Marred Images

I have always understood life to be fuller of various shades of gray and have looked askance at people who have everything sorted out in life with all the right scriptures as footnotes. And yet every day my boundaries in this area are being challenged and enlarged with every new experience that I have. The other day, after hearing a colleague talk about a person who didn’t know whether he was a man or a woman, I am even more intrigued about the Pandora’s box that life is and how impossible it is to shut the lid on that box after filing the contents in neat files. And no, the story is not that of some homosexual or lesbian confused about their sexuality and so I am not sure that the typical verses will any more apply. So listen to this story.

Very much like a man who is hoodwinked into getting into a hospital with a promise of a large some money and wakes up from anaesthesia to find a paltry sum of cash in his hands and a scar from where one of his kidneys had been removed, a man was similarly kidnapped and brought into hospital. Under anaesthesia, he was castrated and then with the help of skilled cosmetic surgeons, “converted” into a woman anatomically. Post surgery, he/she was then given hormone injections so that other physical attributes of a woman eventually developed. At an opportune time, then the individual was sold into a brothel where he/she was abused, raped and brutalized repeatedly over time.

This is not a story out of a book, but one that I heard last week from one of my own colleagues, and the person telling the story, a counsellor assigned to work with the person, after she was rescued on an anti trafficking raid in the brothel. The question before the counsellor was this – what was the point of reference for this trafficked person in the counselling sessions to be done – was this person a man or a woman? Anatomically , the advancement of medical science had seen to it that the person was fully a woman in every possible way ; and yet the mental makeup of the person , the person’s emotions, thinking , orientation and inner wiring was all that of a man. The world would only see this person as a woman and relate to her at that level; but in this story of course there is a lot more here that meets the eye.

We read in the Bible that God created man and woman in His image and gave them one or the other of this dual identity. But what of someone whose identity has been so complexly damaged, that the person can no longer even say if he is a man any more or a woman. He could say that he was a woman, because that is what the person looks like, but his heart beat is still largely that of a man. He could say that he was a man because that is how he was created in the first place; but only God looks at the heart and sees that struggle – for the rest of us he looks, dresses and appears like in a woman, and in at least some churches I have been to, if he went and sat in the men’s pews, the person would be promptly shown his place.

It is not every day that I look forward to getting older, but the one thing that I see and recognize with each passing day, is that life leave us with more questions and puzzles and answers. I never went to a Sunday school and have never been able to do memory verses. So I don’t have a scripture verse for every occasion. But perhaps the one thing that I have learnt is that being a Christian is to embrace all of life’s unanswered mysteries with a curious, open and inclusive heart and mind which is open to God…. because perhaps tomorrow and the day after , each day in fact, I will encounter a new story, a new riddle, a new mystery … and none of these very human, very painful, very sensitive stories about people who were made in God’s image but has now got badly marred can be patched up by citing some passages of scripture from here and there….. I don’t know what it means … but it means a lot more than that.