A kaleidoscope of encounters - Alex Clare-Young reviews Rachel Mann’s 'Dazzling Darkness: Gender, sexuality, illness & God'
Trans Anglican priest Rachel Mann tells the story of how she searched for her authentic self, dying many kinds of ‘death’ in the process and discovering that darkness is as much a positive place as a negative one.
Have you ever met God in someone else’s story?
There are lots of different ways to encounter God. You might meet God in prayer, or walking through the woods, or singing your favourite hymn.
I meet God in lots of different ways, but my favourite way to meet God is through another human being. To hear someone’s story and to encounter the image of God woven through their words is a powerful moment of encounter.
Rachel Mann’s Dazzling Darkness: Gender, sexuality, illness and God is a kaleidoscope of such moments of encounter. Wherever one looks, there is a sparkling new image of God to unpack and explore. If you are someone who likes to skip ahead and read books out of order, ‘Interlude Two’ is a fantastic place to start to focus in on Rachel’s reflections of God. In beautiful and yet gritty poetry, Rachel describes God as both place and creator.
It is in Rachel’s own story, though, that we meet God most powerfully. Through Rachel’s experiences of both struggle and resilience, she paints a picture of a God who is met in death and resurrection as well as around an 'open table'. Rachel writes that
This is the God who, from the first, comes to us as the ultimate stranger: for Christ comes as the emptying of God’s unsullied love into the world and invites us to make a faithful response.
- p. 138
And Rachel, too, comes as a stranger, holding her vulnerability out to us in cupped hands, inviting us to take, to read, to listen, to understand, to love and to respond. When you read Dazzling Darkness - I write when, not if, for I believe it is a must-read! - you will be gifted Rachel’s very self as you read, you will be invited to love not only Rachel, but all of those who have experienced othering, and you will be challenged to respond. This is a book that will change you.
