I live a small life. I teach, live alone, sing in choir, and commit Sunday evenings to family. My body, as it were, disappears into convention. I read, write, and study at the intersection of race, gender, sex, and theology.
For much of my life, I have straddled the center and periphery, complicated by a body at home in between belonging and other-ness.
In this essay, I reconsider the in-between as theological practice. It is a moment of ambiguity, recalling the Christian experience of the resurrection, an event that evokes not so much the promise of a world to come, but as an enduring hope that transcends imaginings of home. More than a mark of sexuality, it also denotes indecision, inchoate-ness, ambiguity. I was seen, even if always in reference to what I was not supposed to be.
But all these shifted with geography. Moving to the United States, I found myself unable to articulate a self. Its reference to ambiguity dissipates, reduced into a category of sexuality, a stable albeit, queer self.
But perhaps in its inability to secure place and time, my migrant body illuminates, too, ancient contentions with stability. Ironically, it was from this place at the edge that I found myself drawn into the center of the Christian imaginary. Grounded in a crucified body, the Christian experience escapes historicity because of the resurrection.
