By Lori Perkins
You know the saying (or cliché or platitude – your choice) that God works in mysterious ways? Well, what better proof than the fact that this year Easter Sunday, the most important day on the Christian calendar, shares space on the calendar with the Trans Day of Visibility.
Many of you might not know that I am the daughter of a feminist, liberal Protestant minister (who was mentored by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and went to Columbia University’s seminary, Union Theological Seminary, so very mainstream Protestant), so I am steeped in the meaning and culture of the American Protestant church, and I find it profound and meaningful that Easter Sunday falls on this day. I do not think it is a coincidence. I think it is a statement.
When my mother was attending seminary, she was still one of the few women in her class (because it was Ivy League and so expensive and they were misogynistic thinking that no one would hire women). Therefore, it was very hard to get a free teaching position at a church, because so many churches wouldn’t hire female ministers and you needed an internship to graduate. The only position my mother was offered was a chaplaincy at Bellevue working with AIDS patients, because the male seminary students didn’t want it. She was amazing. Loved her work, and surrogate-mothered many of the dying men she cared for. She felt that God had called her there.
I left the conservative branch of the Collegiate church I grew up in – where the local minister prayed for Nixon during the Watergate hearings—when I was 12, because even then Nixon’s crimes turned my stomach, but four decades later that same church had a drag queen minister on the pulpit.
Indeed, God works in mysterious ways. Hallelujah!
So this year celebrate that Trans Day of Visibility is Easter Sunday!
(and Orthodox Easter falls on Cinco de Mayo, which is also the anniversary of my end of chemo, so a Hallelujah there too—what a year).