God got her wrong...

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Gob
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God got her wrong...

Post by Gob »

At 66, Diana Johnson has just embarked on her third career.

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She has moved to a different part of the country and become a priest with her own parish. The “thread” that brought her to this point runs right back to her teens and in Johnson’s mind, it blazes scarlet or purple, garish and unflinching. “Whatever bright colour you can think of. That’s my faith,” she says, speaking from the vicarage at St James’s Church Riding Mill, an Anglican parish in Northumberland. It is only recently that she has also come to see a second thread running through her life – gender dysphoria. For more than five decades, she identified as male.

When Johnson was growing up in London, her family “weren’t very religious”, by which she means they were “on the edge of a church” rather than in the thick of one, and didn’t say grace or bedtime prayers. But by the age of 16, when she won a scholarship to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, she began to sense a greater intentionality in her own beliefs. “It was a conscious thing. The question was, where was this leading?”

The consciousness and the questioning must have grown because eventually, after 22 years of service and with the rank of lieutenant colonel, Johnson felt herself “drawn out” of the army and into theological college – as if someone or something were pulling on that thread. Her wife, Penny, who also served in the army, was in remission from cancer, but the illness “galloped up” and she died two years later, leaving Johnson and their three daughters, then aged 17, nine and seven.

Ordination no longer seemed viable. It wasn’t that Penny’s death had caused Johnson a crisis of faith – on the contrary, faith underpinned the pain; but other practicalities proved decisive. Her children had “settled into the most lovely, nurturing school” in Cambridgeshire, so when Johnson was offered a teaching post there, “it became a no-brainer”. For 22 years – as long as she spent in the army – Johnson taught.

Her daughters grew independent and pursued their own lives. So why did it take so long for Johnson to be ordained, at 63, and then to seek her own parish? At this, Johnson starts to describe a Venn diagram, comprising three circles: the army, teaching and the priesthood. It’s like a shape-sorter of selfhood.

This seems a curiously firm structure with which to make sense of one’s life. Johnson cites the Myers-Briggs personality tests, and believes herself to have switched from introverted to extroverted. There is a wish, or need, to self-categorise, to “turn stuff into something graphic”. She studied engineering in her first degree, and finds comfort in the ability of mathematical models to explain personal complexity.

Around 10 years ago, Johnson discerned that second thread. Unlike her faith, her gender dysphoria had been harder to spot, and had somehow wound itself through her years unnoticed. She never discussed these feelings with Penny – “To my shame, I didn’t know what was going on” – and did not begin to “investigate” this aspect of herself until 2010. She realised she could not pursue her vocation before she was “settled and centred”, and so began the process of transitioning.

“As I like to think of it, I’m still the same soul, but how the world receives me is different,” she says. She began living as a woman in 2012. Her transition has spurred mixed feelings in her daughters: acceptance, hurt, closeness, distance.

During her ordination, however, Johnson looked up into the lantern of Ely cathedral and “imagined Penny, spiritually, like a bird fluttering around and looking down, and approving. This has been a journey. We spent some of it together, journeying. She didn’t make it. But I felt she was there,” she says.

The result is something more than peace: a challenge. As she settles in with her new congregation in Northumberland, Johnson says, “My adventure is about to start. And I dare say, so is theirs.”
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

Burning Petard
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Re: God got her wrong...

Post by Burning Petard »

I read this as a description of a life well lived--not without hardship and probable mistakes. But with blessings and joy as well.

snailgate

Big RR
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Re: God got her wrong...

Post by Big RR »

I was thinking the same thinking. IMHO her biggest mistake was buying into the Myers-Briggs bullshit; I say htis as someone who has been trained more flavor of the month pop psychology and management systems than I can count, some of which create cult ideologies that could make scientology blush (especially the ones that claim to rely on "science" (really just using a few buzz words and a cult-like belief that if you aren't with us you're against us and should be removed ).

But that's for another thread; I wish her luck in her new vocation.

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Bicycle Bill
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Re: God got her wrong...

Post by Bicycle Bill »

If this person –

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can live life as a male (married to a woman, fathered and raised three daughters, served 20-plus years in the military) for over 50 years, and then decides that now their personality has changed and they are now a female ....

Then this —

Image

is an oak tree.  Makes just about as much sense.
Image
-"BB"-
Yes, I suppose I could agree with you ... but then we'd both be wrong, wouldn't we?

Big RR
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Re: God got her wrong...

Post by Big RR »

Bill--why do you care? She seems to be happy and, at an age when many are retiring, is starting a new challenge. There are all kinds of people, and they don't exist to make any of us (especially people they don't even know) happy or even comfortable.

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Bicycle Bill
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Re: God got her wrong...

Post by Bicycle Bill »

I cannot yet grasp, let alone accept, the concept that someone can decide that "God — or biology, if you're an atheistic heathen infidel   :P  — messed up and I'm actually a woman (or a man) despite years of evidence to the contrary".  I also cannot comprehend that a significant enough number of the nutbars that make up society are perfectly willing to go along with it.

Arbitrarily deciding that I am going to "live as a woman" and expecting everybody else to go along with it would be like taking a Volkswagen Beetle, swapping out the VW-in-the-circle-logo for the blue Chevy 'bowtie', and trying to convince people that it was now a Corvette.
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-"BB"-
Yes, I suppose I could agree with you ... but then we'd both be wrong, wouldn't we?

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MajGenl.Meade
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Re: God got her wrong...

Post by MajGenl.Meade »

I think it's perhaps a reaction to normalizing the abnormal. :shrug
For Christianity, by identifying truth with faith, must teach-and, properly understood, does teach-that any interference with the truth is immoral. A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts

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BoSoxGal
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Re: God got her wrong...

Post by BoSoxGal »

Normal isn’t even a setting on a washing machine anymore (maybe on some models).

There is no normal, there are 7 billion+ experiences of human existence.

Learn to be happy with your own self and stop judging others.
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
~ Carl Sagan

Big RR
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Re: God got her wrong...

Post by Big RR »

I agree; I just don't understand it. If someone is happy and not hurting anyone else, who am I to condemn them or tell them how to live? I don't extol the "norm", some people who are extraordinary are not those who fall into the norm, be it Albert Einstein or Mother Theresa. I'd rather celebrate someone who is extraordinary, or even someone who can just be a happy and giving individual, than someone who fits the norm. If refusing to condemn deviations from the norm which hurt no one makes me a nutbar, then I am happy to be one,

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Sue U
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Re: God got her wrong...

Post by Sue U »

Agree with BSG, BigRR and SnailyG; also, someone else's gender identity is none of my business, except to the extent I'd need to know how they'd like to be addressed.
GAH!

Burning Petard
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Re: God got her wrong...

Post by Burning Petard »

God made a mistake? I have seen no evidence of that -- lot of evidence of human errors. I came to that conclusion when I was about 10 years old and sitting on the floor of the stacks in the Jackson County Public Library reading the Kinsey report on human male sexual activity. (They would not let me check it out, but the stack were open and I did not even have to reach very high to get it) For me, Kinsey was the first hard evidence that became a long and populous series of data that has re-enforced my current general conclusion that there is damn little about humans that is binary. Not even XY/XX is solid. There are XXY's and lots of other stuff. That is why so many international athletic organizations are have so much trouble stuffing it all into just two bags.

snailgate

Burning Petard
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Re: God got her wrong...

Post by Burning Petard »

And BB about that pine tree of yours--have you looked into the current hot topic in botany that all the trees of the forest communicate with each other and work together to get through had times?

snailgate

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Joe Guy
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Re: God got her wrong...

Post by Joe Guy »

Nowadays you don't even have to die in order to be reincarnated.

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Bicycle Bill
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Re: God got her wrong...

Post by Bicycle Bill »

Burning Petard wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 11:15 pm
... my current general conclusion that there is damn little about humans that is binary. Not even XY//XX is solid. There are XXY's and lots of other stuff. That is why so many international athletic organizations are have so much trouble stuffing it all into just two bags.
"my general conclusion" ... that's the same reason/excuse/justification that anti-vaxxers and pro-ivermectin users toss around.

And so far as "Not even XY//XX is solid. There are XXY's and lots of other stuff." is concerned, I believe that there's a scientific term for that too, and that word would be 'mutant'.
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-"BB"-
Yes, I suppose I could agree with you ... but then we'd both be wrong, wouldn't we?

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Econoline
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Re: God got her wrong...

Post by Econoline »

This is probably gonna get me a load of flak, but.... My first thought when I saw that photo was, "That's a man pretending to be a woman." Okay, now that I've said it, I guess that does come off as a little too harsh. Maybe a better way of putting it would be to say, "That's a man trying hard to look like a woman."(...and not quite succeeding.) (Well? Amirite? Is it just me?)

Which brings me directly to a question I've asked myself for a long time, and have never been able to answer to my own satisfaction: to a prepubescent boy or an over-50 man just what, exactly, specifically, is meant by the term "living as a female"? Wearing dresses, or bright colors, or makeup, or jewelry, or long hair? Sitting to pee? Speaking in a higher pitched voice? What? Why?




And don't get me started about pronouns: that's a whole other rant about how we should just eliminate third person singular pronouns (he/him/his/his/she/her/her/hers) in favor of the plural (they/them/their/theirs) — much like how thou/thee/thy/thine/ye were abandoned leaving only you/yours.
People who are wrong are just as sure they're right as people who are right. The only difference is, they're wrong.
God @The Tweet of God

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Long Run
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Re: God got her wrong...

Post by Long Run »

Sue U wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 5:56 pm
someone else's gender identity is none of my business,
Unless they are on the starting line with you.

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BoSoxGal
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Re: God got her wrong...

Post by BoSoxGal »

This place can be so fucking disheartening.
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
~ Carl Sagan

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Joe Guy
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Re: God got her wrong...

Post by Joe Guy »

BoSoxGal wrote:
Sat Sep 25, 2021 3:13 am
This place can be so fucking disheartening.
But we've all known each other long enough to consider most participants here part of one big extended crazy family.

Isn't that heartening?

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MajGenl.Meade
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Re: God got her wrong...

Post by MajGenl.Meade »

BoSoxGal wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 4:57 pm
Learn to be happy with your own self and stop judging others.
You first . . . :lol: :ok
For Christianity, by identifying truth with faith, must teach-and, properly understood, does teach-that any interference with the truth is immoral. A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts

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dales
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Re: God got her wrong...

Post by dales »

BoSoxGal wrote:
Sat Sep 25, 2021 3:13 am
This place can be so fucking disheartening.

It's a source of free entertainment for me.

For you, not so much,

Your collective inability to acknowledge this obvious truth makes you all look like fools.


yrs,
rubato

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