occurs naturally within us. So I’m not opposed to the idea that joy emerges when our needs are being met, but I would suggest it’s not just about needs, but it’s about love. Maybe no contradiction there, for the greatest need in the human heart is the need to love and be loved. And fortunately, God is love, and through the Holy Spirit, God’s love is poured into our hearts (that’s in the Bible: Romans 5:5, in case you don’t believe me).
John Bradshaw also suggests that when the energy of joy emerges in our lives, this is a signal that “all is well.” And this reminds me of the wisdom of one of greatest mystics of the Christian tradition: a 14th century woman named Julian of Norwich. Julian was a visionary who experienced sixteen life-changing visionary encounters with God and Christ and Mary. She is most famous for saying “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” But she also said “The fullness of joy is to behold God in all.”
That bears repeating: The fullness of joy is to behold God in all.
When we learn to find God in all things, we are given the fullness of joy. It’s a powerful assertion, and it makes sense to link the blessings of joy with the presence of God.
Speaking of which, the French novelist Léon Bloy famously said “Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God.” If you want to experience God, cultivate a joyful heart. And if you want to experience joy, look for it through your connection with the infinite source of infinite love.
And if the wisdom of the mystics doesn’t persuade you, remember that the Bible instructs us to live a joyful life. In addition to joy’s status as one of the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit, the Apostle Paul invites us to “rejoice always” — in other words, make living a joyful life a priority. In the Gospel of John, Jesus instructs us to bring our prayers to God “so that your joy may be complete.” Likewise, Jesus promises us: “no one will take away your joy.” Of course, every translation of the Bible is different, but depending on which translation you use, joy is mentioned in the Bible between 180 and over 400 times!
But I’ll be the first to admit: talk is cheap. We can talk about joy all we want, but for so many people, joy seems elusive, almost out of reach. I spent the first half of this talk discussing the problems associated with trauma and joy. So here is the question: how do we cultivate a joyful life? How do we find the healing of our traumas and the release of our shame, so that those unhappy experiences can give way to the blessings that come from God’s joy?
To begin to answer that question, let’s go back to the nurse that cared for me in 1992 after my accident. A year later, she told me, “None of us had ever seen anyone who had experienced as much trauma as you but yet who was so positive and cheerful.” Again, the trauma I had experienced was physical trauma: a broken jaw, lacerations on my arm, several missing teeth. But they experienced me as happy, cheerful, dare we say it: joyful.
Now, I’m telling you this story not because I want to make a big deal out of my ability to find happiness in the middle of personal suffering. I’m telling you this story because I believe that what happened to me that night is available to anyone who truly wants to live a joyful life. I remember clearly lying in the ambulance as they were rushing me from the scene of the accident to the hospital emergency room. I couldn’t talk because my mouth was full of pieces of my jaw. My arms and legs were covered with blood. My glasses were missing and I was probably in shock. But what I remember is that in the midst of perhaps the single most frightening moment of my life, I was given the grace to remember to do one thing: to pray.
And when I began to pray, I felt cared for. I felt a wave of gratitude for those EMTs who had left their home late on a Thursday night to come care for me, a total stranger who had just had an accident. I didn’t know how badly I was hurt or what was going to happen in the hospital. But because I was a person with a prayer practice, I entered that emergency room feeling joy as a result of my ongoing practice of prayer.
This was the summer of 1992, when I had been practicing a daily discipline of silent prayer for almost a decade. I learned Christian meditation (what we now call Centering Prayer) in 1984. Eight years of prayer, offered up because I believe in God and I want to be faithful. But on that summer night in Tennessee, I reaped the fruit of those years of regular prayer. And at the heart of the fruit of my prayer was a spontaneous sense of joy.
Let’s be real. No one can promise you that every experience of trauma will automatically become an occasion for joy — even if you pray every day. God acts in mysterious ways, and a moment like the one where I felt flooded with joy might leave someone else caught up in suffering and fear. If my years of studying the mystics and practicing Centering Prayer has taught me one thing, it’s this: that God is present in our lives when we’re filled with joy, but just as present when it seems like everything is falling apart. The purpose behind a spiritual life is not just to fill us up with happy emotions, but to draw us closer to God. Of course, when we draw closer to God, a blessing that often arises from that is the experience of joy.
So, I don’t recommend that you go out and get in a serious car accident just to see if you have a clear sense of God’s joy in your life! But I do think there are some simple tasks that every one of us can undertake, to cultivate a more joyful heart — even when our hearts have been burdened by trauma or weighed down with shame. The same God who wants to fill us with joy also wants to transform our trauma into healing and our shame into delight.
Here, then, are a few simple steps that we can begin to take right here and now to open our hearts to the joy the comes from God.
We’ll begin with one of my favorite Bible verses, Psalm 37:4 — “Find your delight in the Lord, who grants your heartʼs desire.” If, like me, you have a heart that desires joy, one way to manifest that joy is through delighting in God — but to really appreciate this, we need to look at the original Hebrew. The word that gets translated as “delight” has a markedly sensual connotation: it could be translated not only as delight, but also as luxurious, soft, pliable, delicate, or even dainty. At least one Hebrew-English dictionary describes this word as meaning “effeminate.”
No wonder I am so drawn to it.
Another example of this word is found in Isaiah 66:11, where the prophet is describing the land of Zion using the metaphor of a woman: “So that you may nurse and be satisfied from her consoling breast; That you may drink with delight at her abundant breasts!”
Us Americans tend to have a very puritanical approach to our religion, but the Hebrews were much more earthy, sensual and down to earth. It seems pretty apparent that when the Psalmist invites us to take delight in God, it’s like how a baby takes delight in mommy’s breast, or how a bride takes delight in her spouse’s love. In other words, we take delight in God by letting God love us, letting God nurture us, and learning to accept God’s unconditional love.
Especially those of us who have been traumatized by religious symbols of God as so angry and mean, this may be a life-long journey of learning to feel in our bones just how much God loves us — all of us, no exceptions. My friends, I believe that is a journey worth taking.
“Find your delight in the Lord, who grants your heartʼs desire” … we take delight in God by letting God love us, letting God nurture us, and learning to accept God’s unconditional love.
So let God fill you with love, and that will give you the desire of your heart. This of course brings me back to Romans 5:5, where Paul writes: “hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the holy Spirit that has been given to us.” Listen carefully: the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” Notice that Paul doesn’t say, the love of God has been poured into the hearts of saints, or the love of God has been poured into people who fit in with mainstream ideas about sexuality and gender. Paul makes it very clear that the Holy Spirit, and the Love of God, is available to everyone. In fact, the only stipulation he makes is that it is important to have faith. Which makes sense: because if we don’t have faith in God, we’ll never dare to believe that God’s Spirit and God’s love are so freely and unconditionally given to us all.
As I say these words, I realize that many people may feel like this is all too good to be true: believing that God is unconditional love, that God pours that love into our hearts and wants us to take delight in that love, and the Spirit will bless us with divine joy. I get that.
In order to move from shame to joy, many of us also need to learn to see God in a different light. In the ministry of spiritual direction, we speak of having an “image of God.” The reality is, every human being has ideas about who God is, what God is like, and how God relates to us. These ideas may or may not have anything to do with the teachings of Jesus and the Church. In fact, it’s been my experience that many of us have grown up with an image of God that is angry, vindictive, judgmental, condemning, filled with wrath, implacably hostile to human foibles, and will punish most of us in everlasting hell.
My friends, that image of God is traumatizing. And many of us grew up with that image of God, exposed to it in the tender years of childhood. Far too many Christians hold on to that image of God, toxic though it may be, throughout their lives.
To experience the joy of the Holy Spirit, many of us may need to give the image of God in our hearts a makeover. We need to think about how joy, and unconditional love, are much better filters through which we can begin to understand God, much better than wrath or judgment. As I’ve already said, I’m not trying to argue about theology. I do believe that God is a God of justice as well as mercy, and that God wants human beings to stop causing so much suffering in each others’ lives. I’m not attacking what we believe — but I’d like to suggest that many of us have been taught to ignore the most important aspects of Christian teaching. God is love. God loves us unconditionally. God wants us to experience divine love and the Holy Spirit in our hearts. And all of the above leads us to joy.
A seventh century bishop, theologian and mystic named Isaac of Syria can help us with recalibrating our image of God. St. Isaac once said, “As a grain of sand weighed against a large amount of gold, so, in God, is the demand for justice weighed against his compassion. As a handful of sand in the boundless ocean, so are the sins of humankind in comparison with God’s providence and mercy.” Imagine that: if you could hold all the aggression and violence and harmful behavior of all humankind in your hands like a clump of dirt, by comparison God’s love and mercy is as vast and endless as the ocean. And the cleansing waters of the ocean of God’s compassion would quickly wash away all of the pain and suffering we inflict on others — or ourselves, or have received from others who probably just didn’t know better.
Christians have an obligation to make love the center of our faith. The Bible says that God is love, so anything we believe or think we believe must be held in the light of love. Is my theology loving? Is my theology compassionate? Is my theology affirming of life? These are the questions we must be asking ourselves — and if not, perhaps some recalibration is necessary.
Related to this, we need a very clear understanding that every human being is created in the image and likeness of God. This is difficult, because we all have people in our lives that drive us up the wall. It is humbling to remember that God infinitely loves the person who is so very different from ourselves. But what is at stake here?
We can still fight for what is right, and advocate for justice. I stand here, conscientiously convinced that the institutional Catholic Church’s teaching on gender and sexuality needs to be radically reformed. But the courage of that conviction does not give me the liberty to hold people who disagree with me in contempt. My job is to love them all, and let God be their judge. Remember, what is at stake here for today is the cultivation of our joy.
To cultivate our joy, we also need to take good care of ourselves and work for the healing of our emotional or psychological shame or trauma. Many of us need to be in therapy. Or in recovery. Or both! And many of us would benefit from the compassionate presence of a spiritual director or companion in our lives. Spiritual direction is not the same thing as therapy but it can be profoundly helpful when it comes to healing a toxic or broken image of God. If our faith is compromised by the wounds of trauma or the sting of shame, it’s worth it to find caring support to help us recalibrate our faith, away from fear and toward joy.
We need to learn to be present in our own bodies. Shame and trauma often can lead to dissociation: feeling numb or disconnected from our own creaturely embodiment. And for those of us who are struggling with trauma and shame related to gender and sexuality, this can be especially pointed: If we have been told that it is a sin to be gay, or a sin to be genderqueer, we might learn to ignore the truth of who we are, in our own bodies. That is a survival mechanism, and I applaud the resilience and courage of anyone who has done what they have needed to do to survive. But there comes a time when we can begin the healing work of re-embodiment. The love of God and the Holy Spirit are given to us in our embodied hearts. Joy happens in the human body, so we need to be present to the very down-to-earth bodies that God has given us.
Another way for us to find the joy that God wants to see blossom in our lives is by learning to invest time and energy into whatever it is that nurtures our souls. It’s an important, sacred question: what nurtures your soul? We will all answer that question in unique ways. And this is not just “churchy” stuff. Yes, I’m all for prayer, and lectio divina, contemplative silence, making retreats, and so forth. But we also nourish our souls by being creative. By being physically active. By enjoying long walks in nature. By falling in love. By serving those in need. By working on our mental health and well-being. By learning to replace negative/shame-based thoughts with positive/joy-filled thoughts. When we nurture our bodies and souls, we make ourselves available for the presence of God, a presence that is often marked by joy.
The love of God and the Holy Spirit are given to us in our embodied hearts. Joy happens in the human body, so we need to be present to the very down-to-earth bodies that God has given us.
Related to this is a wonderful line from the African American mystic, Howard Thurman: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” What nurtures your soul is probably what makes you come alive. Look at me, for example. I am a nerd for the mystics. I could care less about football — I was vaguely aware that Taylor Swift’s boyfriend was playing in the Superbowl, that’s about as far as it goes — but I just love Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, Julian of Norwich, and so forth and so on. Reading and studying the mystics, and following their advice for prayer and meditation, and sharing their wisdom with others — that makes me come alive. And therefore, it fills me with joy.
Alongside Howard Thurman’s wisdom, let’s not lose sight of Jesus’s own teaching: that in order to enter heaven, we need to become like little children. And this reminds me of my favorite memory involving Monsignor Henry Gracz, who for many years was the pastor of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in downtown Atlanta, and a heroic advocate for LGBTQ Catholics. The Shrine is not my parish so I have only worshiped there on occasion over the years, but a number of times I’ve been blessed to have been invited there to facilitate an adult education hour. I think it was my second or third time there when someone must have told Fr. Henry a bit about me. He came up to me and said “I understand that you have a connection to the monastery in Conyers.” I said, yes, I was a lay associate of the monastery, and Henry lit up like a child on Christmas morning, and spent a good fifteen or twenty minutes sharing with me his enthusiasm for the monks and their deeply contemplative spirituality. And every time I saw Henry after that, he always brought up the monks. Now, I know he had a lot of things to worry about besides the Trappist monastery! But clearly, the spirituality of the monks helped Henry to come alive, and when he shared that with me, his face glowed and his voice sang. The monastery brought out the little kid in Henry, and truly his eyes danced with joy.
Finally, for anyone who is seeking more joy in your life, we need to remember to keep in our minds and hearts joy’s best friend — which is love. In the words of John Bradshaw: “Giving and receiving unconditional love is the most effective and powerful way to personal wholeness and happiness.” God is Love, so when the Bible promises us that love is poured in our hearts, the Bible is saying that God’s own self — the Love of God, the Love who is God — is available to us all. If we want to cultivate joy, heal shame, and transform our trauma, there is no better step to take than the step to love.
And often, our journey of love must begin in our own hearts. Learning to love our own selves — this can be as challenging, but also as rewarding, as recalibrating our image of God. But when we allow ourselves to hope in God’s unconditional love, and to let that love into our hearts, we are given the grace to slowly but surely transform our lives out of fear and trauma, and into compassion and care.
In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a concept called the “seeds of virtue.” Part of living a conscious, ethical life is to be the kind of person who plants these seeds. In the words of the Buddhist writer Judith Ragir,
Our practice is to bring forth a seed of virtue… These seeds can be as small as a mustard seed. They can be just a thought in the mind or a very small action. No matter how large or small, we plant a seed of virtue, right in the middle of our likes and dislikes. These seeds of virtue are any spiritual concept that may help the situation, such as: kindness, patience, clarity, changing our habits, bringing forth a soft heart, reconnecting with universal energy, and opening up to something larger than our concept of a ‘self.’
The wisdom here is universal: we are all called to plant sees of virtue. A seed is very small, and we plant it with trust that mother earth and the providence of God will help it to grow to its fullness. The same thing with our virtues. We don’t have to have it all figured out today. It’s okay if we haven’t fully healed from our trauma or if we are still struggling with our shame. What’s important is that every time we plant one of those gracious seeds, we are voting for a future filled with love and joy. And that, I believe, makes God smile.
I still struggle with shame. I still carry the wounds of my own trauma. I have no real idea how to “be” nonbinary in a binary world, other than to simply trust the wisdom of my own heart. But while I don’t have all the answers of who or what God is calling me to be, I know that I am not called to live in shame or fear. In the New Testament, the Apostle John proclaimed that love casts out fear. I believe that, as surely as I also believe that joy casts out shame.
Everyone in this room is a survivor. We don’t need to compare our traumas or our wounds, because every path is unique. But whether our traumas were big or small, we were resilient and we are survivors. And because of this, God rejoices in us, for God loves us. Listen carefully: God rejoices in us. Yes: God finds joy in us.
When we begin to deconstruct the shame that binds us, God is overjoyed, because God loves us. And when you allow the silent spaces in your heart to be filled by the joy that surges forth from the very heart of God, then you are experiencing God’s wholeness and healing (salvation) at this very hour. Truly, a cause for rejoicing!
I’ll conclude by sharing a few words from my own book on joy, Eternal Heart. I hope these words will be a blessing for you and an inspiration on your own journey of courage and growth in response to love.
Beyond just a light and exuberant feeling, joy is a foundational orientation of our hearts and minds—toward God, toward love, toward grace, toward hope, toward life. The happy feelings that we commonly think of as joyful are ordinary side effects of this deep interior transformation, but the transformation can be given, and remain an essential part of us, even when our mercurial feelings come and go...
Joy naturally emerges when despair is healed, and the “medicine” for such healing is the grace of God. Imagine that grace—the divine medicine—functions as an intravenous drip. And indeed, if the medicine were given to us all at once, it might be more than we can bear. The Holy Spirit, in her gracious wisdom, gives us a leisurely drip of grace, slowly and almost imperceptibly, so that little by little, we might root out the infection of fear and rage and woundedness and sin.
We have to be gentle with the process, for sometimes it takes time—a lot of time. But when we say yes to the gifts of the Holy Spirit, we have embraced the process. Once the healing begins, moments of delight and beatitude will arrive unexpectedly. Glimmers of the luminous wonder that awaits us, as our hearts become more fully immersed in the heart of God, will be revealed to us, glimpse by hopeful glimpse.
We can trust love. We can trust mercy. We can trust the spirit of life, a spirit that will heal us and make us whole and then inspire us to bring love and care to others so that one by one, we can slowly transform the entire world… Accept the gift, exult in it, and then share it with the world. The more you give it away, the more it flows within you. Joy, like love, multiplies as we share it with others. May we all orient our lives to such an economy of grace.
Amen.
The central figure in a series of children’s books from the early 20th century, and a 1960 Disney film starring Hayley Mills: Pollyanna is an archetypal optimist — but so much so that she has also become an icon of excessive or unrealistic optimism.