Foreword 2nd edition

When I read the first edition of Dazzling Darkness back in 2012 I recognised that this slim and unassuming book would come to have great importance for my own work and within a wider conversation about gender and vocation in the church. So it has proven, and I could not be more thrilled or privileged to have been asked to write a foreword to this revised and updated second edition.

Rachel Mann is a deeply original thinker and immensely talented writer. Her incisive honesty and perceptive way of uncovering what has been hidden or unexamined have justly, since the first edition was published, meant that her writing (on this and other topics, running a diverse gamut from First World War remembrance practices to the spiritual themes of The Greatest Showman) has reached a wide and increasingly loyal audience. She is one of the few writers and speakers who can take me with her from genuine hilarity to the depths of despair and back again without feeling battered and bruised by the experience. Her enviable self-knowledge and self-critique prompt her readers to the same: to ask of themselves the same hard questions she asks herself. But her lightness of touch – often subtle, always wonderful – means that readers are made to feel safe to do that without retreating to defensiveness or anticipating how the journey will have to end.

Rachel is always slightly diffident about being thought of as a theologian. Yet a theologian (and poet, and playwright, and actor,

and priest, and all-round rock star) is exactly what she is. Her talk about God is accessible, profoundly pastoral, yet strongly rooted in the mystic tradition she loves. Her writing on gender and sexuality makes clear that these aspects of human context and identity are deeply intertwined with vocations of other kinds, and that selfknowledge and knowledge of the God in whose image we are made go hand in hand and are mutually enriching.

In this new edition, Rachel reflects more directly than in the 2012 book on two areas: first, her experiences of being a ‘public’ trans person and priest within the Church of England, and the vulnerabilities and possibilities this has afforded in the last decade. As she notes, things have come a long way, yet it is still the case that those like Rachel who seek to live honestly and authentically in the church frequently face abuse and epistemic injustice as a result. As a member of the Church of England’s working group on theology for the Living in Love and Faith project over the last three years I have been immensely grateful for Rachel and other trans Christians – including Christina Beardsley, Alex ClareYoung, Austen Hartke, Sarah Jones, Cameron Partridge, Justin Tanis, and many more. Some of them have been directly involved in Living in Love and Faith; others have been present through the testimony of their work. As Rachel comments in this book, it will no longer be possible for the church’s decision-making bodies to hold that they did not know any trans people, nor to suppose that conversations about transition, identity and formation are taking place without trans people witnessing to them. With customary humility, Rachel points to the power of abiding: of showing up, of taking part, of refusing to disappear, even when it would have been quite reasonable and understandable to walk away (as it has proven necessary for some others to do for their own survival).

Second, Rachel writes once again out of her experience of living with chronic ill-health, and the way that she has been able to consider each new era of life a gift that she would not have expected to have been given. Her reflections on the possibility of flourishing in the everyday, even an everyday that one would not

necessarily have chosen, have particular resonances at a time when ‘life as we knew it’ is still very much on hiatus and we are all coming to terms with the new normal alongside a pandemic. Such circumstances do not, of course, affect everyone equally or evenly, and Rachel is by no means a Pollyanna about the power of positive thinking. But both readers who do and readers who do not already live with their own chronic conditions have much to gain from Rachel’s insights garnered from what she calls her ‘practised habits of precariousness’, which echo and lead (us and her) more intimately into ‘God’s defining fragility in Christ’. For Rachel, coming to see each day as respite from the death which is closer than many of us dare acknowledge leads not to resigned fatalism or hedonistic individualism, but rather to an invitation not to take for granted the everyday miracle of breath.

Someone recently asked me to recommend ‘a really good book, if one exists, about gender transition and priesthood’. This is that book. It is indeed about those things, but also far more. It contains the messy and inconvenient parts of the story – the parts that, as Rachel hints, mean that people of various persuasions might wish she had come down more emphatically on their ‘side’, because if she had done so she would have made such a devastating ally. To my mind, however, the book’s power is precisely in its refusal to tell less than the full truth. I hope that it will prompt in others the courage, self-awareness and openness to God that exist so dazzlingly in Rachel herself.

Susannah Cornwall Associate Professor of Constructive Theologies University of Exeter, UK August 2020