Music, photographs, poetry and homilies minister to the seminary community
by Mike Ferguson | Presbyterian News Service
Photo by Tirza Van Dijk via Unsplash
LOUISVILLE — The Union Theological Seminary community gathered in James Chapel Wednesday evening for a two-hour vigil remembering transgender people from around the country lost to violence during 2024.
The Transgender Day of Remembrance vigil was hosted by the seminary’s Queer Caucus. Watch the vigil, which included music, poetry and brief homilies, here. The program for the vigil is here.
According to The Associated Press, TDOR marks the end of Transgender Awareness Week. The Williams Institute at UCLA Law estimates that 1.6 million people in the U.S. 13 years and older identify as transgender. The institute also says transgender people are four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violence. This week the Human Rights Campaign released this report on the epidemic of violence against the transgender and gender-expansive community in the U.S.
Romy Felder, a Ph.D. student at Union Theological Seminary, recalled attending a meditation class five years ago in James Chapel. The class met early four mornings a week. “I had just started pursuing my MDiv and was terrified by the prospect — mostly the prospect of dying poor and alone, a pariah,” Felder said. “I was in a place where I wasn’t safe, surviving in a friendship-bound community. My fellow Union students, many of us share that trajectory. Many of us take that leap with varying results.”
One morning, it dawned on Felder: “Every day in our world, thousands of people die poor and alone, and God loves them the most. … Slowly, grace keeps eroding at me. We need to reject that fear of not dying well, the fear of dying alone, humiliated or ashamed. If we cower to that fear, we will never live our lives.”
“I am interested in the lifeways that don’t fear death — all the radical possibilities, all the abundance that is outside that fear. We must, I think, embrace death — embrace that there is more to life than death,” Felder said. “We have to embrace grace, that we live in a world that denies us to feel grace, the grace that emanates from our bodies, the grace that guides us to who God created us to be. I have faith in that grace, and I have experienced it … in remembrance of all we have lost, who have also rejected that fear of not dying well. I have faith in the grace deeply buried in each of us, deeply buried in this world — a grace that is abundant and obvious, as obvious as waking up in the morning and remembering who you are. It’s a grace that breaks molds and reveals us to ourselves and each other.”
“I have experienced that grace. In the coming months, years and decades, we must keep to that faith, a faith that cannot be taken away by powers and principalities. We deny that death, and we choose our own. Amen.”
A speaker named Ollie “would love for this to be cis awareness week instead of trans awareness week. This week is about how humans are, who we’re attracted to and our fear of our own expression.”
Ollie offered some questions for reflection, including, “What part of your own humanity isn’t depending on your body, or the meaning others give to your body?” and “What part of you have you gotten back in touch with? Delighted in reclaiming?” and “What part of you is willing to fight for the liberation of all beings, including yourself?”
According to Daniel-José Cyan, one of the event organizers and a co-chair of the Queer Caucus, calls to The Trevor Project were up 700% from the previous week following the Nov. 5 election. Cyan read Suffering Servant passages from Isaiah 53:3-5 and 8-9, replacing the singular pronouns with plural ones.
The writer of this portion of Isaiah “understood the servant’s death is serving a larger purpose. I am not sweeping these lives lost to an ideology that argues that everything happens for a reason,” Cyan said. “I value holding space for grief, anger, frustration, numbness and despair. There is beauty in honoring our feelings in community.”
“Death is not the opposite of life; it is the conclusion of it,” Cyan said. “To my trans family: Know that I feel frustrated too” by “another year of counting those we have lost. I refuse to allow anyone to tell me I am not made in the image of God.”
Musicians Apollo Flowerchild and Amelia Wehe concluded the vigil with thoughtful and moving performances, including Wehe’s rendition of “Rhapsody in Blue” and Flowerchild’s songs, “The Curse of Knowing” and “A Delicate Reminder.”
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