Sermon 5/18: The Divine Between

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH1amFKrMSY&t=56s&pp=ygUJZXVnZW5lIHV1

Blurb: 

Growing into ourselves is rarely a straight line. In this sermon, Ember Morgan-Wigmore reflects on gender, identity, and the imaginative process of becoming. Drawing from queer experience, personal memory, and sacred performance, this service invites us to honor what we try on, what stays, and what transforms. Together, we will explore how the divine shows up not in fixed definitions, but in fluid motion and unfolding truth. Through stories of transition and reflection, we are called to witness the holiness of ambiguity. This is a celebration of the sacred in process, of identity as a living, creative act. Come as you are, and come as who you are still becoming.

Call to Worship

Come, let us gather in space and time, where the sacred is not either/or, but both/and,

Allow yourself to sink into the recognition of the divine in ourselves; layered and shifting, within us, among us, around us.

We come as people made of many selves, who filter through many masks, who are shaped by both solitude and in relationship, honoring the names we choose, the forms we try on, the expressions that set our spirits at ease.

You do not need to arrive complete. You only need to arrive as yourself, unfolding,

We enter this space seeking. Some of us come longing for healing, others for clarity, for connection, for purpose. Knowing lives in connection. Wholeness grows in witness.

Let us welcome a sacredness that holds paradox, invites creativity, and calls us toward becoming.

Let us worship together, open to change, grounded in love, held in the holy tension of the in-between.

Sermon

The path to self-understanding often begins in play. Before we have the words, before we feel the certainty, we reach for expression. We try on names, styles, and ways of being not just to test how the world might respond, but to give form to something that lives inside us. Play becomes a space of imagination, of possibility, where pretending gently slips into becoming. There is a kind of sacred experimentation in this process, a quiet act of reaching toward truth. Even when we feel uncertain, stepping into another version of ourselves, even for a moment, can reveal something real. These gestures are not detours. they are part of how we begin to recognize the outlines of who we are becoming.

There is a difference between pretending and becoming, and it is not always visible from the outside. What begins in play can settle into something lasting, something that feels less like invention and more like discovery. You might try on a name, a style, a way of speaking or moving, only to realize it is not a performance but a revelation but an uncovering. In those moments, what you put on is not a costume at all, but a mirror. My particular understanding of the sacred has always lived in these spaces, where action becomes behavior and shifts from exploration to recognition, in the moment when trying becomes knowing. Identity does not always come in a flash of clarity; sometimes it arrives slowly, shaped through repetition, reflection, and resonance. Some truths do not shout. They settle in the body like a sigh of relief.

This sacred process exists in tension with the world around us. In the early 2000s, the landscape of queer identity was limited and highly structured. Representation was slowly expanding, but the language was still narrow, often reduced to a binary framework. You were either gay or straight, man or woman, and anything outside of those categories was treated as confusion or erasure. Bisexuality was often dismissed, and gender variance was only discussed within rigid, clinical contexts. To be seen as legitimate, many of us learned to simplify ourselves. Complexity was seen as a liability, and fluidity as a threat to progress. There was a collective sense that ambiguity made the fight for queer rights harder to win. And so, we shaped ourselves to be understood, even if that understanding came at the cost of our wholeness.

I came out during that time, when external validation and self-recognition often stood in conflict. I knew I was queer, but the models available to me didn’t reflect what I felt inside. I was expected to explain my identity using a cisgender, heterosexual vocabulary. Queer people have a language, and most of us have learned to code switch outside our safer spaces. But even within those spaces, relationships were assumed to follow familiar scripts. Presentation needed to be legible. Even well-meaning adults, Queer adults, UU adults, pushed labels onto me that felt too small, too settled. There was constant pressure to define myself clearly, to become knowable to others before I had come to know myself. But queerness, for me, was not a single destination. It is a relationship to fluidity, to possibility, to the sacred space between what has been and what might still be. The more I tried to fit myself into a preexisting mold, the further I drifted from anything that felt true.

What gave me space to breathe were the places and people outside the mainstream. I found community in queer youth centers, where creativity and uncertainty were not just allowed, but celebrated. I was part of a Unitarian Universalist congregation that offered OWL, one of the few comprehensive sexuality education programs at the time. These were the spaces that gave me tools my peers often lacked. But it wasn’t just the programming that shaped me. It was the long rides on public buses, the conversations in parks, stepping into the margins. These experiences taught me to listen differently. They taught me that not knowing could be holy. They taught me that being in transition wasn’t a failure of definition, it was a sacred state of becoming. 

The youth center where I spent my time was a diverse space, in the sense that it served both high schoolers living in the suburbs alongside unhoused trans youth with nowhere else to go. We shared meals, wandered the city, did ritual, and skateboarded. Well, they skated, despite my dance background I was terrible at it. And in that mix, I would come to briefly coexist with the teenager who would eventually grow up to become Jinx Monsoon, winner of RuPauls Drag Race Season 5, All Stars 7. In my late teens, my community would be hit by several tragedies, I would hold a number of memorials under bridges and in skate parks and over time, I lost track of almost all those people. 

In a 2018 interview with Them, Jinkx Monsoon shared that for a long time, she didn’t feel “trans enough” to claim a nonbinary or gender nonconforming identities. Even after learning the words, she hesitated to use them, unsure if they belonged to her. I had long held myself to the same impossible standard, waiting for perfect clarity before allowing myself to claim what I already knew. That interview didn’t give me a new identity. It gave me permission to trust the one I already had. It reminded me that many of us do not struggle with who we are, but with whether we are allowed to say it. Sometimes the validation we most need is the kind we are already willing to give to others. I was reminded that we came out in the same ecosystem, where taking up space felt unsafe, even with the small supports we had.

Performance became part of how I explored what existed outside the binaries I had been given. I had more language than many of my peers, but even then, the language was narrow. We talked about gender, but mostly as a blend of man and woman, not as something that could be entirely other. I knew I wasn’t a man, so the only option that felt even remotely close was “woman.” It didn’t quite fit, but it fit better than the alternative. Within the binary framework that dominated both mainstream and queer culture at the time, there wasn’t much room for softness without it being read as femme, and there wasn’t much room for femme without it being read as woman.

Over time, I noticed how femininity offered me shelter, not because I felt like a woman, but because I needed a way to be in my body without being in conflict with it. There was grace in choosing softness, in refusing the expectations of dominance and sharpness that masculinity placed on me. I could be tender, expressive, gentle, and still feel strong. Eventually, the performance started to feel like something more than costume. Still, I never fully identified with the label “woman.” It felt safer, more legible, and more familiar than claiming something unnamed or invisible, but it was always partial. It was a shape I could inhabit, but not one that could hold all of me. Womanhood became a placeholder, a way to be seen without having to explain too much, yet even as I wore it, I could feel the boundaries closing in.

That sense of near-truth, of almost-fitting, brought me back again and again to performance. Drag, in particular, lives in that layered space where costume meets essence, where exaggeration becomes revelation. It gave me permission to put something on without promising to keep it. It offered a kind of imaginative freedom that made space for both becoming and undoing. Drag was not about pretending to be someone else. It was about stepping into a self I didn’t know how to name yet. The glitter, the fabric, the movement, it all created a door. And sometimes, walking through that door felt like coming home. Drag taught me that transformation can be playful and real at the same time. That what starts as theater can end in truth. That what we put on might not be a mask, but a reflection of who we’ve been becoming all along.

This is the comfort of duality. Knowing that performance and truth are not opposites, but companions. That what we try on in experimentation can become what we keep in devotion. That sometimes the thing we imagined becomes the thing that anchors us. Identity is not always revealed by peeling away the layers. Sometimes it is revealed in what we put on. There is sacredness in what feels right, in what settles into the body with ease, in what makes the mirror feel kind again. There is knowing that does not need to be argued or explained. There is truth that arrives not as a declaration, but as a sense of breath.

I’ve never believed that the sacred sits still. For me, divinity is a shifting presence, layered and relational. It is not contained in certainty. It moves through paradox and holds contradictions without needing to resolve them. It lives in the space between the person I am and the one I am still becoming. It lives in solitude and in community. It shows up in mirrors and in memory, in longing and in love. It is both internal and shared. The sacred speaks through relationship and reflection, through the stories we claim and the ones we are still writing.

There comes a moment, often quiet and unremarkable to the outside world, when what you try on no longer feels like a trial. It settles differently in the body. The voice steadies. The breath deepens. You might not be able to name it, but something in you says yes. Not because the world approves, but because you are no longer holding yourself at a distance. This kind of knowing doesn’t always arrive with clarity. It grows slowly, step by step, across conversations, reflections, and small acts of recognition. And when it comes, it allows you to stop performing for others and start living from the center of your own truth.

Celebrate those moments. Celebrate the ones that come before them, too; the experiments, the questions, the borrowed language, the first brave steps. Honor the ways you have tried to find yourself, even when the path felt uncertain. And, trust that others are doing the same, and that their truth is just as sacred as yours. Respect their names, their pronouns, their identities, because those choices are not small. They are the expression of something deeply known. Welcome the layers, the metaphors, the gestures that turn out to be more real than the roles we were given. You are not unfinished because you are changing. You are sacred because you are still becoming. You can be grounded in your identity and still explore at the edges. Both are true. And both are holy.