Respite and Realizations

I'm taking a break from the labor-intensive art project I've started in advance of my birthday party in two weeks. I'll take pictures and post them when I'm done. Hint: The Chinese New Year is the Year of the Tiger.

I've also been doing some preparations for tomorrow morning. I am substituting at the 9am service at St. John's, and am tasked to do the first reading which is Jeremiah 1: 4-10. And, again, I find myself faced with the bizarre and beautiful that is God. See, I am quite familiar with verse 5 of that passage in which God says to the prophet:

"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you."

This is a quote I used at the beginning of a novel that I wrote when I was a teenager. My magnum opus which I labored at for most of prep school had a story line about a girl who was skilled at basketball and, once away from her family, had an affair with a woman in her college journalism class and later ends up in counseling with a therapist who keeps trying to "cure" her of her lesbianism (hmmm...). This strange mix of my reality with a great deal fantasy is just another one of those links back in time to my years at GDA when I was unable to speak my truth but--damn-- I was going to write it out! I actually have lots of writing samples from that period which showed that, as a teen immersed in a sexual identity struggle, I had a pretty good grasp on who I was... if only I were allowed to express it and have it affirmed.

All this week I've had so many "things" that were reminders of GDA in general and Charlotte in specific. I was sitting in a coffee shop and David Bowie's "Let's Dance" filled the air, a song that was very much a part of high school. The smell of the bergamont in Earl Grey tea captured my time shared in counseling with Charlotte. And the gospel reading at noon day yesterday was about the mustard seed... which corresponds with the charm on my necklace, a charm I received from my mom on my 16th birthday, one month after the intervention to stop me from suicide. It's all been a little overwhelming. But it's all been good. It's been this weird experience of undergoing a spiritual healing just as my friend was going through her own metamorphosis in North Carolina.

"Then I said, 'Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.' But the Lord said to me, 'Do not say to me, 'I am only a boy'; for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord.' Then the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the Lord said to me, 'Now I have put my words in your mouth."--Jeremiah 1: 6-9

Today, I speak up and I am as "out" as an introverted lesbian could be. And those moments that are in my past that have injured me and kept me quiet before are vanishing and fading away. I am at peace. I've used this blog as a means of doing what I can with the written word to encourage the inclusion of the LGBT community, especially in the Church, and, in my own way, to give strength to anyone reading who is working to find that voice within to state clearly and simply, "Here I am, and this is who I am." A big part of that fell into place with the healing that has occurred this week around Charlotte. And with it has come another deepening of the understanding of who I am in the body of Christ, and assurances that this "God thing" is the real deal.

This week, God heard my supplications for me, and has bent down to meet Charlotte as the loving community of her friends have sent up prayers for her and Betsy. Her acknowledgement that she is loved and she is safe to share herself fully and with humor is a gift of enormous proportions. I know that is true. Amen and amen.

In you, O Lord, have I taken refuge; let me never be ashamed.--Psalm 71:6