Happy Pride!
Some fellow parishioners and I were recently asked by our church to reflect on LGBT Pride in the context of our faith.
This Pride season, I’m reminded of how truly blessed I am. I have an amazing family by birth and through marriage, and my husband and I have built an incredible life together and with our daughter. None of this would have been possible for me were it not for my faith formation at a very young age.
I’m an Episcopalian and I was baptized in the same church in which my parents were married: Transfiguration in San Mateo, which is in the Diocese of California, which serves the San Francisco Bay Area. I recall making a green felt banner with friends in Sunday School when I was five or six that read, “God is love,” in an arc above a field of felt flowers.
I clung to that knowledge even as an adolescent when I prayed every night for God to make me straight when I woke up the next morning or not to wake me up at all.
My thoughts turned to that banner when I was ten or eleven and heard Bishop Swing preach to my congregation about our Christian call to love and serve the gay men in San Francisco’s Castro District twenty miles to our north. Even in their dying days from AIDS, Bishop Swing told us, many of them were refused love, compassion and care from their families of origin, some of whom purported to be Christians, but were behaving in ways diametrically opposed to our call to love and serve our neighbor as Jesus taught us. He contrasted those families’ responses to their dying sons with the love and Christian compassion he saw in the Castro itself where gay men modeled Christly living as they bathed, fed and comforted one another with their ministry of presence. Ah yes, God is love.
Although I couldn’t relate at a young age to the bawdy images of gay men that I saw on TV reports showing the raciest floats in Gay Pride marches or the scenes from the Folsom Street Fair, I could locate myself in Bishop Swing’s description of the gay community he knew, loved and served. And, to be completely honest, the representations of gay men that I did see in the media both excited and frightened me because I was afraid what the future would hold for me.
And, here I am in that future. Instead of being disowned, as I had feared, my family loved and accepted me, welcomed my husband into our family, and I have in-laws whom I love. By the grace of God, I have been blessed with a life that is God-centered, family-oriented and filled with love. For all of that, I could not be more grateful.
Once again, happy Pride.