Last weekend, Lindsay and I drove ten hours to Minneapolis. We were welcomed into the city by a red-winged blackbird. I knew it was a male because it was all black except for the red patch with the yellow border on his wing. This bird is impossible to misgender. Because the female is dark brown.
I spotted the red-winged blackbird posting up on the east bank of the Mississippi River on the day before the wedding of our friend Maki Ashe, who we met a dozen years ago on our 12,000-mile road trip through North America. She and her wife at the time started an intentional community that created a home space for unhoused people.
I had not seen Ashe in person since 2019. That was a couple of years before she transitioned.
*******************
The wedding was at a brewery, just a block from the police precinct that burned down after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officers. During the reception, the brewery transitioned into a karaoke bar.
Ashe calls karaoke “a spiritual practice.” Her rendition of "Tiny Dancer" was exquisite.
Elton John released this song two years before George Floyd and I were born. Some radio stations banned it because of the start of the second verse:
Jesus freaks out in the street
Handing tickets out for God.
The Jesus freaks were charismatic hippies who handed out contemporary versions of the bible on Southern California streets in the 60’s and 70’s. The movement eventually morphed into Christo-Fascist institutions like Calvary Chapel and Campus Crusade for Christ, which became conduits of hetero-patriarchy, US imperialism and Islamophobia.
Ashe grew up in an evangelical Christian culture, like us, aggressively shaped by these principalities. When we met her the year after Trayvon Martin was murdered, Ashe had already done a considerable amount of intentional work transitioning out of Christian supremacy. Her process had a huge impact on how Lindsay and I have transitioned too.
Ashe deconstructed and reconstructed. A few years ago, she wrote that grace is the gift of divine presence without us having to secure it. Grace does not depend on our obedience to a Supreme authority who is above us, but in the abundance of a friend who dwells among us. My own transition pivots on this crucial divine paradigm shift.
During the reception, I sipped on a rye IPA with another post-evangelical, Rev. Joanna Lawrence Shenk, who is the pastor of 1st Mennonite Church in San Francisco. We bonded over many things, including our mutual affection for Dr. Jim Perkinson, who influenced a sermon she preached a couple years ago about the subversive ways that the bible portrays Jesus as Lady Wisdom showing up in drag.
Ancient Jewish writers personified Wisdom as the goddess Sophia, describing her as the way, the path and the life, the image of the invisible God, the reflection of God’s glory, the first born of all creation, and the one through whom the world was created. Anyone familiar with the New Testament can clearly hear the echoes.
In that sermon, Joanna exhorted her congregation in the Bay to reclaim Jesus from the Christian supremacists as "a gender bending divine emissary come to restore humans to our right relationship with the Great Mother."
The gender bending divine emissary did not come to save us from a hellish afterlife. He challenged us to transition from the cold-hearted conventional wisdom killing the planet to the logic of a Love supreme.
*********************
It takes a lot of courage to get on the mic and belt out cover songs in front of friends and strangers.
It takes even more courage to publicly break rank with gender, religious and middle-class constructs that parents, pastors, bosses and other authority figures expect us to perform.
Ashe's life has helped me come to see that my spiritual journey is a life-long transition from what empire has constructed me to be to who God conceived me to be(come).
American society is one big social construction project, hammering us with gender norms, racial norms, religious norms, political norms, nuclear family norms, middle-class norms. Hammering. Hammering. Hammering. Around every corner.
Our whole sense of security, identity and value are hammered into place by the nails of being normal.
This social construction project is a destructive spiritual development.
******************
On the morning of the wedding, I saw a meme on social media that said “I’m not concerned about men transitioning to women. I am concerned about Americans transitioning to Nazis.” This kind of says it all.
Over the past few years, mainstream America has suffered a mass transition towards the right. Corporate propaganda has effectively fueled fear and confusion by weaponizing racism and homophobia. The consistent message: “the radical left” (or the “woke agenda”) has “gone too far.” Also: watch out for the those who are "grooming" our children with this "radical gender ideology."
What’s unsaid – but clearly understood - is that we’ve got to get back to what is white, straight, American, middle-class - and the sex we were assigned at birth.
Hammering. Hammering. Hammering. Around every corner.
Over the past few years, I’ve seen how this pressure to get back to “normal” has pushed progressive folks into a more “moderate” posture, which is portrayed as reasonable, realistic, sensible, civil and diplomatic.
Sixteen months ago, Ashe confronted this situation with compelling words:
Radical centrism engages in both-sideism as a way of absolving itself of complicity while it normalizes the violence required to maintain the status quo.
To stay safe, many folks have moved to the middle.
They lament the extreme “polarization” of both parties.
The US and Israel are ethnically cleansing Palestinians, but they blame both sides.
They want peace and unity under a system that kind of works for them, while it exploits half the US population and most of the rest of the world.
Ashe’s words echo what Dr. King wrote sixty years ago from his jail cell, imploring the white moderate to be more devoted to justice than order.
While the Black Freedom Struggle called for a full and final transition out of the racist system, masses of moderates preferred a kinder, gentler racist system.
America never transitioned. So here we are. Radical centrism has enabled a Nazi agenda.
********************
On the day after Ashe’s wedding, at the end of our long drive back to Detroit, there was a huge accident on I-94, about four miles from our condo. We were stuck on the interstate. It was 10pm. Some of the cars started driving up one of the on-ramps to get off the interstate. We followed suit.
In order to get free, we had to go the wrong way.
If we followed Google maps, we might still be on that interstate.
There’s a major pile-up ahead – and what’s conventional cannot save us.
We must transition.
The only way off this interstate is to follow the queer, the curious and the questioning.
The ones who are courageously driving up the on-ramps.
*********************
To support Maki Ashe Pendergast's work, check out this recent piece she wrote.
Also, check out the Inaction Planner that she created. Doing nothing is one way to subvert corporate fascism.
Maki Ashe and Amy Shaw Pendergast with Rev. Joanna Lawrence Shenk.
