Editor's Note: A version of this article was first preached as a sermon at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne.

Before I was born, my mom and dad went about the business of considering baby names and preparing a nursery. In the early 1980’s, though, ultrasound predictions of an infant’s sex were perhaps not as common as they are today, so it was a matter of speculation whether I would be born as a boy or a girl. My mom was convinced that I was going to be a girl, though, and she decided that my name would be Ashley.

My parents had an artist friend at the time who gave them an oil painting as a baby shower gift. It still hangs on my bedroom wall today, a quirky family treasure. The painting features a pastoral landscape with small figures: my dad carrying a fishing pole, a few cats, and my mom next to a bassinet with a little blond baby under a pink blanket.

After my birth (surprise! it’s Phillip, not Ashley!) the artist changed the painting to fit the updated narrative—brown hair, blue blanket. Now, to be honest, they could have left it alone. I would end up being the type of little boy who loved pink, but they didn’t know that then.

My favorite thing about this, though, is that when I look closely at the painting now, you can still see traces of the blond and the pink peeking through, like the shadow of a different existence–a different, unrealized identity. And I can’t help but wonder about that other child who is not me—the Ashley who never arrived—and what her life would have been like, shaped by the expectations and assumptions that are assigned to certain types of bodies. I am sure it would have been quite different, and perhaps harder in ways that I’ll never fully understand as a cisgender man.

Yet, in a way that I can’t fully explain, I still feel like I carry a piece of Ashley inside of me; maybe it’s that part of my identity, as a gay man, doesn’t conform to some of the gender expectations which came along with those last-minute painting revisions. Who we are is never quite as simple as initial appearances might indicate.

I share this story because it reminds me of the constructed nature of our identities, and especially of the ways in which our bodies and our genders and our self-understandings (which are inevitably influenced by our culture) are always engaged in a process of becoming, from the moment we take our first breath all the way up to our very last. Whatever labels have been assigned to us, rightly or wrongly, and whatever identities we claim for ourselves, their meanings and significance can and will develop. This happens both by the unfurling of our interior self-knowledge and by the changeable nature of our contexts. Who we are as social beings is always contingent, always being revealed ever more in its fullness. 

This is the journey of a lifetime. At any given moment we tend to understand ourselves primarily by a handful of roles or identities that feel especially consequential, even while, in the enduring contingency of becoming, we know that we are also other things, other identities, some of which we want to forget, and some of which we yearn to embody more deeply.  We are already, and we are not yet. 

Consider the Samaritan woman at the well, with whom Jesus speaks in today’s Gospel passage. She stands at the intersection of many identities and labels, but key among them, perhaps, is that she is one who thirsts for living water—that is, for the slaking possibility of Divine wisdom and for understanding herself and her own people more fully as participants in God’s unfolding purposes. Jesus’ response to her, that true worship will one day be enacted “in spirit and truth” (1) rather than in any one specific place, suggests to her (and to us) that the answer she seeks is found in freedom, not fixity, for no one point of reference or single layer of meaning can ever suffice to capture the dynamism of Holy Mystery. Our relationship to God, neighbor, and self can only deepen when our understanding of both is expanded beyond its presently visible horizons.

And that, I think, is as it must be, because the fullness of ourselves, the telos of our complex, nuanced personhood, is located, ultimately, in the heart of an infinitely complex and nuanced God who draws us across time and space to a place as yet only partially revealed to us—that Kingdom of eschatological fullness wherein all possibilities of self and community are concurrently realized, when we will see both the Divine and one another—and ourselves—as we truly are. (2) Who precisely that will be, only God knows, but we should move forward in confidence that there is spacious multiplicity within Godself—many dwelling places, (3) if you will—to hold our expansive identities rather than winnow them down to a reductive sameness. 

Julian of Norwich, the medieval mystic and earliest known woman author in the English language, whom the Church honors today, was intimately acquainted with the spaciousness of God’s identity. Her text, Revelations of Divine Love, which describes her ecstatic visions of Jesus’ passion and the Holy Trinity’s deep yearning for the salvation of all creation, is one of the most beautiful accounts of Christian wisdom ever recorded. It is also a text, written in the late 14th century, whose treatment of God’s gender and identity is so fluid and liberating that it challenges any notion that the language of maleness and patriarchy is a sufficient way of speaking about God. She writes:

“So Jesus Christ…is our real Mother. We owe our being to him—and this is the essence of motherhood! God is as really our Mother as he is our Father. He showed this throughout, and particularly when he said that sweet word, ‘It is I.’ In other words, ‘It is I who am the strength and goodness of Fatherhood; I who am the wisdom of Motherhood; I who am light and grace and blessed love; I who am Trinity; I who am Unity; I who am the sovereign goodness of every single thing; I who enable you to love; I who enable you to long. It is I, the eternal satisfaction of every genuine desire.” (4)

What Julian saw, and what she blessed us with in recording her visions for posterity, was the capacity of God to take on varied expressions of gendered and descriptive selfhood, an intertwining of specificities. In so doing, she showed us that all such identities—every last one— contribute to creation’s emerging redemption.

And so, no matter how we continue to grow in self-understanding through our lives and relationships—whether we end up claiming for ourselves a pink blanket or a blue blanket or perhaps we decide we don’t want to be confined by any one color of blanket at all—whatever our becoming looks like, God holds it. God loves it. God IS it.

God is our Mother and our Father and Trinity and Unity. God is wild Spirit and unchangeable Truth, and God flows through our fluid identities, bolstering their unfolding current with Christ’s life-giving waters, as we travel together with Jesus towards something beautiful and vast and mysterious, something in which all of who we are, all of the ways we name ourselves, all of it is revealed in its magnificence—in that place where we will indeed and at last be “true worshipers” (5) in the fullness of our hard-won, fully embodied truth.

I pray for that day. I long for it. I hope I’m courageous enough to keep working towards it alongside all of my siblings in Christ.

Julian is perhaps most famous for one particular quote from her text: “All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” It’s a lovely sentiment, but there’s an important clarification to be made: these words are not Julian’s own. It is not a speculation on her part, or a vague, facile hope for the future. No, these are the words that Jesus speaks to Julian in her vision, assuring her about the destiny of all creation.

And so Jesus says, to her and to us: all shall be well. All manner of thing—every person, every searching heart, every identity we name and encounter, every single thing—shall ultimately be well, in the fullness of what it is because it is of God. It is of spirit and truth. Within all our diversity, that is our shared identity in Christ Jesus, commingled with all of those other identities we are carrying and discovering and painting in new layers over the landscapes of our lives.  Pink, blue, something else—it doesn’t matter. God is in all the colors. God is in every possibility.

All shall be well.

1. John 4:23

2. 1 Corinthians 13:12

3. John 14:2

4. Revelations of Divine Love, 167.

5. John 4:23