Dazzling
Darkness: Gender, sexuality, illness and God
Rachel Mann
Wild Goose £11.50
(978-1-84952-241-0)
Church Times Bookshop £10.35 (Use code
CT618 )
THIS is not a comfortable
book to read. In it, the author, who describes herself as a trans,
lesbian, disabled, and chronically ill person, makes her
confession, beginning with a five-year-old boy's cherished yellow
Tonka truck, and ending with a middle-aged woman strolling the
seedy end of Stourport. Through gender dysmorphia, conversion to
faith, sex-reassignment surgery, and ordination, Mann charts a
growing experience of God, as the God who is unconditional love
becomes God who suffers alongside, and finally God who gives voice
to the broken and marginalised.
Her title quotes Vaughan's
"There is in God (some say) A deep but dazzling darkness", apposite
lines, since her story, told in language often itself poetic,
travels from initial euphoria of first faith into a "darkness of
possibility, like the darkness before the world began". Ultimately,
for her, Christian life is not so much about being consoled as
being stripped bare, naked before God and unashamed.
Critics of religion often
see faith as a panacea, but the author insists that truth is not
comfortable and rarely comforting. Being in the company of God is
about real and often brutal honesty. She wrestles with God and
images of God, confessing that, in words of Belden Lane, "grace
comes sometimes like a kick in the teeth, leaving us broken, wholly
unable any longer to deny our need."
Mann's determination to
voice a particular journey occasionally leads to defensiveness;
and, because she outgrew it, she dismisses the kind of Christianity
that nurtured her early faith; but this is a book full of brave
insights, born of the wisdom of suffering. "We all create myths for
ourselves," Mann writes, admitting that all tellings of one's life
are selective. This engaging book also exposes myths, and its
greatest strength lies in its convincing challenge to the myth of a
comfortable God.
Dr Denise Inge is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the
University of Worcester, and a Thomas Traherne specialist.