Embracing Passion and Healing | Monday Invocation

This Pride Month we are examining the original meanings of the colors on the first pride flag. We hope that this exercise in remembrance will help us to honor the LGBTQ+ ancestors and activists who came before us, love and celebrate ourselves and the wider queer community, and inspire us to join in a long line of queer artists, activists, poets, and protestors who have insisted upon a more just and inclusive world.

The theme colors for this first week of pride are red and orange. Red symbolizes passion and life, the powerful energy and determination of LGBTQ+ activists throughout history. Orange represents healing and recovery, honoring the many journeys of resilience, self-acceptance, and communal healing within the LGBTQ+ community.

Hebrews 11:1-2 (NRS) says, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval.” When bringing together the themes of passion and healing, the first person who came to my mind was Audre Lorde, a queer ancestor, Black, lesbian, intersectional feminist, and poet. Throughout her impactful work, the themes of passion and healing emerge as deeply interconnected and mutually necessary aspects of queer life. We find in her writing a faith that through acts of passion we can and will move into healing and justice that may be yet unseen.

In her essay, “Uses of the Erotic,” Lorde expands the popular understanding of erotic from simply sexual to include the capacity for joy, connection, and imagination. It is a passionate word encompassing deep feeling and presence. Lorde invokes passion as a tool for healing by claiming that eroticism has the power to shift our spiritual, political, social landscapes.

This is one reason the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe…Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world.

The power of the erotic is to feel deeply; to channel passion, joy, connection; to be embodied and present. By engaging as our whole selves, we are passionately fueled toward healing of our own bodies, communities, and relationships, and those of the world.

“By engaging as our whole selves, we are passionately fueled toward healing of our own bodies, communities, and relationships, and those of the world.”

— Millie Piper

Lorde underscores this point in her piece, “Poetry is not a Luxury,” in which she argues that poetry–or passionate, emotional language–is the tool that allows us to imagine and usher in new futures.

Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action…For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt–of examining what those ideas feel like being lived.

This Pride month we honor Audre Lorde and all of the other queer artists and revolutionaries who have expressed themselves boldly and passionately as a movement toward justice and healing. We hope and pray that our community would bravely follow in their footsteps, living lives of embodied presence, feeling deeply, and allowing that passion to move us toward healing for ourselves and the world.

Stay tuned for next week, where we will explore the colors yellow and green, representing sunlight, happiness, nature, and growth. Until then, let's celebrate the passion and healing within the LGBTQ+ community.

Happy Pride Month!

Best regards,