Embracing Serenity and Spirit | Monday Invocation
Today's invocation has mentions of depression, anxiety, and suicide. If you are experiencing thoughts of self-harm or suicide, we want you to get the help you need. We encourage you to immediately seek help from a friend, partner, or qualified health worker. After you seek help from a person you trust, we recommend that you to connect with any of the service providers listed here. Please take care, beloveds.
This week, as we study the colors that offer Purpose to Pride, we focus on the colors blue and purple, representing serenity, harmony, spirit, and pride. Let's delve into their significance:
The color blue signifies serenity and harmony. It represents the importance of inner peace and acceptance within personal journeys. Purple is a color that represents spirit. It embodies the vibrant spirit of the LGBTQ+ community.
As a closeted queer teenager sent to a Christian counselor to try and ease my constant anxiety, I was often given scriptural platitudes. These are the verses plucked out of context, on coffee mugs, t-shirts, and online. Thinking about blue, and the serenity it hopes to inspire, one such verse came to mind:
“For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart….” Jeremiah 29: 11-13.
Calling upon God came in the form of desperate prayers for change that would assimilate me to the expectations of society. When I found that I couldn’t change who I was, I believed that walking away from God was the only option, since I was made to feel that I was doing something wrong to be this way.
Through telling his story in his book In the Margins, Fr. Shannon T.L. Kearns speaks about this in a way that is a direct reflection of my own experience:
“I worried a lot about my depression because I was taught that Christians, real Christians, understood joy. I was not joyful. I was terrified. I was lonely. I was sad. I did not have the “peace that passes understanding.” And yet I knew that I believed in Jesus and God… So, what was I doing wrong?”
The prophet Jeremiah wrote in a time of great upheaval, when Judah was exiled after an unsuccessful rebellion. While out of context this verse gets taken as assurance of the nearness of a perfect future, the hope offered is in the long run. His message was about endurance, for the people to be resilient by preserving their identity and their connection to God while in a painful situation. Perseverance, not blithe ignorance to the suffering of our day, are what we must lean on.
In recent conversations with my community, we look to our queer and trans elders for these lessons in endurance. When artist and drag queen Gilbert Baker sewed the first Pride flag in 1978, it began as a celebratory symbol of the emergent freedom for gay people in San Francisco. Just 5 months later, after the assassination of his friend, openly gay politician Harvey Milk, the flag took on a more urgent meaning..
This is where spirit, represented by the color purple, comes in.
My own efforts to build community began in 2010, by leading an observance of the first Spirit Day in my small town. Started by Canadian teenager Brittany McMillan, the third Thursday of October is dedicated to inspire LGBTQIA+ youth to live authentically through visible demonstrations of support and action to stop bullying. By wearing purple and making their stances of affirmation public, allies make their commitment to these youth clear. Queer and trans adults who share their stories model the possibilities of a future in which they can thrive.
Spirit Day was not founded for fun, but instead in direct response to multiple young people’s deaths by suicide following incidents of homophobic bullying. Just like the Pride flag shows us that nothing could kill the spirit of Harvey Milk, wearing purple is our statement that the spirit of each and every person we’ve lost is remembered and carried with us as we keep the fight for freedom going.
When we “rejoice in hope; be patient in affliction; persevere in prayer“ as Romans 12:12 calls us into doing, we aren’t ignoring the poverty, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism or oppression of our day. We’re bending down to draw peace from the river that never runs dry, so that we may sustain one another in the hard and the hurt of our day.
It isn’t the end for our queer and trans ancestors that look down from that great cloud of witnesses and strengthen our spirits. Jesus, the living water, offers us refreshing serenity that the setbacks will never be the end of us.
Stay tuned for our final Purpose to Pride blog post next week, where we will bring together all the colors of the Pride flag and celebrate unity and diversity. Until then, let's embrace the serenity and spirit within the LGBTQ+ community.
Happy Pride Month!
Best regards,
