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A trans pastor’s fascination with the Scripture inherited from his closeted, fundamentalist father.
When his dad died, Malcolm Himschoot inherited his father’s Bibles. He chose to re-read them, examining his dad’s notes in the margins, teasing out the details of his upbringing and gender identity amid the structures and forms of biblical narratives. For Malcolm, coming out meant exile and verbal excommunication; he embodied all his gay father tried to hide. In Reading Secrets, he travels alongside the ghost of his father, exploring their inherited homophobia and the American culture that shaped their triumphs and tragedies. With these poetic and evocative meditations, Malcolm transforms the Scripture he inherited, and finds a place in it for himself.
"In Reading Secrets, Malcolm queers the forms and functions of memoir, biblical interpretation, and poetry to offer a landscape of story that moves like water and wind and roots through soil. The power of this movement is subtle and deep, answering questions and uncovering more, with a tenderness of heart that is truth-telling, vulnerable, and compassionate. How do we love what/who has hurt us? How do we stay in relationship with people, with traditions, that have harmed us? How do we reckon with the harm we ourselves have done? Malcolm wrestles with all these questions in ways that can help all of us build the capacity to hold the complexities of our inheritances necessary for collective liberation." — Rev. Anne Dunlap, UCC Pastor & Organizer, Co-Founder of the Liberating Lineages Collective
In Reading Secrets Malcolm Himschoot’s brilliant poetic voice transforms his father’s fundamentalistic, patriarchal reading of the Bible to a wondrous, life-liberating reading that brings hope and healing to our broken and beautiful world. Malcolm takes us through his life journey, carried by the river of his ever searching/ finding soul, led mysteriously by the truth Jesus came to reveal, that love is never ending, ever broadening, and beyond the boundaries of exclusion we humans keep erecting. With a deep understanding of scripture, a poet’s sensitivity to language and feeling, and remarkable insight and compassion, Malcolm’s memoir is grace-filled and will touch your heart, mind and soul. Be prepared to be opened to gratitude for the More that cannot be confined and that leads us into the hope of new life.— Martie McMane, ordained UCC minister and author of Living Grace: Spiritual Growth in in the Every Day World, Worship Comes Alive, and A Lexicon of Grace
"Beautiful and sad and raw. Like life." — Jan Everhart, Emerita Professor of Religion, Simpson College
"It's about time someone recorded the bullshit going on in church ministry! This book is worth reading!" — Major Griffin Gracy, author of Miss Major Speaks
Malcolm Himschoot is a writer, minister, and educator. The United Church of Christ, a historic denomination, made much of his ordination as an out trans man by producing the indie documentary Call Me Malcolm in 2005. His previous writing has appeared in edited anthologies and journals.