Midpoint on Jacob’s Ladder
Hodos anō katō mia kai hōutē. (The path up and down is one and the same.) — Heraclitus, Fragment 60
Five years ago, I managed to execute a simultaneous exit and re-entry: I started transitioning from male to female and began my return to the Christian church. Were you to have asked me ten years ago if this could have been one of the forking paths in the garden of my life, I would have dismissed the thought with a chuckle. While I was never the kind of ex-Catholic to refer to the Roman church with nothing short of venom and bile, I was sure that it was not the kind of spiritual place where I could feel at home. It was too much the “old boys club”, too welded to opinions about sex, gender, and ministry that I believed were rationally meritless and certainly not an institution I could honestly and unreservedly endorse. More importantly, I felt that my long-standing vocation as a philosopher foreclosed the possibility of faith, Christian or otherwise. I thought it was a matter of personal integrity to take a different path. Philosophy is all about persistent and passionate questioning; faith rested upon a still-point in which questioning stops and receptivity begins. If I had continued understanding myself as Christian, going to church, and reciting the prayers publicly, I would have been faking it. Not only “it” but faking myself. I had read enough Kierkegaard to understand that.
