I want to tell you about the heart from my heart. Does that sound confusing? Let me explain.
There’s not a whole lot I can reference when it comes to reliable sources on love, because, frankly, I can’t trust many of them. When it comes to love, I’ve had to start from the beginning again and again, not unlike Rene Descartes who did much the same with determining whether anything really existed, resting upon the indubitable fact of his having thoughts at all. Few things about love can be called indubitable. Why? It’s because we humans are so basically unreliable and often find the search for love to be a pernicious affair. Some of us also needed to make changes to realize our potential for love and other virtues. I’m one of them. It was part of my reason for transition.
I’m not kidding. During pre-transition I started over on many levels of my life. I had enough of religions’ empty disingenuousness that always ended in summary condemnation simply because I was alive as a male who wasn’t really male. I had enough of marriage for much the same reason. I went through periods of heavy self-examination and attempted things to see where they may lead, some proving to be good, some leading to deep shame.
By 2001 I temporarily abandoned the idea of ever transitioning. I tried to find my way again near the relatives I had. But I would learn to my sorrow that my relatives were not there for me. At best they looked upon me with condescension, and often malice proved that I would not be able to make a life there. Familial love wasn’t available to me.
On an April day in Wichita I plucked a dandelion like a small child does and whispered a prayer: “Blessed Goddess, let me die as a woman.” I blew the umbels and at once a wind rushed out of the West and carried the umbels skyward till I saw them no more. That evening I received an invitation to return to California and use my steam license to become re-established and to assess for transition.
But just what would such a transition entail? I had known too much of the sex industry and swallowed myself up in activism because I looked upon other girls and desired to free them all. If I was to transition I could not return that direction. I would have to find an ethical standard, something that would give me ample cause to continue what I could do come hell or high water.
Ethics and transition: it’s a combination many think to be a contradiction in terms. Yet, together they’re reflected in the words of Y’shua:
“Eisen gar eunouchoi hoitines ek koilias metros egennethesan houtos, kai eisineunouchoi hoitines eunouchisthesan hupo ton anthropon, kai eisin eunouchoi hoitines eunouchisan heautous dia ten basileian ton ouranon, ho dunamenos chorein choreito.”
“For eunuchs are whoever out of a mother’s womb were born this way, and eunuchs are whoever were emasculated by the men [as mankind], and eunuchs are whoever emasculated themselves for the Kingdom of Heaven. He (being) able to regard, regard.”1
Eunuchism to achieve a spiritual purpose? That did become my quest, considering that many of the eunuchs of antiquity were in fact transgender. Many deny the possibility that one could do this for a spiritual objective.
I had gender issues since a young age. But this quest breathed in me a new purpose and I’m convinced I was better for it. I didn’t follow the course of a church. No church sanctioned it. Neither did any temple, mosque, or synagogue.
But it would mean realizing again what love would entail. I had tasted some. I would have to prove more, at least for myself, because I had to be sure that genuine love would become an enduring possibility for me, a possibility rooted in my capacity to trust another.
ROSANNE
A dear friend played a huge role. Rosanne was a woman of my temple with fiery eyes and wasn’t particularly pretty. When our eyes first met at the temple doorway in 1997, I loved her at once. We engaged in easy conversation after ritual. But it would be a year before our friendship really flourished. When I next saw her at her home she looked like she had aged 20 years.
Each time we met the love between us grew. But it wasn’t the kind of love you probably think. We kissed like lovers because we were. But it was a sexless love.
She had been divorced twice and had no desire for sex, especially because of chronic illness. I also was unable to trust a woman on that level, not even Rosanne. But that all worked to the better.
We spent many a weekend afternoon talking about crystals, temple events, and engaging in some light rituals. She understood crystals better than anyone I knew. She had also been a bellydancer in her prime, performing 45 minute routines in cabaret. She taught me what she could and gave me my first set of professional zils, Saroyans that rang sweetly when struck.
One January afternoon I visited her to find her in deplorable condition. She had not eaten in 6 weeks. She couldn’t keep water down. Intense pain from adhesions due to endometriosis jarred her awake every few minutes. She stank horribly, having been unable to bathe. Despite my urging her to let me take her to an emergency room she refused. All I could do was lay next to her and stroke her to affect a charmed sleep.
But her mother and sister arrived the following week and put her into a local hospital. That’s where I found her next. That’s also where her family first met me. After I kissed her good night her mother lit into her with, “Are you having an affair with this man?”
She doubled over with hysterical laughter. She knew something they didn’t but soon would. Rosanne had already seen me as Lynnea and Rosanne wasn’t into transwomen. The next time I visited Rosanne at her home I came as Lynnea. Rosanne’s mother understood. That’s when she began to warm up to me.
Rosanne endured 3 surgeries and 2 rounds of chemotherapy. Her hair fell away. My heart ached to watch her grow increasingly feeble, unable at times to withstand the soft touch of her finger on a keypad. When her pain brought her to tears I kissed them away. I also helped to clear her basement since she had to sell off much of what she had to pay her mounting medical bills.
THE GATE OF DEATH
Work took me to the Bay Area and away from Rosanne. But I still went to the nearby Fremont Library each day to use a computer for correspondence. We spoke of dreams and the deities we knew. But her e-mails diminished in frequency while they grew more poetic and reading as if she was addressing everyone:
“@–>– >—A rose for you
and
@–>– >— A rose for you.
The Goddess dances in the wind.”
One day her e-mails fell silent. I thought of her often, fearing the worst. Soon e-mails arrived from her sister Lilly. She told me that Rosanne had returned to her parent’s home in Paradise, California. She rested on her death bed. She had given up fighting. Lilly asked me to send e-mails to her that she could read to Rosanne because we had been so close. So I did.
One night I dreamed an intense dream:
I see the ocean with a teal color like a shimmery bellydance skirt Rosanne had given me. The waves curl a special curl that sprays to one side. I also see what looked like 2 cats cavorting in the air. The dream coalesces into a bolt like that of lightning and I awake.
A butterfly of light circles the room before it flutters out the window northward till I see it no more.
The next day I drove through San Francisco to Ocean Beach. As soon as I saw the water my mouth dropped wide open. The color matched the teal of my dream. So did the curl of the waves. I had to stop.
I watched as the wind blew furiously from the northwest. Few bothered to stop at this beach on such a blustery day. But as I watched, 2 crows tried to fly against the fury of nature, the wind contorting their wings into catlike shapes.
Just then I understood. I remembered that Rosanne was a shamaness. I had also read at the local college some years before then that Altaic shamans were known to depart from this world in the form of a butterfly of light. Rosanne had said goodbye to me in that dream the previous night. I knew she was gone and began to weep.
I walked onto the beach toward the breakers. Wind blasted my legs sore with sand. But I didn’t care. My grief was deeper than the pain of a sandblast. Besides, it diminished when I neared the water line. Despite the damp windy chill I performed a rite of release for Rosanne. Then I broke down and cried for her all over again. My heart was broken and I would not be comforted. I remained so for many days.
The next day I stopped at the Fremont Library again to check my e-mails. A new message from Lilly appeared on my screen. It said:
“I’m so sad to tell you that Rosanne had passed away yesterday. She had said that she loved you. I worry about you now.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Rosanne already told me.”
As it turned out I was not permitted to attend Rosanne’s funeral for her father’s sake. Lilly said that her father would not be able to handle the fact that Rosanne had chosen a transwoman as her closest friend.
Years after whenever I viewed a Lunesta commercial featuring a butterfly of light I wonder, “Did Rosanne prompt a screenwriter to write this commercial so that I would never forget her?”
A PROFOUND CHANGE
Clearly, I had not understood love. I had studied for the mission field. But I didn’t understand love then either. Certainly that impacted all my attempts at ministry. I had an assignment to learn. That lesson would begin its cohesion in 2012 with Professor Neill Cooney presenting his own translation of Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle.
Aristotle presented love in 3 ways:
- Love based upon economic advantage
- Love based upon mutual pleasure or eroticism
- Love based upon goodness reciprocated2
He presented the third as rare, virtuous, and enduring, a love which seeks to fulfill the good of another without possessiveness.3
Did I know this kind of love from my own family? Not at all. My birth family approached love entirely as a matter of economic advantage and social status, so much so that they designed my birth and upbringing in order bring them much wealth and prestige in their retirement. They planned for me to become a research scientist, driving me to sickness. Largely because of this I never attained a degree. When I was building my career as a hospital engineer my father expressed that he was ashamed of me—his last communication before he died.
Did I know this kind of love through a church? Not at all. While much was established by the constant reading of the Bible and prayers, my family was estranged against me. A minister played a large role in this, so much so that teachings lost their savor.
Love died in a mixed message concerning the erotic: once as a valid part of a marriage, again as an intrinsic evil for which marriage must be condemned, at least as far as a husband’s affections are concerned. Despite church claims, men are not loved and men are deemed incapable of love. This part could only be achieved by a woman, however full of guile she may be.
I had struggled greatly with this innate mysandry for I knew there must be something else. But what it was I couldn’t grasp before leaving Christianity and exploring love through the woman within. Did I make mistakes with love in the meantime? Definitely so. I often look back with shame at much of my own foolishness with love.
But love never comes with a training manual. Too often the teachers of love are as foolish as I am.
My spouse died from cancer in 2003. She had rejected my reaching out to her in her affliction. She insisted on suffering alone. She rejected medical care, draining our account in the pursuit of a medical quack. I learned of her death 2 weeks after the fact and after her burial. I only learned of it because the caretaker wanted to confirm where to return the monthly support I had sent to her since our divorce.
That night I wept. I wept because I had given 21 years to her without meaningful fruit, a tragedy made in fraudulent churches I could never again accept. I wept because of the loss of illusory love. I wept because I never truly knew that woman I had married.
Spending the time I did with Rosanne made a difference because I was able to help her in her suffering such as my spouse denied to me. I knew suffering’s part in a greater illusion, but suffering must have at least an illusory purpose.
So when it came to my assignment to write about Aristotelian love, I said:
“It was a love for the sake of mutual good. We helped each other and found pleasure in it. Our love was also an intense love; intense enough to connect even at the time of death. We brought out the goodness of one another as those who knew how to love well. Of all friendships I have ever known among humankind, this was the best; a transcendental love which alone could qualify as Aristotelian, in which a kiss meant more than all medicines in the world to a woman whose cancer robbed her of her beauty and cast it into the withering winds of aging.”4
When Professor Cooney read the paper he was stricken and breathless. He wrote on it, “This is beautiful.” He gave it to his wife to read. She did so and wept. He read it in its entirety in class, noting it as the best paper ever submitted to him.
THE LIBERTY TO LOVE
Not until I came out as transgender was I really able to learn about love. Much of what I would face would consist of exploitation. Much of what I would face would consist of my poor choices. But in the role of a male I was always hobbled with the presumption of criminality at every turn… one presumed to be “good for nothing” no matter how much I might make, how many hours I might work, how much I did the work that belonged to others. None of these things mattered. Because I was deemed “male”, there was no possibility for my love to be considered good. The presumption was absolute, dogmatic, and no possibility was allowed to dissuade anyone. I was condemned, accursed, consigned to demons, unforgiven and unforgivable. This is what religion does too often, despite claims to the contrary its adherents insist.
So the “rebellion” of my transgenderism had its own holiness in becoming Scandal. In fact, “rebellion” is the meaning of the name of the mother of Y’shua— Miryam, means “rebellion”. It’s the name of a quiet woman, one who seems generally silent in the Gospels, reflecting the Lakota proverb: “Silence is the mother of truth.” It’s in the silence of meditation one may yet arrive at something momentous, even revolutionary.
No longer did I rest my decisions upon the directives of a theocratic clergy. I sought a new spirituality as one directly, whether for good, or whether for bad… and quite often the bad turned out to be good in disguise. Suffering is like that. So is the suffering of one loved.
This past month a man I love received back-to-back surgeries because of endemic infection. After his second surgery I sat up all night with him in the hospital because he had doubled up in excruciating pain. So great was the pain that he could no longer bear it and desired to die.
Worse yet, the hospital administered a dangerous hallucinogen which after his transfer to another hospital we were told was illegal and that the doctor had no idea how they could have administered it. His appetite had vanished. His mind ran wild with terrible images, leaving him to wonder if he had in fact died.
I took his hand, the caretaker of one on the brink, debilitated, unable to make sense what was happening to him. He said, “I can’t stand this. I don’t want this. I want the good like it was with you and me. How does it end? How does it end?”
I said, “Together.”
“Yes,” he said. “Together.” For a moment his pain seemed to subside, though it remained very great. “You’re everything to me,” he said. “I love you.”
I had to look away, being unable to contain myself with tears. A broken body may be healed with a broken heart. In heartbreak love may yet be proven though perseverance.
THE WORDS OF THE POET
I was reminded of a poem written by a great imperator of my tradition named William Butler Yeats. It’s titled The 2 Trees. Here it is in part:
“Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colours of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with merry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the night;
The shaking of its leafy head
Has given the waves their melody,
And made my lips and music wed,
Murmuring a wizard song for thee.
There the Loves a circle go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the wingèd sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.”5
To gaze upon one’s own heart consists of assessment and recapitulation, knowing what dreams may have to say. The pursuit of love is also a pursuit of natural innocence. If any would answer the call of love, one must also answer the call of dreams, working through their seemingly illogical nurture, not knowing what will come of them. Love seems to be pernicious by nature, but no more so than humans who so desperately search for love, often becoming disillusioned in suffering.
In the unfolding of love and dreams, one must recognize the difference between the hedonic that seeks happiness through pleasure, and the eudemonic which seeks happiness from the exercise of good. Love’s proving in suffering can only be achieved through the latter. Once realized, the realness of love cannot be disputed.
We who transition rightly should ask, “To what end?”
If the end rests in the sex industry as too many of us have been misled, the end is a bitter cup. If it rests in serving another, the cup is bittersweet, and the latter case offers the greater meaning.
Pursue love, not in hedonic wildness but in eudemonic carefulness, meditation, and prayers of the heart, looking always for others to help. You will not be disappointed even in the worst of times and it will lead you to greater health and meaning.
______________________________
REFERENCES:
Featured Image: [L] Cessare Musssini, The Death of Atala (painting, c. 1830), [R] Sufis discussing the virtue of mystical love (Persian illustration, Sufafid Period, c. 1590). Note the tree in the Persian illustration, reminiscent of the Tree of Life and whose branches appear ordered after the manner of Ikebana (Sun, Moon, and Earth). Note also the Native American figure of Chactas, reaching to the dying Atala while a monk appears to pull him away; Chactas as a representative of a people vilified even as men are often vilified today.
- Matthew 19:12, Greek transliteration from the Greek New Testament and translation by the author.
- Nicomachean Ethics 1156b7-17.
- Ibid, 1156b18-33.
- Lynnea Urania Stuart. The Highest Human Love (philosophic paper dated March 1, 2012)
- Yeats, William Butler. The 2 Trees.
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