Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Creating liturgy for an inclusive world
There’s a wee Chinese boy on the bus, who’s not been talking long from the look of him, who’s saying
“Twinkle twinkle little star”
Over and over again.
“How I wonder what you are...”
He’s taking such pleasure in the rhymes and rhythms of it
“Up above the world so high...”
As my daughters did when they were small, as my grandson is doing now as he explores all the different kinds of sounds he can make
“Like a diamond in the sky.”
As we all did, once...
Because creativity with language is part of the wider amazing and wonderful gift of creativity that belongs to all of us as our birthright.
And that gift being distorted and blocked is a huge collective source of suffering.
It breaks my heart the way language above all is so misused in our world.
The way it is habitually used as a means to humiliate and dominate and deceive and manipulate.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I began a writing workshop with asking all its members to remember and to tell of the times their creativity had been used as a means to mock them or humiliate or hurt them.
I sense we’d be still listening the next day: because all of us have suffered that way.
Which means that up to a point it’s very simple to run a writing workshop: you just have to create the conditions which allow this innate creativity to emerge.
My church (http://www.augustine.org.uk/) St Columba’s in Oxford (http://www.saintcolumbas.org/) and the City URC in Cardiff (http://cityurc.org.uk/1/) all have significant numbers of LGBTI members in their congregations and asked me to lead a writing workshop to enable them to create the kinds of prayers and services and liturgies we need.
So they hired a beautiful venue, the Windermere Centre (http://windermere.urc.org.uk/) and there we all were. Feeling apprehensive. Or at least I was.
The theory is quite simple: you have to create a sense of community. A sense of a safe space in which everyone is able to be themselves.
Then you devise a way of helping the participants evade the inner censor that will be blocking them creatively. And then you encourage them to work on the results.
It takes a certain level of energy and focus; and, as here, a fabulous group of open hearted and courageous participants.
There’s always a moment when everyone hits their fear and distress. It happened very strongly that first night; partly, I suspect, because the Christian tradition has always been to encourage its members’ sense of unworthiness and shame.
And, sad to report, it’s done so largely to bolster up the church’s authority.
All that has to change; and is changing, in these astonishing forward looking churches.
Maybe that’s why we got through.
What’s for sure is that when we came to share what had been created at the end of the evening, the results were beautiful. They created a palpable sense of the sacred.
The task the next day was to encourage everyone to let go of their own work. Hand it over to someone else so we could help each other.
It’s a scary moment, this. It leaves you feeling naked. There was such a palpable resistance to it; some people physically did not want to let go of what they’d written.
But it all ha to be faced, somehow. Faced and cried over. Or laughed over.
And we did.
And the result of all that astonished me: a whole other set of beautiful new work.
That is now being enjoyed all over again as we send it to each other and slowly assemble it as a future publication and online resource.
Something is happening. The dear star is shining.
Change is in the air....
Labels: creativity, inclusive liturgy, United Reformed Church
Saturday, October 01, 2011
Equality Network Conference
The Conference was an extraordinary place to be. I was so moved, yet again, to see how our public institutions are working towards trans inclusion.
It is actually beyond everything I could ever have dreamed of.
It really wasn't that long ago that I believed that if I suffered it was my fault. It was because i was somehow sick. I had so greatly internalised my oppression that I could see it for what it was.
On Wednesday someone asked me where I got my hope from. I said it's because I'm sixty one years old and I'm still alive.
I guess so much of that survival I owe to my creativity. It was that above all, I think, which enabled me to receive the amazing love of my partner and my daughters and learn to come back to myself once again.
I was leading an hour's workshop on creativity in the afternoon, and while I think I communicated something, i don't think that was it.
Except maybe indirectly. What i was trying to express was that developing our creativity - in our work, in our relationships, in our art, obviously, but also in our daily life - helps us live in the present and value who we are.
And learning those things helps us free ourselves from suffering.
It is actually beyond everything I could ever have dreamed of.
It really wasn't that long ago that I believed that if I suffered it was my fault. It was because i was somehow sick. I had so greatly internalised my oppression that I could see it for what it was.
On Wednesday someone asked me where I got my hope from. I said it's because I'm sixty one years old and I'm still alive.
I guess so much of that survival I owe to my creativity. It was that above all, I think, which enabled me to receive the amazing love of my partner and my daughters and learn to come back to myself once again.
I was leading an hour's workshop on creativity in the afternoon, and while I think I communicated something, i don't think that was it.
Except maybe indirectly. What i was trying to express was that developing our creativity - in our work, in our relationships, in our art, obviously, but also in our daily life - helps us live in the present and value who we are.
And learning those things helps us free ourselves from suffering.
Labels: creativity, equality
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Last Friday I had to make a speech.
I was to open an art exhibition at an art. It was curated by the LGBT Health Centre in Edinburgh
http://www.lgbthealth.org.uk/
and it was happening at the Out of the Blue Drill Hall
http://www.outoftheblue.org.uk/
I like both organisations, and wanted to support them.
As far as I can gather, they asked me because they think I am Somebody; and the nerves I felt before and after made me aware that in a part of my being, at least, I still fear I am nobody.
I rehearsed, as I do, without writing anything down before hand. If i write anything down, it always sounds ridiculous and dull.
What generally then happens is that I make the speech, forget what I've said, and then lose whatever it was I did.
But this time I wrote it down afterwards. Partly to tell my lover, who couldn't be there, and partly to resist this nobody feeling.
Because it really is not true.
The place was packed. Maybe 200 people there? Not sure. It seemed like an awful lot.
I had to stop myself imagining they would be hostile to me. Because that really was not true either.
I started off with an opening from my GODS NEW FROCK:
“Hello
Hello ladies, hello gentlemen. Hello men, hello women,
Hello those of you who are not ladies and are not gentlemen,
And not men and not women
but like me
maybe something in between or maybe something that’s a bit of both or something
or somebody
that has never been thought of or imagined yet
Somebody or something this evening may even bring into being.
Welcome.”
And got them all to say hello back to me.
And how pleased I was to be there, and how eminent I felt, and I should really have been wearing a big frock with big shoes and the most enormous hat and been able to crack open a bottle of champagne on something and bless this boat ... even though this wasn’t a boat, it was an old army drill hall I still wanted to bless everyone very seriously because what was happening here tonight was so very special.
It isn’t in our nature to be entrepreneurs or bankers but it is in our nature to be creative.
Research shows early humans invented singing before talking. That before we communicated through words we communicated through song. And then we shared poems and amazing stories and painted wonderful pictures on the walls of our caves... and in sharing our creativity we are re-entering something really profound in our humanity.
I’m lucky, I said, for two reasons. One for being transgender. And in contradiction to everything I have been taught about it, to be transgender is actually an amazing privilege and blessing.
(That got a round of applause. Typical of me, somehow, not to have expected it).
The other thing is being able to use my creativity. Because without it I’d never have been able to stand up to the discrimination and prejudice from which we all suffer.
It would have been the end of me.
And I have seen in the amazing work of the transgendered writing group, Transforming Arts, just how profoundly art transforms everyone who is able to create it.
And that’s why this is a boat because everyone taking part is on the journey, and the health centre is on a journey, a good journey through choppy waters where we re-connect with who we really are, and our pride in who we really are, and we contradict prejudice and show the world our amazing gifted diversity.
So I am cutting an imaginary ribbon -SNIP - and cracking open an imaginary bottle of champagne - CRACK! - and naming this ship “The Amazing Exhibition” and Goddess bless all of us who sail in her."
There seemed to be a lot of applause. Which i didn't really know how to receive.
I felt a bit trembly and exhausted and exposed afterwards and after being congratulated - because it really did go very well - I suddenly felt unbearably shy and tired and had to leave.
Reflecting on it all afterwards opened up a memory:
of being back at boarding school in my second term. I was just thirteen, and still raw from my mother's sudden death two years before.
I can't remember why, exactly, but a boy called Whitley sent me to Coventry. He had a kind of ascendency over everyone in my year and it meant that for most of that term no-one would speak to me.
At mealtimes we would queue up the revolting food and then carry it back to our tables. And no-one would sit with me.
Looking back on it, it sounds almost trivial. But I'm not sure I can find the words to describe the sense of fear and humiliation and shame I felt.
It had something to do with the feeling of fear of being Different, and the horror of it was intensified by the fact that the following year i started acted girls' parts. And discovered I loved it. So that experience of being rejected, and so afraid of it, all got tangled up with my awareness of being transsexual.
Not that I could call it that then. The word didn't exist. Whatever i was was unspeakable.
And there it still is: that paralysing shyness with large groups of people in social situations.
That panic and that withdrawal and that desire to run away.
Which shows just how hard it is to remain fully in the present moment. And I imagine that it is precisely because it is so hard that we value it so much, and call it Presence, or some such thing.
But it can be achieved. There are amazing possibilities of life within us.
I was to open an art exhibition at an art. It was curated by the LGBT Health Centre in Edinburgh
http://www.lgbthealth.org.uk/
and it was happening at the Out of the Blue Drill Hall
http://www.outoftheblue.org.uk/
I like both organisations, and wanted to support them.
As far as I can gather, they asked me because they think I am Somebody; and the nerves I felt before and after made me aware that in a part of my being, at least, I still fear I am nobody.
I rehearsed, as I do, without writing anything down before hand. If i write anything down, it always sounds ridiculous and dull.
What generally then happens is that I make the speech, forget what I've said, and then lose whatever it was I did.
But this time I wrote it down afterwards. Partly to tell my lover, who couldn't be there, and partly to resist this nobody feeling.
Because it really is not true.
The place was packed. Maybe 200 people there? Not sure. It seemed like an awful lot.
I had to stop myself imagining they would be hostile to me. Because that really was not true either.
I started off with an opening from my GODS NEW FROCK:
“Hello
Hello ladies, hello gentlemen. Hello men, hello women,
Hello those of you who are not ladies and are not gentlemen,
And not men and not women
but like me
maybe something in between or maybe something that’s a bit of both or something
or somebody
that has never been thought of or imagined yet
Somebody or something this evening may even bring into being.
Welcome.”
And got them all to say hello back to me.
And how pleased I was to be there, and how eminent I felt, and I should really have been wearing a big frock with big shoes and the most enormous hat and been able to crack open a bottle of champagne on something and bless this boat ... even though this wasn’t a boat, it was an old army drill hall I still wanted to bless everyone very seriously because what was happening here tonight was so very special.
It isn’t in our nature to be entrepreneurs or bankers but it is in our nature to be creative.
Research shows early humans invented singing before talking. That before we communicated through words we communicated through song. And then we shared poems and amazing stories and painted wonderful pictures on the walls of our caves... and in sharing our creativity we are re-entering something really profound in our humanity.
I’m lucky, I said, for two reasons. One for being transgender. And in contradiction to everything I have been taught about it, to be transgender is actually an amazing privilege and blessing.
(That got a round of applause. Typical of me, somehow, not to have expected it).
The other thing is being able to use my creativity. Because without it I’d never have been able to stand up to the discrimination and prejudice from which we all suffer.
It would have been the end of me.
And I have seen in the amazing work of the transgendered writing group, Transforming Arts, just how profoundly art transforms everyone who is able to create it.
And that’s why this is a boat because everyone taking part is on the journey, and the health centre is on a journey, a good journey through choppy waters where we re-connect with who we really are, and our pride in who we really are, and we contradict prejudice and show the world our amazing gifted diversity.
So I am cutting an imaginary ribbon -SNIP - and cracking open an imaginary bottle of champagne - CRACK! - and naming this ship “The Amazing Exhibition” and Goddess bless all of us who sail in her."
There seemed to be a lot of applause. Which i didn't really know how to receive.
I felt a bit trembly and exhausted and exposed afterwards and after being congratulated - because it really did go very well - I suddenly felt unbearably shy and tired and had to leave.
Reflecting on it all afterwards opened up a memory:
of being back at boarding school in my second term. I was just thirteen, and still raw from my mother's sudden death two years before.
I can't remember why, exactly, but a boy called Whitley sent me to Coventry. He had a kind of ascendency over everyone in my year and it meant that for most of that term no-one would speak to me.
At mealtimes we would queue up the revolting food and then carry it back to our tables. And no-one would sit with me.
Looking back on it, it sounds almost trivial. But I'm not sure I can find the words to describe the sense of fear and humiliation and shame I felt.
It had something to do with the feeling of fear of being Different, and the horror of it was intensified by the fact that the following year i started acted girls' parts. And discovered I loved it. So that experience of being rejected, and so afraid of it, all got tangled up with my awareness of being transsexual.
Not that I could call it that then. The word didn't exist. Whatever i was was unspeakable.
And there it still is: that paralysing shyness with large groups of people in social situations.
That panic and that withdrawal and that desire to run away.
Which shows just how hard it is to remain fully in the present moment. And I imagine that it is precisely because it is so hard that we value it so much, and call it Presence, or some such thing.
But it can be achieved. There are amazing possibilities of life within us.
Labels: art, creativity, lgbt health
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