Guarding against cruelty through contemplative practice

“It's very important to guard our hearts because when you're faced with evil, it's very hard to keep our responses to that wholesome,” said Dr. Wendy Farley. “Not because we don’t want to be but just because that’s the nature of evil — to corrupt us in whatever ways we are vulnerable.”

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During her two lectures at the MidWinter Lectures of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary this week, Farley addressed a crowd wondering how to understand and practice Christianity in today’s political climate. Farley was one of three lecturers alongside John Pavlovitz and Dr. Reggie L. Williams. In her second lecture, Farley particularly addressed the beauty of trans and queer identity as an icon for Divine Love.

Farley, who directs the Program in Christian Spirituality at San Francisco Theological Seminary, has had a long career as a theologian. She is also a practitioner of contemplative practice and has authored several books recovering the overlooked wisdom of medieval women mystics and contemplatives in other traditions and spiritual spaces. Her two lectures sought to expand the canon and befriend the voices that have been left out of Christianity since the Council of Nicaea gained influence within the empire.

Since her first book on theodicy, Farley has wondered which voices inside and on the margins of Christianity have truly taken seriously the afflictive suffering that continues to pervade our world. The voices Farley lifts up to create a broader canon speak from these spaces of trauma.

Julian of Norwich “heard that even in the midst of the Black Death, Hundred Years’ War, the rise of the Inquisition, the cruel repression of the Peasants’ Revolt, the grief of keening mothers,” and yet, according to Farley, in Julian’s vision of God, “there was no wrath, only a mysterious love that would make all things well, and we all hope everyone will see it.” Julian wrote to help others see this version of God’s love. “‘If only you saw this,’ she says, ‘your suffering would not be so terrible,’” Farley summarized the mystic. “‘This unbearable love will simultaneously break and heal your heart.’”

The French beguine Marguerite Porete penned “The Mirror of Simple Souls” before being executed as a heretic. Sojourner Truth found a private space in the midst of slavery to seek and hear God’s message of liberation. Civil rights activists Rosemarie Freeney Harding and Fannie Lou Hamer recognized God as their strength to remain in a movement of nonviolence. Hamer is remembered for saying, “Ain’t no such a thing as I can hate anybody and hope to see God’s face.” These words speak to Farley’s concerns about the cruelty and hatred bred in today’s politics.

“Hatred is a toxin. It will not help you,” Farley said, speaking to our desire to reject the souls and possibility of the redemption of those who do us and others harm.

Resisting hatred and the “logic of domination,” which Farley sees as a temptation for Christians since the fourth century, is hard work. “This is a hard teaching,” Farley said of Hamer’s advice. “It's a beautiful thing to read in a lecture. It's a hard teaching.”

“I started to train myself: Everybody I look at I’m going to say, ‘You're Jesus. I can see Jesus in you.’ I don’t mean I’m good at it. That’s why they call it practice, but it’s a way to practice,” Farley said in a Q&A session when asked how she “guarded her heart against hatred.”

“Put on the mind of Christ. That's what the mind of Christ is. Put on the mind of Christ. Look through your eyes. Let Jesus look through your eyes. ‘Oh, I see who you are. You’re the beloved.’”

Farley reminded listeners that the Christian tradition teaches its adherents to look for the Divine in unexpected places, like the womb of an unwed teenage refugee and the dirty shed of beasts.

“When one begins to wander around the stories of trans folks in many periods and cultures, it is a special joy to discover how many people carved out long and mostly happy lives within communities that cared for them,” Farley said after sketching personal histories of the daughter of a Scottish laird who transitioned to male and inherited land and title, an impoverished 18th-century English girl who passed as a male medical student and doctor in the navy, a jazz pianist married several times to women discovered to be female upon his death, and a Crow woman who maintained four wives and a career as a warrior and a chief. “We learn of any number of female husbands in the 18th and 19th centuries who were accepted into their communities as workers and even church elders,” Farley said when you delve into history without an eraser.

“Trans identity is not a fixed identity,” said Farley. “The variations of trans identity are as various as the individual lives.”

Along with widening the canon of witnesses to include medieval female mystics, freedom-seeking slaves and civil rights activists, Farley delighted in the witnesses of queer and transgender theologians working on the edges of religious traditions. These voices lift up both the multiplicity of names for God and the image-defying nature of the divine countenance in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions.

Joy Ladin, the first openly transgender professor at an Orthodox Jewish institution, has described how being trans can make one a stranger to those we love and who love us, but not to God: “God never mistook me for the body others saw. God knew who I truly was and understood how alone I felt, because God, like me, has no body to make God visible, no face human beings can see.”

“Iron Age Israelites found God in their experiences of warriors and kings. Slaves sang of God as a rock in a weary land. Martin Luther extolled God as a mighty fortress,” Farley said before describing how transgender souls add to the multiplicity and pervasive particularity of the Imago Dei while at the same time inviting us closer into the ineffability of Divine Love.

“Many names and images draw the ineffable divine mystery closer to us, and the divine image is revealed to us in countlessly diverse faces and forms,” said Farley.

“How wonderful it is to recognize in our beloved trans friends or our trans selves a particular kind of witness to the divine goodness and beauty.”

Farley finds the solace of compassion and the strength of love in contemplative practice, which she called a non-discursive “way of knowing,” therefore to expand the “limited way of knowing” that is “listening to a theology lecture.” Farley concluded her final lecture with a 10-minute guided compassion meditation that invited participants to imagine a person they love, a transgender person and an architect of transphobia, and imagine them being held in the heart of compassion. “Notice what it feels like to imagine such a person is also beloved and precious,” guided Farley. “Notice your resistance.”

After inviting those gathered in the room, the overflow “awesome space” and online to take some closing deep breaths, Farley concluded:

“Return for a moment to your heart space and allow yourself to feel, viscerally and without interruption, how precious you are; how tenderly you are held by the Divine.”