The collapse of the Woodbrooke Quaker center (err, “centre”) in October 2023 was a big deal, but a shock cushioned for most American Friends by the Atlantic.

.Recently there was a notice online that someone is compiling entries for a projected book of memories by staff, students, and other participants.

I wish the project well, and to that end, I’m going to share a draft of my potential entry for it here.

It’s a long read, but take a look: there’s a lot to it, which came out of a brief but jam-packed and unforgettable visit to Woodbrooke in 1997.

Twenty-eight years later, that visit and the matters it brought to light are back in the harsh spotlight of reaction.

This account gets beyond the serenely-manicured Woodbrooke lawns, the sprawling estate, the legacy of chocolate imperial splendor, to love, sex, war, peace, gender-bending (plus dreadful British cuisine), all seasoned (predictably) with intensive scripture study.

Oh— also Finland.

Yes, the endangered jewel of Scandinavia: six times-designated as the world’s happiest nation, and NATO’s newest member, precariously perched by and in permanent peril from its huge Slavic neighbor.

I’ve never been there, and it wasn’t on the agenda. Nonetheless Woodbrooke gave it a permanent place in my memory.

The piece explains why: its title is,

The Harlot’s Bible

I

This story begins in England, on a summer morning, with a passage from the gospel of Luke, about which I was definitely not thinking:

Luke 7:36-38: “Now one of the Pharisees was requesting Jesus to eat dinner with him. And he entered the Pharisee’s house and, and reclined at the table.

“And behold, there was a woman in the city who was an immoral woman; and when she learned that Jesus was reclining at the table in the Pharisee’s house, she brought an alabaster vial of perfume, and standing behind Him at His feet, weeping, she began to wet His feet with her tears, and kept wiping them with the hair of her head, and kissing his feet, and anointing them with the perfume.”

There were any number of reasons why I wasn’t reflecting on this passage: It wasn’t dinner, it was breakfast. I had just landed in England the day before, to join an international Quaker conference on Identity, Authority and Community, at Woodbrooke College, the study center in Birmingham. It had once been an estate owned by George Cadbury, of the Cadbury Chocolate empire.

Still a bit jet-lagged, and definitely not feeling Christlike, my disposition was closer to a finicky kosher-eating Pharisee. For sure I was recoiling like a typically crotchety middle-aged Quaker food fanatic from the predictably slim pickings of Woodbrooke’s morning spread:

Before me was a row of various whole grain cereals, each one looking more like a mix of dry straw and twigs than the next. Several forms of concentrated fat provided the main alternative, along with tea and a basket of wan, anemic-looking fruit. Classic British cuisine.

Settling on a bowl of soupy yogurt and a pale orange, I moved toward a table, making plans for a surreptitious food run later to the American-style supermarket up the road.

At the table sat a woman from my small group. I groped in my memory for what she had said about herself during our introductory session the night before. A couple of items surfaced vaguely.

“It’s Kati, right?” I asked tentatively, pronouncing it “Katie.”

She shook her head. “Kati,” she corrected, which sounded like “naughty.”

“Okay, Kati.” I paused. Conversation was an effort for me at that hour. “So, um, you were once a Lutheran seminarian in Finland?”

She nodded. Her hair was short, almost bobbed, and a shade of auburn that looked as if it had been helped along. She wore maroon lipstick, a pale yellow denim jacket, a tight knit shirt and jeans. The look was studied, even a bit provocative; hardly the nondescript Quaker informality I’m used to. I couldn’t quite place it. But then, I thought, I’ve never been to Helsinki, to see what the styles there look like.

“I recall,” I labored on, “you said you still thought of yourself as a theologian, even after leaving the seminary and becoming a Quaker.”

Another nod.

“So,” I finished lamely, “what does a Quaker ex-seminarian theologian in Finland do now?”

She didn’t answer for a few seconds.

Maybe her English isn’t so great at this hour, I guessed. Later I understood that she was studying me, and making a decision.

“Now,” she said calmly, “I work as a prostitute.”

“Oh.” I blinked.

“I see,” I said, and blinked again.

For a minute or two, the conversation hung suspended. I found
something very absorbing about the bowl of soupy yogurt, and watched my spoon pass deliberately through it several times, as if somehow gauging its exact consistency and verifying that it was, in truth, white in color both on the surface and underneath.

Luke 7:39: Now when the Pharisee who had invited Him saw this, he said to himself. “If this man were The Prophet, He would know who and what sort of person this woman is who is touching Him, that she is an immoral woman.”

A bell broke the awkward silence, summoning us to a round of
meetings that was scheduled to last through the day and into that evening.

 

II

I was both relieved at not having to pursue this startling disclosure into who knew what murky waters, and intensely curious to do exactly that.

How, I wanted to know, did her new profession square with Quakerism, or resemble theology? (Only later was I to imagine some of the unflattering jokes that might be tacked on to such an inquiry: “Hey, have you heard this one? How is a prostitute like a theologian?” Yuk, yuk.)

The conference was, aptly, meant to explore the nature of Identity, Authority and Community among Quakers on the brink of the twenty-first century. The day’s first plenary session was to examine our varied uses of, and attitudes toward, the Bible.

During the mostly forgettable discussion, my curiosity was bolstered when Kati rose to confront the whole body, some seventy-five of us from four continents. She didn’t exactly come out, as she had to me at breakfast. But she did speak about her “journey,” and asserted that she was trying to put into action what she thought was most essential in the Bible, and what the Inner Light had shown her in her life.

She added that some of her choices might be seen as wrong and headed for hell by those who saw the Bible in conventional terms, but they had been right for her.

This declaration set off another line of thinking for me. Not only did I want to hear more about this “journey” of hers; I also wondered what her attitude would be toward the parts of the Bible, and there are many, which speak about women in her, venerable if not venerated  profession.

Was there, I wondered, a “Gospel according to the harlots”?

Over the long weekend of our conference, she proved very willing, even anxious to talk more about her experiences. Nor did she draw back when I changed the terms of the conversation and asked if I could take notes, and seek publication of our dialogue.

My unspoken question about how her new profession resembled theology was first on my list, with redoubled interest after her declaration in the plenary. And not just theology, but ministry.

Did she really think being a prostitute, having sex with men for money, was a ministry to them?

“Yes,” she assured me.

“Why?”

She flashed a saucy smile. “Because, you see, I understand
men.”

Another significant pause.

Then: “I understand men, because I
used to be one.”

“Oh.”

I blinked. Another conversation stopper.

How many more twists to this story were there, I wondered.

Quite a few, it turned out, before we got back to theology, and
in particular, to the Bible.

III

The Religious Society of Friends has long been a haven for strongly-etched individuals. But in Kati, I had met a true original. How many other Quakers can there be who are transsexuals, and working prostitutes; never mind former seminarians in the Finnish Lutheran Church?

Not that these were Kati’s only distinctions. She had also been, in her former life, a soldier, and later a husband. She was currently on her way to becoming a prostitute’s human rights activist. This was to be a further expansion of her “ministry.”

Kati sniffed when I mentioned the notion of transsexuals as being a “woman trapped in a man’s body.” This had sounded plausible to me, and not inherently demeaning.

But the problem with it, Kati said, was that it presumes there are only two ways to be: either a “man,” or a “woman.”

“I’m happy with where I’ve come to,” she said, “but I cannot escape the fact that my history is different from that of other women, and sometimes that hurts.

“In nature, all individuals are different. That variation is what makes evolution possible. And in reality ‘boys’ differ from each other, just as ‘girls’ do. So the way I have come to see it, the problem is not with the way I was born, but rather the two gender roles that society expects; so that if you don’t fit into one, you must go in the other.

“But I can imagine a more accepting society in which it would be okay to be as I was, biologically ‘male,’ but doing ‘womanly’ things, and dressing as a female.”

She can imagine such a society, but it’s not the society she grew
up in, or lives in now.

IV

Kati’s father is a chef; she has a younger brother. Her family knows about her sex change, but not about her current profession.

As a child, the boy, Kati–

“I’d rather not say what my old name was,” she told me. “I kept the same initials, but that’s all I feel it’s right to say about that.”

Very well, let us speak of the boy as “K.”

As a teenager, K was confused. “Male hormones predominated,” she said, “and I couldn’t imagine having sex with a man. But this part of my life was very confusing, because while I had sexual feelings about girls, at the same time I found I envied them, for being able to grow up female. I had been very lonely as a child, and had wanted a close friend, a close friend who was a girl. My confusion was deepened by the fact that many of my sexual fantasies had a sadomasochistic character.”

At fifteen, K attended Lutheran confirmation school. He was strongly drawn to religion. He thought he saw there the promise of some relief from her confusion. He found hope of reconciliation in studies of theology, and in contemplation of Jesus and divine love.

At seventeen, K began dating. “I had long prayed for God to give me a girlfriend,” she said, “but was it because I wanted a friend, or a sexual partner? I don’t know now.”

Appropriately, it was in church that K met Susanna. Both were shy and introverted. “We talked about many deep things,” Kati recalls. “We dated for a year before we had sex.”

The progress of their relationship was disrupted by a fact of Finnish life, the military draft. In church K had been exposed to Christian pacifism, and he thought long about being a conscientious objector.

But Finnish history, and its geographic destiny next to Russia (offered compelling, concrete counter arguments: “I finally decided,”

Kati recalled, “that for Finland an army was a necessary evil. (E.g., there were two Russian invasions during World War Two.) And if we must have one, better the Finnish army than the Russian.”

Not that K’s military career was particularly bellicose. He was on active duty for only eleven months, and spent most of that as a driver.

The army behind him, in 1983 K began university studies in Helsinki. There he became increasingly active in the Student Christian Movement, where he soon became a paid staff worker. He also began the course of theological study that would ultimately lead to the Lutheran priesthood. He and Susanna still dated, and by 1987, when she came to Helsinki to study, they moved in together. In early 1988, they were married.

V

“At first, I enjoyed being married,” Kati said, “and I think Susanna enjoyed it too. We were good friends and a loving married couple. We talked about many things, ‘women’s things,’ that married women don’t always tell their husbands, especially about growing up as a woman in our society and our church. It gave me some insight into what it means to be a woman.”

But the domestic euphoria did not last. K began feeling steadily more uncomfortable living as a “man.”

“I identified more with women. I didn’t fit my in-laws image of me. Sex with Susanna became less appealing. There was something disturbing about it. Maybe it was something biological after all; I don’t know.”

K admitted to his wife that he felt a desire to dress as a woman. Susanna was horrified; but she agreed that K could do it, provided it was kept strictly between them. “I had been trying to be a good husband, to find a way to live as a ‘man’, but in an alternative mode. The cross-dressing was something I seemed to need to do.”

Finally, K broke his promise, and went out dressed as a woman. Susanna found out, and couldn’t handle it.

“I was very torn,” Kati said. “I really loved her, I cared about her opinion. But I couldn’t fight this dream anymore.” He joined a transvestite support group in Helsinki, and found that he was increasingly comfortable with cross-dressing, and less willing to return to a normal “man’s” role.

In the late summer of 1992, K and Susanna had one final,
searching talk. “We agreed that we loved each other, but also that we couldn’t live together anymore. Susanna wanted to be married to a ‘man.’”

They soon separated, and their divorce was final early in 1993. “We kept in touch for awhile afterwards,” Kati said. “But I haven’t heard from her in a few years.”

VI

After K’s divorce, the pace of change increased. He was still working at the Student Christian Movement, and studying theology part-time. He began thinking about a sex-change. But this raised, and not for the last time, a career problem: The Finnish Lutheran Church did not then accept women as priests. (It has since changed.)

During this time K’s job sent him to an ecumenical conference in England, held very near where Kati and I were talking. For Sunday worship there, K decided to try something entirely new to him: a Friends meeting. There was a Quaker meetinghouse  nearby, a stately red-brick building with a sundial on its southern face.

“I fell immediately in love with the silence-based Quaker worship,” K said. He returned to Helsinki and soon quit his job, and the Lutheran Church. He joined the small Helsinki Friends Meeting.

In search of a new career, K enrolled in a secretarial program, and by early 1993 was living fulltime “as a woman.” He began taking hormone treatments. “They changed my emotions and my sexual feelings,” Kati said, “and my breasts grew.” By the end of that year, he had changed his name.

K was now Kati, legally and psychologically, but not yet physically. While the progression to a sex-change operation might seem inevitable in hindsight, Kati struggled with doubts for months.

“An operation meant I would never have children of my own,” Kati said. “Was I willing to give that up? When I was married, I wanted children, but Susanna didn’t.” The Helsinki Quakers began a healing group, in which Kati found much comfort. She also got formal counseling.

Finally she made her decision, coming to what Quakers call “clearness.” “I came to feel that there are many ways to love children, and that the most important thing for me was to be able to live in a way I could be at peace with.”

In early 1994 she wrote to a British surgeon. By June she was in London, and while her Helsinki Quakers prayed for her, went under the knife.

Full recovery took several months, then Kati returned to her secretarial course. In early 1996, she was ready to look for work as a woman.

VII

But finding work proved difficult. Employers don’t hurry to hire transsexuals. “I soon realized that I had had many experiences that I couldn’t use in secretarial work, things I had to hide in regular jobs.” Besides, most of her previous experience had been as a man; how, for instance, would she explain her military record?

Relationships were not simple either. She dated, and saw much of a teacher for awhile. But when he found out about her history, he backed away.

The problem was not simply one of training or concealing her past. She also found she could not ignore what she felt she had learned in the course of her journey across genders.

“Inside, I felt these experiences made me more skilled rather than less,” Kati insisted. “How was I to be truthful to my experiences, and what I saw as my gifts from God?” The current of these experiences seemed to point her ineluctably toward sexuality.

What did that mean in concrete terms? Kati found a job at a phone sex line. “They didn’t care about my past there,” Kati said. “The only concern was whether my voice would sound female on the phone. Some transsexuals’ voices are too husky to sound female; but mine was all right.”

Kati says she learned a lot in this job. “It was a good experience for me. I learned that many men were alone or unsatisfied. There was a big demand for sexual services. Many of the men I talked to said they wanted to meet me. I came to feel that I could help some of these men,” she said.

But along with learning about men and their needs from a new
perspective, Kati was also learning about the sex business. And among the first lessons was that the phone sex line was falsely advertised: Kati was presented as a casual caller, when of course she was actually a paid employee, whose job was to keep callers on the line as long as possible, running up their charges.

This felt dishonest. Quakers have always been big on integrity; for her, this “testimony” applied even to the phone sex line.

She learned that there was a counseling center for prostitutes in Helsinki. She talked with the counselor there. “The counselor didn’t encourage me to start working, but she told me there was a prostitute’s support group that I could sit in on if I wanted to.”

She did. In it she learned more about the risks and the rules of the oldest profession, and ultimately decided to give it a try.

Right away she found that prostitution paid very well. She had been working for about two months when, in March of 1996, she was suddenly offered a secretarial job in the civil service.

“I felt I should take it,” Kati said, so she did. “I thought working for the common good would be better than working for some private profit-making company. And at first, I was inspired by the work.”

But soon enough, the routine of bureaucratic life came to feel restrictive. She discovered that there were compromises of integrity in the public sector also (although Finland is also rated very on public integrity indexes) and she felt her talents were underutilized in an office job.

Then too, to tell the truth, there was the matter of money. Kati was still moonlighting as a prostitute, and she was earning more in two two-hour sessions than in a week of pushing government papers. “I also felt I was learning more,” she asserted.

By September of 1996, Kati had had enough of the civil service life. She quit her secretarial job and has been a full-time prostitute ever since.

VIII

Kati specializes in S&M. With her clients she typically acts as a dominatrix.

By the time we got to this disclosure, I was past being astonished at her. Thus it was also no surprise to hear that her usual rate is about $400 for a two-hour “session.”

In that price range, she does not walk the streets. Instead, she advertises as an “escort” in a large Helsinki paper, and her clients, who understand the code, call her for an appointment.

Does she worry about her physical safety?

“I believe you get back what you are putting out,” she said. “If I treat my clients peaceably and respectfully, I believe I’ll be safe.”

She also finds that it is the prostitutes who lack self-respect, who get in trouble. “They feel they are simply selling themselves, so they treat their clients aggressively, evoking aggressive reactions and attracting violent types.”

Nevertheless, as a safety precaution, she keeps track of clients’ names and credit card numbers, and makes sure they know it. She gets AIDS tests regularly, practices safe sex, and says she hasn’t had any trouble in either area so far. She would also rather talk about product quality.

“I am concerned to provide good service,” she said, sounding like any modern retailer. “I want to be ethical and moral in my work, to give my clients as satisfying an experience as possible.”

For a great many clients, she said, this involves not only sex, but talking with them about their problems, their stresses and concerns. “It’s almost like counseling sometimes. “For some men, it is easier to talk about such things with a prostitute. They prefer counseling from a therapist with whom you can hug and fuck.”

Very often after sex she massages her clients. “Physical touch is healing, and many of these men are without it. Men are usually more willing to receive this touch after sex, when they are spent and relaxed. I try to do these massages in a healing way, like in the healing groups, and I feel I succeed with many. I get much thankful feedback from my clients, that I gave them the service that I promised.”

It is easy to overdo the image of uprightness. If she deals squarely with her clients, Kati was still irregular in her dealings with the law.

In Finland, she explains, (in 1997) prostitution is not illegal; but it is not legal either, and certainly not respectable. So Kati’s landlord did not know what her rented flat was used for; if he did, that would make him legally a pimp. Nor was her “escort service” formally registered as a business, and she was not paying taxes on her considerable earnings.

This last bothered her. She has benefitted from Finland’s extensive social services, as during the months of her recovery from surgery, and she knows these benefits are financed by taxes. There is also the matter of gaining credit towards an old-age pension.

Another aspect of registering her business is that doing so would also put her in the public records as a prostitute, in a way that would likely reach her family. And she is not ready for that yet.

But she remains, in Quaker parlance, “under the weight,” of the need to “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar, and to God, the things that are God’s.”(Matthew 22:21)

IX

Which brings us back, at length, to the Bible. Kati and I talked between sessions of the conference, and for several hours after its conclusion. I brought my thick study Bible to our meetings. Soon we were bent over its open pages, looking first not at Luke 7, but rather at Matthew 21:31, where Jesus declares to the religious authorities of his day: “Truly I say to you, the tax-gatherers and prostitutes are getting into the kingdom of God before you.”

“Why,” I asked her, “do you think Jesus said that? Why did he mention “prostitutes”?

She answered obliquely at first. “I’ve been surprised to find that not a few prostitutes are very religious.” She knows one in the small circle of the support group in Helsinki, a Pentecostal. In the spring of 1997, at a sex workers conference in California, she attended a workshop on spirituality and prostitution. Most of the working participants there responded affirmatively to a question about whether they felt there was a meaningful spiritual dimension to their work.

“So those prostitutes who are religious feel that way, knowing that most of society considers their work to be shameful. They don’t get any respect for it, so that helps keep us humble.”

“So why,” she mused, “did Jesus mention prostitutes  I think I understand that verse now–at least its meaning for a prostitute: We can’t trust other people to accept us or our work. The only one we can trust is God. Often I feel that the only one who understands my way, my choices, is God.”

Now she turned the pages to Luke 7. “This is one of the passages that I love the most,” she said, smiling as she scanned it. She gazed up at me, then off into the distance.

“I remember studying this passage about kissing and washing Jesus’ feet as a youth in the Lutheran church. There were many times that I thought, would I do that–kiss Jesus’ feet? Oh, no–those were Jesus’ days, people wouldn’t do things like that today–what would people think? So I didn’t pay any real attention to this passage.

“But one day about a year ago, after I had been thinking a lot about the religious dimensions of my work, I started thinking about this passage. How did it end? Did Jesus say to the woman, ‘Go and sin no more?’ He did say that to a woman somewhere. But I wasn’t sure. So I got out my Bible and checked.

Luke 7: “And turning toward the woman, He said to Simon, ‘Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet My feet with her tears, and wiped them with her hair.
“‘You gave me no kiss; but she, since the time I came in, has not ceased to kiss my feet…. For this reason I say to you, her sins, which are many, have been forgiven, because she has loved much; but he who has forgiven little, loves little….’(44-45;47)

“When I finished reading the passage,” Kati said, her voice husky, “I was weeping.”

“I recognize the attitude of the Pharisee. To him, a prostitute is everything unclean, dirty and diseased, the kind of person you shouldn’t even allow to touch you. This is a very common attitude; I know it well.

“I also recognize what the woman does: it is a very physical expression of her emotions–serving with her body, doing what she does. I know this well also.

“When she washes Jesus’ feet with her tears and her hair, somehow I felt it was like what I do for my clients. When I wash their feet, or suck their cocks, it parallels what the woman is doing here.”

She thought of something else. “Where is it in the Old Testament that there is the image of angels with six wings? I remember that two of the wings cover their faces, and two of them cover their feet.”

We hunted, and found the text: Isaiah 6:1-6.

“Why cover their feet? I think this really means to cover their genitals, that ‘feet’ in the Bible often is a euphemism for genitals.”

I thought of Ruth (3:4,7), when Ruth “uncovers the feet” of Boaz, obliging him to marry her.

“Could these things be parallels?” Kati asked. “Could kissing Jesus’ feet be like kissing his penis? I often kiss and suck the penises of my customers.”

She almost glared at me. “Does this sound outrageous? Immoral? Maybe so. But compare the ethics of this to the ethics of being a secretary for a big multinational company which owns slave labor factories in poor countries. Would I, as a secretary for such a company, have any responsibility for that? It would be very easy to say, ‘I need this job, so I can’t think about that, the blame belongs to the boss, or to the shareholders, not me.’

“But when I’m working as a prostitute, there are no shareholders, no boss. I have chosen to do this. All the responsibility, and if there are any problems, and there sometimes are problems, all of any blame for them, points directly at me. So that’s why I know I need forgiveness.”

“There are other prostitutes like me who are religious. But most of society considers our work as shameful; we don’t get any respect for what we do, so that keeps us–keeps me–humble.”

“Jesus’ words in Luke 7:44-46 show that he understood this–The Pharisee didn’t show Jesus these signs of respect that the prostitute did. The Pharisee was interested in Jesus, but he was also probably wondering what others would think of him for associating with this controversial guy, so he kept a kind of distance. He was ashamed. But the prostitute was already ‘shamed,’ and had no respectability to lose.

“But it also means that if I knew a man was Jesus Christ, the son of God, I wouldn’t be “ashamed” to kiss his feet, because I’m already ‘shamed,’ you see? And having had to come to terms with the shame of her profession, kissing his feet would be no big deal.”

“Somehow, these men, my clients, represent the Lord Jesus to me. As Christians and Quakers we’re supposed to see that of God in everyone. When I do my services for my clients, that is what we should do for Jesus. Just like what was done here.

She gazed back at the page of text. “And what was Jesus’ last word to her?”

Luke 7:50 “And He said to the woman, ‘Your faith has saved you; go in peace.’”

“Go in peace,” she whispered.

It was the part about who is forgiven more that so moved her. “I feel the most discomfort with my work when friends ask me about my profession and I tell them. I wonder, does it cause them worry? Do they wonder whether I am safe to be around? Am I crazy? Have I lost all sense of morals? Am I aiding the decline of society? People also get embarrassed.”

“So then I feel inside; forgive me because I’m here. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I just want to be what I am. I feel very dependent on forgiveness–of friends, or of my parents, if they ever learn about this.”

Kati turned away from the page and contemplated the Woodbrooke pond.

X

We turned back to Matthew 21:31. In this verse Jesus is rebuking the “chief priests and the elders of the people,” who are challenging his right to preach: “Truly I say to you that the tax- gatherers and harlots will get into the kingdom of God before you.”

“Why do you think Jesus said that?” I wondered.

“You mean, why do I think he mention prostitutes?” Kati asked. “I believe there’s another dimension to this,” she went on.

“Working in sexual services has brought me to deal with one of the very basic needs in life, basic the way food and shelter are basic. And working with this need reminds me repeatedly and concretely that humans are part of nature. Sex is something that is very hard to understand rationally, because it isn’t rational. So I’m reminded over and over again that we are animals.”

She told me she was convinced that her services help her clients enjoy sex in healthier ways. “I know some people would argue that, no–I’m drawing them into abnormal relationships. And I agree that people need good relationships. Yes, if they can get sex that way, it’s better.”

Here she made a sad face. “But it’s just the reality of life that not everybody can get fulfillment for their sexual needs in a close intimate relationship. And in that case, I think my services are better. Or if a basically good marriage lacks sex or has a sex imbalance, divorce is not necessarily the answer. My services in most cases are more constructive than destructive.”

“When I was married, being faithful to my wife was very important, and I was faithful. I’m not so convinced about this now, but I used to believe it, and I can’t be sure anymore. I’m just doing my best to do my best.”

“This realization helps keep me humble: In front of God, I know I’m just ash, nothing more. This realization has somehow opened my eyes to love this creation. Somehow my love for God and my love for the creation have been strengthened by what I’ve learned about the reality and wonders of sex.”

“I sometimes think back to the sermons I gave when I was in the Lutheran Church. I tried to make them practical, relate them to the normal life of my hearers. But looking back, they all seem rather theoretical. Now, when I work, I’m not talking the theory of love as I did when I preached. Now I’m practicing love. Not romantic love, of course, but love as doing services to your neighbor.”

“Do you really think that?”

“Yes,” she was emphatic, “because remember, I’ve been a man, and I know how it feels to have more testosterone in your blood than estrogen.”

We noted that the Luke story goes right on from the dinner scene to chapter eight, in which there is a reference to Mary Magdalene, and a number of other unidentified women who were supporting Jesus and his work out of their “private means.” (Luke 8:3)

It isn’t clear from the text that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, though that association has long been traditional.

But what about some of the other women?

Where, Kati wondered, did women then get wealth of their own? Prostitution was very common in Jesus’ day. Kati suspected that some of them were, especially given the Luke 7 story.

“I can’t trust other people to accept me or my work,” she said again. “The only one I can trust is God. Often I feel that the only one who understands my way is God. One thing I am a hundred per cent sure of, is that I need forgiveness and love.”

XI

We also looked at the Old Testament, especially the story of Rahab the harlot, in the second chapter of Joshua:

Joshua 2: “Then Joshua the son of Nun sent two men as spies secretly from Shittim saying, ‘Go, view the land, especially Jericho.’ So they went and came into the house of a harlot whose name was Rahab, and lodged there.

“… And the king of Jericho sent word to Rahab saying, ‘Bring out the men who have come to you…for they have come to search out all the land.’ And the woman took the two men and hidden them….Now before they lay down, she came up to them on the roof, and said to the men, ‘I know that the Lord has given you the land, and that the terror of you has fallen on us…Now therefore, please swear to me by the Lord, since I have dealt kindly with you, that you also will deal kindly with my father’s household…and spare my father and my mother and my brothers and my sisters, with all who belong to them, and deliver our lives from death.’
So the men said to her, ‘Our life for yours if you do not tell this business of ours; and it shall come about when the lord gives us the land that we will deal kindly and faithfully with you.’” (1;3-4;8;12-14)

Kati nodded knowingly as I read this passage aloud. “This colleague of mine, Rahab,” she mused, “had foreign clients, and she had to protect them from those who are hunting for them. As a prostitute, I have to protect myself, but I am also used to protecting my clients from people who are looking for them.”

“So Rahab’s protectiveness is very familiar to me, and my guess is that prostitutes in all times have had to do this, to keep secrets. Also, I know that these men who came to Rahab were enemies of the society in which she lived, and that brings me back to my relation to Finnish society.

“My work is not recognized there, and I can’t register for the regular social benefits without getting harassment from officials. But it’s much worse in countries where prostitution is actually illegal. There prostitutes probably have much less solidarity with their society. Finland is not so bad, really for a prostitute; but still it’s pretty bad.”

“I think the words were probably put into Rahab’s mouth about God giving away the land and so on. But originally Rahab was probably alienated from her society, and constantly forced to find her own way to survive. The fact that she wants to help her family too is not surprising. It’s not so different today: I know about prostitutes in Finland, and other countries too, who are helping to take care of their families, and sometimes their own children.”

XII

There was one more passage I could not pass by, but which I left for near the end of the conference, when I hoped a good rapport had been established between us. It was from the Book of Revelation Chapter 17, one of the most notorious passages featuring a prostitute:

“And one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and spoke with me saying, ‘Come here, I shall show you the judgment of the great harlot who sits on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth committed acts of immorality, and those who dwell on the earth were made drunk with the wine of her immorality.’
…And the woman was clothed in purple and scarlet…and upon her forehead a name was written, a mystery, ‘Babylon the Great, the Mother of harlots and of the Abominations of the Earth.’
…After these things I saw another angel coming down from heaven…and he cried out with a mighty voice, saying, ‘Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! And she had become a dwelling place of demons and a prison of every unclean spirit and a prison of every unclean and hateful bird.. For all the nations have drunk of the wine of the passion of her immorality, and the kings of the earth have committed acts of immorality with her….’And I heard another voice from heaven saying, ‘Come out of her, my people, that you may not participate in her sins and that you may not receive of her plagues….’” (17:1-2;4-5; 18:1-4)

I squirmed reading this long passage aloud, wondering how she would take it. But in fact she laughed at the beginning. Her first reaction was that of the seminary-trained scholar. “It’s evident to me that this is about making war on power,” she noted. “When I read in newspapers about what politicians and conventional feminists say about prostitutes, they remind me of this story.”

Then she turned to psychology. “There’s a lot of fear of sex projected on women who express their sexuality too openly. The need for sex, the sex drive is very basic. It connects us with animals and many people are frightened about these feelings, because they are hard to control and sometimes can’t be controlled. This fear is hard to bear in yourself, and is easier to project onto an enemy.”

“So I have a hypothesis about this kind of story: The enemy of God represents sexuality. The sex drive in people is so powerful, that if the Church wants to control people, controlling sex is the easiest way, or maybe the only possible way.” She grinned at me. “I’m not sure, remember, this is only a hypothesis.”

Then she grew reflective again. “In the teaching of Jesus there are so many things: don’t collect treasures on earth; a radical equalitarianism, and so on. Most churches don’t follow these teachings–but do focus heavily on sexual morality. Why? I suspect it’s about power. You get power over people’s lives by controlling their sex drives.”

She fingered the pages of the open book. “Why did John write this kind of stuff?” An irritated shrug. “Maybe he had trouble with his sexuality, or saw it as a way to build up church power.”

We also looked at Ezekiel 16, which luridly compares Israel to a hyperactive and promiscuous harlot.

This passage produced another shrug. “The argumentation sounds familiar, doesn’t it–full of aggression and hate. I’ve realized from other, secular reading that somehow the idea of a woman who expresses her sexuality with many men arouses fear and hate.”

She straightened her shoulders, defiantly. “A woman needs to be courageous–is that the right word?–and not afraid of doing something considered shameful. People are used to women always being the pillars of stability, so if a woman does the opposite, it strikes at the heart of everything. It’s dangerous because the family is the basic unit of society; and women have to keep it together.”

“But I’m not convinced that society would fall if women were more independent and active about their sexuality. It would change, yes. But the kind of family system we have is not the only one possible.”

XIII

This was enough Bible study. What about her Quaker community in Finland, I asked, were they aware of her work and her attitudes? What did they think?

Kati spoke warmly, even proudly of her small Helsinki meeting. She described having a clearness meeting with them just a few months before, where she candidly described her work. They had known about, and stood with her during her gender transition, and she was grateful for that. But coming clean about her profession was more complicated and delicate.

At first she was very cautious, testing carefully for empathy and then talking privately with one person and then another. “It was very good to have these discussions,” she said. “But I didn’t want to shock anyone.”

Then in March of 1997 she attended an international prostitutes’ rights convention in California. “I got a lot of ideas there, about international networking to work for common concerns and human rights for sex workers. The human rights concerns made me feel that this was something worth sharing with Friends.

“I wanted to have a clearness meeting, not to ask I fit was okay to work as a prostitute,” she explained. “The problem was, can I share with Friends not only that I am working as a prostitute, but also that I intend to work publicly for the human rights of prostitutes? On this point, I was hoping to have the support of Friends.”

At the clearness meeting, when she did “come out” to the whole group, some indeed were shocked at first, she said, and there was hardly any unity about her occupation or her human rights concerns. She was asked many questions, which she answered.

In the end, those present decided they were able to accept Kati’s profession as hers, without condemnation. But they also said they preferred that she pursue her concern for prostitutes’ rights on her own, as a personal concern, and not on behalf of the group. One overseer of her meeting, at least, had personally affirmed her work as a ministry, and told Kati that she could be a great resource for the Society of Friends, who challenges conventional thinking. This overseer, at least, was glad to have her as one of the group.

XIV

We talked more, but too soon, the larger consultation was drawing to a close and it was time for me to head back across the pond and home. Kati was moving on to the Triennial of the Friends World Committee for Consultation, the worldwide Quaker umbrella group, which was meeting nearby at another, larger conference center. We promised to keep in touch.

And we did, sporadically.

One of the first things I heard from her was how she got in trouble with some local British Friends, when she joined some other women for a brief tour around some Quaker sites after the Triennial. When the facts of her occupation came out, the shock was more than her hosts could handle, and she was essentially turned out by the group and their host, thrown back on her own resources.

And two years later, when the next Triennial was set, for New Hampshire in July of 2000, we both had hopes for a reunion visit.

But it was not to be. Early in the summer, Kati sent me a copy of a letter she received from the FWCC office in London, when they learned she was slated to be a delegate. Very diplomatically, they told her to get lost, or if she insisted on coming, to keep quiet.

I was disappointed, but not surprised. The FWCC Triennials bring together many Friends from the Third World whose official views on matters sexual are quite conservative; and the Triennial programs are carefully scripted to avoid ruffling their feathers with exotic First World notions.

This meant, for instance, that issues like feminist spirituality, homosexuality and same sex marriage, all hot topics then (and still some now) in many American and European meetings, are strictly verboten, not even to be mentioned. And dealing with a self-identified “sex worker,” never mind a transsexual–well, that would simply be too much.

I could tell that Kati was more than disappointed, though; pain and anger seeped from between the lines of her clipped e-mail messages about it.

But she also reported that there had been noteworthy developments in her career: most important, she was now legal, registered as a business, providing escort services, “but nothing has changed” in terms of her actual work. This meant she was now paying taxes, lots of them, carrying her share of Finland’s welfare state. “I’m poorer now,” she said, “but more honest.”

Her evident pride in this status continued to puzzle me. I am, after all an American, and hatred of taxes is one of our oldest national traditions. But her attitude was illuminated recently by a report from a group called Transparency International a group which monitors public corruption in numerous countries around the world.

In the 2000 edition of their major study, “The Corruption Perceptions Index,” the nation rated most free of public corruption, scoring ten out of a possible ten, and thus coming in Number One on a list of ninety countries, was–Finland. (The USA was #14, rated at only 7.8; in 2022, however, it was tagged as #69 of 100).)

Aha, I thought. Now maybe I begin to understand.

If she was now a legal, loyal Finnish entrepreneur, Kati nevertheless faced occupational hazards: like many other women who had turned to surgery out of concern for their appearance, she had had trouble with breast implants, and had to get replacements. Recovery time, of course, meant time without work or income.

She was also, she told me, beginning to drift away from her previous limited identification with Christianity, toward a kind of pantheism. I hoped to talk with her some more about this. And I also hope that she will not give up on the Society of Friends.

But the emails stopped. If she did drift away from Friends, I’ll be sorry, but I’ll also do my best to follow the example which moves me as it once moved her, and never more than when she repeated it: “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”