Rachel Mann - Dazzling Darkness

2012, England, English, Rachel Mann,

Full title: "Dazzling Darkness: Gender, Sexuality, Illness and God" by Rachel Mann. The book was re-published in 2022.

"This passionate and nuanced book brings together poetry, feminist theology, and philosophy and explores them through one person s hunger for wholeness, self-knowledge and God."

Rachel Mann is an inspiring woman, the Church of England priest in charge of St. Nicholas’ Church Burnage in Manchester, and Minor Canon of Manchester Cathedral. She is a broadcaster, published poet, theologian, and music journalist specializing in metal, prog, and folk. Her memoir of being trans, lesbian, and Christian, “Dazzling Darkness” (2012) was a Church Times bestseller.

"Dazzling Darkness is a true story about searching for one’s authentic self in the company of the Living God. Rachel Mann has died many ‘deaths’ in the process, not the least of which was a change of sex, as well as coming to terms with chronic illness and disability. Through these experiences she has discovered that darkness is as much a positive place as a negative one, inhabited by the Living God – the Dark God, the Hidden God. This is the God that many of us, because we try to make our lives safe and comfortable, are too afraid to meet.

This is the God who is most alive in those things we commonly associate with the Dark – failure, loss and brokenness. The Christian church has legitimated certain ways of talking about God – male, fatherly, monarchical and so on. Many believe these descriptors tell the exhaustive truth about God. In accepting the complexity of her sexuality and identity, Rachel Mann has been able to explore with a greater freedom what God might look like to an ‘unconventional creature’ like her."

In 2014, I interviewed Rachel and asked her why God is so merciless towards transgender people, placing their minds in the opposite gender bodies: "I don’t quite see things in those terms. God is not in the business of punishing people, no matter what some fundamentalists might claim. The way you frame things makes it sound like we have ‘minds’ that are separated from our ‘bodies’ which act as a vessel or container.

However, who we are, whether we’re cis or trans, is always an embodied matter. Identity emerges out of an extraordinarily complex set of social, cultural, and embodied relationships. I sense that God is intimately caught up in lived experience and reality rather than being some kind of Wizard of Oz pulling levers from the outside. If my hunch is right that means that God is as much trans as s/he is cis. In time society and religion are going to come to terms with this: that there is no normative reality."

Available via Amazon

and The Heroines of My Life

Amazon

Photo via Heroines of My Life.