(Ay apologies for the long comment, but this post prompted a lot of thought for me I've had trouble articulating)
This all seems exactly right to me. I've even at times thought a lot about the providential good and gift that sexual and gender minorities can be to the whole picture of significance of human sexuality. I admittedly sort of straddle a simultaneously "high" and "low" view of human sexual distinction and cultural instances of gender. I think on the one hand every authentic human culture produces norms of gender expression that in some sense (or at least in some part) point towards the mystical reality of Bridegroom and Bride, of the reconciliation of heaven and earth etc...
At the same time it seems like all such expressions in our fallen human cultures are perennially tinged with violence, or with the spectre of idolatry, of being made into a whole rather than recognized as a fitting part of the image of an ineffable and uncontainable whole. And there can be a sense that the higher love of God transcends all such depiction, and is best pointed to in the androgyny of the religious habit, that mutes distinctions of male and female that are no longer as we are in Christ.
With that lens I sort of tend to see those for whom such social scripts are intolerable and unmanageable, who simply cannot live them and flourish as honest and authentic gifts to those around them, as helping us to relativize what ought to be relative, not by destroying distinctions but by playfully and cheerfully transgressing them. For all that might be beautiful and true in our gendered patterns of life, there is at least as much false, shallow, or worthy of a bit of ridicule.
There's possibly an irreconcilable (at least this side of heaven) tension in trying to hold all that together at once, and a kind of thin line for the sexual/gender minority then between idol-smasher and iconoclast, but that seems like it mirrors the thin line between the more ordinary familial love that images the love of God and the carnal idolatry that sets flesh over spirit and fails to recognize Christ in the stranger and outcast.
I don't know, I might be way off the mark here, and coming from a fairly limited personal experience. But your post prompted me to think out loud a bit.
(Ay apologies for the long comment, but this post prompted a lot of thought for me I've had trouble articulating)
This all seems exactly right to me. I've even at times thought a lot about the providential good and gift that sexual and gender minorities can be to the whole picture of significance of human sexuality. I admittedly sort of straddle a simultaneously "high" and "low" view of human sexual distinction and cultural instances of gender. I think on the one hand every authentic human culture produces norms of gender expression that in some sense (or at least in some part) point towards the mystical reality of Bridegroom and Bride, of the reconciliation of heaven and earth etc...
At the same time it seems like all such expressions in our fallen human cultures are perennially tinged with violence, or with the spectre of idolatry, of being made into a whole rather than recognized as a fitting part of the image of an ineffable and uncontainable whole. And there can be a sense that the higher love of God transcends all such depiction, and is best pointed to in the androgyny of the religious habit, that mutes distinctions of male and female that are no longer as we are in Christ.
With that lens I sort of tend to see those for whom such social scripts are intolerable and unmanageable, who simply cannot live them and flourish as honest and authentic gifts to those around them, as helping us to relativize what ought to be relative, not by destroying distinctions but by playfully and cheerfully transgressing them. For all that might be beautiful and true in our gendered patterns of life, there is at least as much false, shallow, or worthy of a bit of ridicule.
There's possibly an irreconcilable (at least this side of heaven) tension in trying to hold all that together at once, and a kind of thin line for the sexual/gender minority then between idol-smasher and iconoclast, but that seems like it mirrors the thin line between the more ordinary familial love that images the love of God and the carnal idolatry that sets flesh over spirit and fails to recognize Christ in the stranger and outcast.
I don't know, I might be way off the mark here, and coming from a fairly limited personal experience. But your post prompted me to think out loud a bit.