A Forced Fit
Jigsaw puzzles sustain my prayer life.
Needing stillness and silence to hear the still, small voice of my inner knowing, the visual distraction of searching out and placing puzzle pieces quiets my endlessly chattering mind.
Yesterday, I forced a piece to fit where it didn’t belong.
***
It’s a Thursday night, late fall 1975, my freshman year at Smith College, where everyone knew then, and still knows, there are no lesbians.
Standing on tiptoe to lean over my too-tall, college-issued dresser, I put the finishing touches on my toilette before my weekly foray to The Pink. A generous spritz of perfume in the air, I walked through it as it fell, saturating my clothes in Scent of a Woman.
The only full-length mirror was down the long hallway toward the communal bathrooms and the stairwell. My legs in their highest-heeled Capezios prompted an anonymous dyke wolf whistle. I nodded, hiding my immediate grin with my wild red curls. That night, I wore my hair down. A statement all its own, my hair looks like it belongs spread out on a pillowcase.
In those days, weekends began on a Thursday night with womyn’s night upstairs at the student center. All the jeans, flannel shirts, and Birkenstocks you ever wanted. I never went because I was a bad lesbian. Not in the but-I’m-so-good-when-I’m-bad kinda way either. I mean, I was bad at being a lesbian.
I didn’t know why, but I did know as sure as my hair is red, that first night when I stood poised in the doorway of The Pink, and the whole place turned as one to look at me and, I kid you not, sighed, that I’d come home. I still didn’t know why, but I felt a whole lot more real with the townies on the wrong side of the tracks where The Pink lived than I did with those who identified as womyn, with a y.
Getting ready for The Pink became pure liturgy for me. The process and the result were equally important. A ritual shedding of an intellectual, socially-ideated self revealed the wild, womanly part of myself that made me feel like my skin fit.
Costume, bottom to top consisted, as you already know, of my highest-heeled Capezio jazz shoes. They were t-straps with a curved heel that made my legs both look and feel wonderful. Whenever I wore those shoes, I could dance the night away and never suffer for it.
The shoes went over black silk or fishnet, seamed stockings secured with a black garter belt. Over that, always a short, short skirt, most often black and slinky, cut tight across my ass, with a soft, low-cut, brilliantly-colored top, showing as much cleavage as I dared. Hair choices were either red curls down and wild, or up and sassy, tendrils escaping over one eye, a shoulder, my neck. Lots of glittery jewelry, way more make-up than nice Smith girls wore, and, of course, the usual cloud of a subtle perfume.
It was too far to walk to The Pink, and although I had no wheels, somehow I always got there. The old-time butch townies would stand in line to dance with me. They’d arrive for their dance at my table, where I drank only soda, collect me, speak a few genteel words, and take their delighted spin with me on the dance floor. Nary a one was ever inappropriate. Such gentlemen.
I almost always arrived back at Emerson House at the same time as the dykes who populated the student center. I don’t remember ever climbing those stairs to the fourth floor without appreciative eyes on my ass and audible tsks in my wake.
See? I was a bad lesbian, from day one.
***
Ten years later, I became a first year seminarian at St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City. I am fond of saying it was known as a liberal Methodist seminary—till I got there.
By then, through painful loss, I’d found my spiritual path—classical Aristotelian Metaphysics. Metaphysics takes the position that each of us is divine, and that if we all lived that way, life on earth would be a whole lot better, and a whole lot more fun.
One day in a first-semester theology class, I asked our team teachers to explain the difference between Jesus of Nazareth and The Christ knowing from my own biblical studies that Christ was a title, not a proper name. Both men first gasped, then gaped, then sputtered.
One of them pointed a shaking finger at me, and said, “You are ..., you are ..., you are ... a synthesist!”
I took it as a compliment. “I am,” I agreed proudly. I saw no problem with that.
The other one said, “For that, you will go straight to hell, young lady.”
The room, some forty-odd of my peers, was stunned into a paralytic silence.
They sent me to the dean’s office—again. By then, I’d been there so often that she knew how I took my tea. Usually, we’d have a cuppa, commiserate over narrow-minded men in the church and their even narrower theology, and I’d go back to class.
The faculty lasted about a year. Then, they threw me out for being a heretic. Hallelujah. My skin never fit in that place; in fact, more often than not, it made my skin crawl.
***
Eventually third generation Ernest Holmes students ordained me, and invited me to study for a Doctorate in Divinity. I became the pastor of a tiny start-up metaphysical church in a trio of small towns in southeastern Washington State.
There also happened to be an MCC Church in the triangle. They’d lost their part-time pastor so they asked me, the local lesbian religious—even though I was no dyke—if I’d fill in for a little while. Eventually, amidst great enthusiasm and vociferous endorsement, they hired me to fill the post.
At the time, I’d thought my life couldn’t possibly get any better—spiritual work with queer people.
What could possibly go wrong?
It had been a long time since those admiring if disapproving sounds had followed me up the stairs at Smith.
It was a love affair for about a year. It felt good to serve in a community that recognized more of what I am than just a metaphysician. I loved preaching. I loved telling queer youth that She loved them as just they are. I loved serving the queer boys who loved divas. One of the members was so excited about how I worked with scripture that he created a television program for my sermons. I was a local celebrity. Life was rich, spiritually at any rate. Or so I thought.
Then two very angry, excommunicated, former pastors decided that since I didn’t believe in Original Sin, I couldn’t possibly believe any of the rest of the correct theology. They manufactured charges of sexual misconduct with a parishioner out of whole cloth, demanding that we hold a trial, and crucified me spiritually, sexually, and ethically. The church fired me, escorted me far from gently out of the building, confiscated my personal computer, and spread vicious rumors where we lived and on the MCC grapevine.
I got the message loud and clear: persona non grata, not meant to be a pastor. It was a forced fit.
***
Newly orphaned and now forty, I’d moved home to New York City. I’d been asked to be the Executive Producer of a worldwide premiere opera based on the lesbian classic, Patience & Sarah.
At my first meeting with the fundraising committee—high-profile lesbians-around-town—I did what I always do when I’m nervous. I dressed up. Similar to the costume for The Pink, but on the business spectrum. Classic emerald green suit, black velvet collar. The rest, bar the cleavage, pretty much the same.
I called the meeting to order. All twelve committee members were checking me out, and doing their level best not to appear as though they were. Finally, one of them said, in a distinctly whiny voice, “We don’t even know if you’re a lesbian.”
I let the usual beat go by before delivering my Martini-dry standard line, “Tell me where to get an I.D. card.”
There was a butch woman at the far end of the table opposite me. She was blow-my-skirt-up, tall, dark and handsome. In a voice like aged, smoked whiskey, she said quietly, authoritatively, “She’s not a lesbian.” The room stared at her in total silence. She repeated herself, “She’s not a lesbian.” Beat. “She’s a femme.” Then she bowed her head to me.
I swear I very nearly passed out.
I’d never even heard that word before. When I did, though, I knew in my every cell that it fit me. It fit me so well, it was so right, that suddenly I was right. I was right, just like I promised those queer youth, just as I am. I was right to dress up for this meeting. I was right about how to raise the money to do it. I was right about how to produce the show.
And I wasn’t going to apologize for being a bad lesbian ever again.
That night I went home and put the word femme into Google. Words matter.
Ohhh, I see. Not a lesbian at all.
The premiere was stellar. I wore a black strapless sequined dress, and I was the Femme of the Ball, and believe me when I tell you that my skin utterly fit.
***
In the ten years from my crucifixion till I owned femme, I figured out that I really didn’t want to be a pastor. What I excelled at was helping people figure out how to live their lives in their own spiritual way. I became a spiritual director, and now have been one for more than thirty years. I have served all sorts, many of them pastors, of myriad denominations, even some Jesuits.
One of my directees recommended me to a Protestant consulting firm as a great spiritual director. The head of the organization called me personally to invite me to be on their roster of consultants. I’d long wanted to work only with those who were serving others in a spiritual capacity. Consulting for spiritual people who were building spiritual organizations. I was a perfect fit.
After a few months, I realized that the director wasn’t making the referrals she’d promised to make, although she was not shy about asking me to take courses in coaching. They were a waste of both money and time—mine. She also asked me to give four hours a week on conference calls with her and her team. I did everything she asked; I so wanted this to work. On paper, it was a perfect fit.
Remember that old seminary joke? Wanna make God laugh? Tell Her your plans.
As time went by, I grew progressively more uncomfortable. I alternated between feeling angry and feeling hurt. I began to reach out to the director. She wasn’t returning emails or texts or phone calls. I did not understand why, but I felt shut out, once again. This time, not a bad lesbian, no, I’d graduated from that already. This time, I was a bad spiritual person.
By the time she finally called me to say she thought I wasn’t the right fit for her organization, I’d already figured it out for myself. It was a forced fit so it was a wrong fit for me.
Strangely, it is because I am a femme that it took a whole lot longer for me, and for them, to figure out that I didn’t belong because I look like I do belong with them. I look like I should be able to fit in with mainline faith practices, but I don’t fit with them at all. There isn’t the least bit of orthodoxy about me. Not as a gender, not as a sexual creature, and not as a person of faith. Nope, it’s heterodox or heterodox for me all the way.
***
So that puzzle? When I found the piece that didn’t really fit, I remembered pushing extra hard to make a similarly-shaped piece work. I forced it.
I had a felt-sense memory of that resistance, and went right to the piece that didn’t belong where I’d put it. I swapped the two out and finished the puzzle, praying all the while.
What was my prayer? Gratitude. Gratitude for all the times in my life that I’d tried to force myself to fit where I didn’t. Why? Because that’s when the grace of the Divine always shows up to swap the pieces—sometimes gently, and sometimes forcefully—making sure, regardless, that all the pieces are in place for me to find my place in the world.