Blessed Are the Binary Breakers

These binaries divvy up the world into neat, rigid boxes, for the purpose of elevating one group above the other. Those whom these binaries favor have a vested interest in getting everyone to accept that this is “just the way things are” — and they’ll deny the existence of any person or thing that doesn’t quite fit. Try to break out of your assigned box, and you’ll be brutally punished.

But a disruptive wind is blowing, upturning the status quo. It whispers rebellion into our hearts, nourishes us with dreams of change. Those who allow themselves to be fed by that subversive Spirit, to challenge the Powers that Be, become binary breakers.

My glimpse of the divine ignites my own passion for several particular topics, which are the focus of this site: queerness and trans faith; disability justice and theology; interdependence and interfaith relationships. In all of these areas I find an urgent need to break down binaries, to burst into city halls and religious communities, bars and schools, streets and homes, and cry out, “The world is so much grander and more fearsome and beautiful than you have been led to believe! The things you dismiss as weakness may yet prove to be greatest strength; the darkness is as numinous as the light; the human beings you drive away are shimmering round the edges with too much splendor to contain!”

I honor the rich insight to be found among all religious traditions; I recognize that I don’t have all the answers on my own, and that holding interfaith dialogue brings us all to ever wider visions of the divine and what it means to be faithful. That is why in this site’s three Christian-focused sections you will still find references to various religions – often in the context of acknowledging how Christians past and present have pitted ourselves against and above non-Christians. Hence also the interfaith conversations held in my podcast Blessed Are the Binary Breakers. I cannot express how humbled I am by the wisdom and holiness I have been graced with by my participants in all their diverse faith backgrounds. 

Let us recognize the spark of the sacred burning bright in one another. Let us open our doors, extending and receiving hospitality with grace and eagerness to learn. In this way, some of the longest upheld binaries around who is Us and who is Them, who is Right and who is Wrong, will crumble away; and all of us will be the richer for it.

When being blessed = being gifted, receiving some sort of special privilege or power from the Divine, it’s not really my cup of tea. When people assume that it is “blessing” that allows billionaires to amass and hoard resources, or “blessing” that determines which countries can dominate and exploit others, or “blessing” that keeps some healthy and safe while others suffer…well. I am not fond of such blessing.

But I have learned another way of understanding blessing.

Those who join in the hard, holy work of calling attention to and tearing down life-limiting binaries truly are blessed – but not in the ways the world thinks of blessing. We are not always safe, or happy, or showered in pleasant things. We are frequently more empty than we are full, but unafraid of the loss that comes with demanding justice from an unjust world. No, for me, to proclaim “Blessed are the binary breakers” has little to do with gifts lavished and honestly, much more to do with spite. We are blessed – in spite of our struggling. We are blessed – in spite of the rejection we face. We are blessed – in spite of the roughness of the road we travel. And perhaps, in ways, because of all that.

From my Christian perspective – nestled at the feet of a Galilean hick proclaiming to a sea of impoverished, exploited people, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who grieve, who hunger, who thirst, who are tortured by a world that denies the blessing in them” – blessing comes to those we would assume least blessed! Those who are cursed by the world are blessed by Divinity – not because they necessarily “deserve” it more (because blessing isn’t about “deserve”), but because they need it most, and because they tend to be the ones who most desperately seek it.

“Who would stick around to wrestle a dark angel all night long if there were any chance of escape? The only answer I can think of is this: someone in deep need of blessing; someone willing to limp forever for the blessing that follows the wound.”

– Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark

In the above passage, Taylor tells the story of Jacob in the wilderness, where he finds and wrestles a strange, numinous Being in the dead of night. He refuses to give up or give in to this stranger, even when his hip is wrenched from its socket – “Unless you bless me, I will not let you go!” (Genesis 32:26). And the Being gives him what he demands: Jacob first gets a wound, and then a new name (v. 28), and finally “the stranger blessed him there” (v. 29) – there in the wasteland, there in night’s predawn glow.

But what exactly is the blessing Jacob receives? Is the wound and the limp his blessing? Is the new name, Israel? Or something else, undefinable? Or perhaps, all these things combined?

When we come to see the wound as part of the blessing, it turns the world’s notion of blessing on its head! We want to be blessed with riches and power, with safety and control; but Jacob’s blessing comes with a wound, and a transformation so bone-deep he needs a new name.

When we look to the ones the world calls wounded, calls broken, calls cursed, will we also glimpse the blessing there? 

Is there a blessing to be had in my disability? Is my transness, my queerness, holy? 

These are the questions I explore here — and I ask that all who are willing will join me. I cannot go it alone; I need your insight, your stories, your questions and your corrections. We all are interdependent on one another — and to me, that is the strangest and most powerful blessing of all.