Leaving your religion and having to invent your own system of values is a big deal, after all.

Maybe I’m strange and perverse, but I’ve always thought there was something sexy about a compelling argument.

A Christian is supposed to be in the world, and yet not of the world--a Both/And as perplexing and demanding as the Either/Or that precedes the life of faith. I'm at once a pure, beautiful, genderless soul, but at the same time a gendered body full of flaws, sins, and wanting. This contradiction, the Both/And, is the Cross.

I want to see the world without explaining away its mystery by calling things wicked, righteous, sinful, and good. I want to erase in myself the easy explanations, the always mendacious explanations about why things happen the way they do, and in this way, come to know the mystery of being–-not by any approximation in thought, but by being. I want to be and not be ashamed of being.