Reach for the Neither

November 23, 2025

by Rev. Nicole M. Lamarche

Thank you again for being here! As you are moved, I invite you to join me in a spirit of prayer. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart, be acceptable in your sight our Rock and Our Redeemer. Amen. With a ball of crumpled tissues in my lap, I sobbed through the 17 th Annual Hope Lights the Night gathering on Tuesday. Our own Susan Marine created this event and every year people come from all over to light candles and to feel hope. The mission of the group is to de-stigmatize suicide loss and to make it okay to talk openly about depression, living with mental illness and what it’s like to go on even after a pain that creates chasms of grief that seem insurmountable. It is meaningful to everyone who comes, and the members of the Resonance choir have told me that this event is their most important one of the year. At the end, as I was waiting at the door, thanking people for attending, the woman who had been sitting next to me, approached. “It felt good to have you crying next to me,” she said. She told me that her family had moved here not long ago from another state. She had come to connect with the choir but stayed to process the grief from a long-ago suicide in her family. Then as her words slowed, she said that they had only recently moved to Colorado. They had to flee. And it was because she has a transgender child. It was no longer safe to be where they were. And they could not get the care that was needed. They decided to pick up their whole life to do right by their child. We both got teary then. “I am so glad you could find refuge here.” I said.

The family had already connected with Rocky Mountain Equality and felt saved by the love they have received from that community. I said that earlier that same day Jackie and I had gathered with 20 or so faith leaders from all over Boulder County at Rocky Mountain Equality to come together to see what more we can do to support our transgender community and immigrants. We all feel called to draw a circle of protection around these two groups in particular And we are a part of a broad nationwide effort. There are millions of us who believe we are called to protect one another. And that feels good to remember. I want you to have hope still. I want you to be fueled by the hope from that. Don’t digest the propaganda. There are more of us who believe in love! And still, I am always praying and

pondering, seeking the opening to help bend the curve and move the dial, shift things where we can.

What is especially curious and frankly sad is that we are really working toprotect who we love from those claiming to be doing God’s work. Most of this hate and these restrictions are coming from a passionate piety, from those invested in the belief that they know God better than the rest of us and that this God is so against human diversity that it’s worth banning books and banning healthcare and banning military service. Their God seems angry and binary and demands that we humans live in this binary too. But here is the problem with this. Well I should say here is one of the problems with this. There is no evidence that God is as small as we are, that God is as afraid of difference as we are, that God is as limited as we are. I suspect that for many, holding tightly to a God bound by binaries comes from a fear of doing it wrong built on the selective use of some biblical texts to confirm existing biases, which then supports a theological paradigm that contends that doing it wrong, leads one to being forever in flames. So maybe that is why there is fear? And still, I wonder… Why do we need God to fit into our human constructs? Regardless of what we believe or what our experiences have been, why do we humans need God to be reduced to our limitations? What if we could let God be the placeholder of what we do not yet understand? The placeholder of possibilities, the keeper of what is yet to come into our grasp? What if part of the whole point of a life of faith is being summoned to expand beyond where we humans are inclined to stop? What if the very heart of orienting our lives toward God, is expansiveness? What if the purpose of the Creator is the ongoingness of creation, that we individually and collectively face the task of evolving? What if we are to aim for love before our understanding, not after? What if we have always been shapeshifters, always on the move?

Not long ago I dragged my husband to see what he feared would be a chick flick when Come See Me in the Good Light was featured at Chautauqua, he couldn’t help but delight in it and to cry along with me. It is really a love story in layers, the story of Andrea Gibson loving themselves and finding their light as a slam poet, finding Meg, living fully, knowing death was near. Andrea used they them pronouns and before they became a Colorado poet laureate, they spent their life searching to belong, to be seen and to be heard as they were. In response to the world telling them they just needed to blend in Andrea wrote this, “They’re telling you to blend in, like you’ve never seen how a blender works, like they think you’ve never seen the mess from the blade.”

In the waves of grief, as today we bear witness to some of the graves, let us also make a collective commitment to stop needing people to be shredded to blend in? What could unfold, be revealed, changed, built, shifted when we can start to reach only for the neither thing. Not like this or like that, both/and, yes and, the neither place. What connections would be made? What lives would be saved? What beauty would be uncovered in the place between attempts to destroy? What are we called to create? Because the Beloved, our God is our refuge and our strength, a Loving Presence in times of trouble. And our God is not limited by what we know or understand, by what we believe. Therefore we need not fear, God is love. What if our transgender friends and family show us how expansive God really is? What if we are to be moved to imagine more broadly what is possible about the Great Mystery that is love that continues to call us. In her book God is a Black Woman, scholar Dr. Christena Cleveland writes, “Imagination is theology. We can believe what we imagine. Our cultural landscape hasn’t given us many tools to imagine a non-white, non-male God.” But we know that this isn’t all God is. And God’s pronouns are more likely to be they/them than anything else. God is not afraid of our human diversity, this is part of the Divine Design. So, in the words of Andrea Gibson, “build yourself as beautiful as you want your world to be. Wrap yourself in light then give yourself away with your heart, your brush, your march, your art, your poetry, your play. And for every day you paint the war, take a week and paint the beauty, the color, the shape of the landscape you’re marching towards. Everyone knows what you’re against; show them what you’re for.” God is not as small or as limited as we are. God is love. And our God is love is for all of us, stretching us where we are inclined to stop. A loving presence in times of trouble. So let us reach for the neither thing. Show them what we are for is: love.

Communal Reflection

How can and do we live beyond the binary?

God is not as limited as we are. Reach for the neither. Show them what we

are for is: love. May it be so. Amen.