“Reflections: Where Love Takes Us”
Laura Fitzpatrick-Nager with Guest speakers; Kate Summerlin and Raegan Graziano
Sermon: “Reflections: Where Love Takes Us”
Text: Acts 2:1-12
I like to think of Pentecost described in our scripture this morning as a Pride parade. Have you ever been to the Pride parade in Middletown or Guilford or Manhattan?
Oh my. You’re missing out!
All kinds of people dressed for celebration and their own fire of expression and taking it to the streets.
All kinds of bodies celebrating difference and uniqueness of not only themselves but everyone who shows up All kinds of hats and wigs and fabulousness. All ages and languages and ways of being in the world are dancing down the street together! Speaking one common tongue: that of Love and Freedom.
As William Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest, “O brave new world that has such people in it!”
We all are on a journey. We all need to be seen and understood. Accepted and dignified, celebrated and honored. And of course, remembered.
June 28th, Friday, was the 55th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City, now considered a galvanizing and symbolic event in the struggle for LGBTQ rights. Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center, in Greenwich Village, which made its public debut on Friday June 28, Pride Day, marked the 55th anniversary.
As the history goes, police raided the Stonewall Inn bar, on the pretext that the bar was selling alcohol without a liquor license — but it was the third raid in a row on a Greenwich Village gay bar, and this
time, the outraged patrons didn’t disperse, but rather gathered on the street and actively resisted the police. The ensuing unrest lasted five days, and inspired activism around the country. On the first
anniversary of the uprising, the inaugural gay pride parades were held in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago.
Wrote a young friend of mine, “Pride Month is about sharing your true self with the world. …In spite of the ongoing threats and violence.”
Jesus came to be with the least last and most invisible and forgotten, full stop.
Right now, in particular, our trans siblings are under attack in devastating and inhumane ways from restrictions and bans on essential health care, to language use and the ability to use one’s pronouns.
Certain sectors of our society along with 17 states are seeking to legislate hate and cruelty with restrictions and bans on health care, language use and the ability to use one’s pronouns. 1 Essentially, these cruel attempts to ban human beings are antithetical to the gospel and to human rights.
We have a long way to go. And the resiliency, strength and courage of the Queer Community and those family members and friends in my own life, continue to teach me and us about celebrating diversity and the wide spectrum that is the human experience.
One of the powerful strategies for building the language of understanding is storytelling. At this time, I’d like to invite Kate Summerlin to share what she calls in her book of essays, “Observations of an Ordinary Life” There’s nothing ordinary about you my friend! Kate will be followed by Raegan Graziano, a new member of our church. I’m honored to have you both in the pulpit with me this morning!
Jill Summerlin, Guest Speaker
Sunday, June 30th Sermon
We all are on a journey. As a mother, I have been blessed to travel with a beautiful but complicated child. We’ve walked side by side over the past 32 years and at the same time I have also walked my own parallel path. A journey that as the mother of a once-daughter has often been lonely largely because I have not had the luxury of knowing other mothers who are on the same road. In my world, perhaps in some of your worlds too, there are no familiar landmarks to reassure that you are on the right path – a path to understanding both your child’s future and your ability to traverse to a familiar place. Matter of fact, the landscape is often unrecognizable.
I’ve navigated this journey, both mine and my child’s through writing about it and with the support of my husband and close friends. It has been filled with fear, anger, confusion, questions, awe, pride and lots of love. Embedded in these writings is the whispered, sometimes shouted, desire for recognition and understanding and ultimately, acceptance, both for me and for my child.
This is the story of my oldest child Eliza who began life as a she/her and now is still Eliza but a they/them.
Just when we think we’ve come to a place of understanding, the ground beneath our feet shifts and we resolve to put one foot in front of the other and await the view that greets us.
Where Love Takes Us
Flat men was how we started our journey. Three days a week I laid out a flat man of clothes on her bedroom floor. Four days a week my daughter got to choose her own wardrobe. Funny that we chose to call the horizontal costume a ‘flat man’. Over the years, we marched on, through the boys department, the boys bathing suits and diatribes about the advantages boys had over girls (do I really have to wear a dress to early colonial days, she’d lament.)
Early on, my beautiful, quirky, delightful daughter grabbed my hand and whispered, ‘come follow me, let’s go on an adventure.’ And adventure we did. We traveled to the valley of tears after the first boy-girl dance (why did the girls ditch me for the boys she wondered?); exalted on the mountain top after successful piano recitals, select chorus performances and Destination Imagination competitions. When she joined the playing field, I sat on the sidelines, cheering her on through soccer games, lacrosse matches and school performances. Always she led the way and always I followed, but we journeyed together.
My heart burst with pride when she won the special award for outstanding 6th grader. I always knew she was special and different and her own person. She had no use for dolls or jewelry or makeup. She was interested in doing and thinking and competing. She turned down the first boy who asked her to the eighth-grade dance. And then she turned down the second guy ( I don’t want to ruin our friendship, she said.) I started to wonder (was this journey going slightly off course?) Not to worry, Eliza knows her way, I told myself.
Then came high school and the school proms. We went shopping for dresses, discussed hairdos and made appointments to get her nails done. Maybe she’s a late bloomer I thought. But then again, maybe not. There was no dating in high school (mom get with it, dating is what you did; we hang out!) But there was no hanging out with boys – her world was pretty exclusively girls. Again, I wondered? At the end of her senior year she decided to cut her hair, her beautiful, thick, wavy long hair. She cut it short and in that act I saw a new person born – a person of her own making and design. She was till beautiful and strong and confident but she was coming into her own.
College was on the horizon. Other things loomed larger. Was she ready? Was I ready (it’s too soon, I thought – I haven’t finished my job!) The journey was taking her 1, 300 miles away 0 to the Midwest – it could have been a foreign country. How would I cope? But as in all journeys we move one step at a time and as she moved into her own life I moved back into mine.
When we got together in the summer we worked and lazed and talked. I told her how proud I was that she transitioned so confidently into her new life and was taking such advantage of all the opportunities college had presented to her. My only regret, I voiced was that she had not yet had an intimate relationship. With a certain amount of mother’s intuition I added “I don’t care if it is male or female, I just wish for you a loving, intimate partnership.” There I said it! With a sense of magnanimity I opened the door to possibility and what I hoped was a certain sense of freedom and acceptance. (Honestly, my heart was in the right place but my mind still had some catching up to do. Or maybe it was the other way around?)
It was in November, right before Thanksgiving when the phone call came. It started out so casually and then my own words came back to me. “You know Mom, how you wanted me to be in an intimate relationship? Well, I wanted to let you know that I am dating my friend, pause….Claire!” The little voice in my head became a roar. I couldn’t hear myself think but I managed to say, “I’m so happy for you! pause…Does this mean you are coming out?” No mom, I’m putting no labels on it, I’m just dating a girl.
So Eliza had arrived on the threshold of her new life. Her paradigm, and necessarily our, shifted that night. It wasn’t a huge shift — our daughter was still bright and beautiful and healthy and ours to be proud of-but the landscape had ever so slightly tilted. A new view had come into focus because Eliza had followed her own path, with a sense of truth and integrity and confidence. As always she led the way and as always I followed. Together we have journeyed. It’s been a beautiful trip and it continues. As we walk hand in hand there is the promise of new horizons, new vistas and new opportunities – so many ways to explore this thing we call Love.
And so the road stretches out with no clear view in site but instead and understanding that it will be what it is.
Enroute
A poem by Kate Summerlin
this hero’s story is of another kind
like others I do not leave willingly
I do not even leave
my world leaves me
my map of motherhood reconfigured by my child
a once daughter has migrated to another self
what was sufficient yesterday enough
the shadows of known trees the garden path
the familiar roads to here and there now
desert me I wake to a foreign land
no decision no map no choice but to
open the door and greet this world like a hero
a hero breathtakingly aware that
this departure insists on something difficult
something bigger, something more demanding
a new look new language a new expression
the order of the day shifts tilts skews
demanding first one step and then another
an encounter with a new name new gender
transformed familiar face
so when the path arcs back to the beginning
as all hero journeys do
there will be the fullness of transformation
the gift of the awaiting Return
with eyes open heart beating love surging
traveling one step followed by another
I am on the way there.
So all along the way I’ve wanted clarity and closure..
I’ve come to realize that is not possible. Instead, I will put one foot in front of the other and celebrate … celebrate that we live in a place and time that allows me to tell my story to all of you who willing to listen, accept and embrace all our wonderful differences.
Vocabulary
A poem by Kate Summerlin
Daughter no longer
Son neither
You’ve birthed yourself somewhere in between
Invented a new vocabulary
Invested in a new dialogue
you gave your body permission to speak.
We are learning the language now
Not without hesitation but infused with love
we stumble past what was familiar
changing tenses
understanding how the plural can satisfy the singular
educating others as we become aware
of our linguistic limitations
our binary ways of speaking the truth
our license to exclude and shame.
No more
Your liberation is contagious
It infects our outlook with all the possibilities
of being human
heralding a brave new world
When called by any other name
Is recognized
Simply without tran-slation
Family.
Raegan Graziano, Guest Speaker
Sermon Sunday, June 30, 2024
I’ve been asked to speak today. Laura asked me if I would be willing to participate on this day particularly as it is recognized by some as Pride Month and, after a lifetime of saying, No, I am learning to say, Yes.
Yes, to life!
I have lived my life on the periphery, always on the outside looking in and desperately wanting human connection.
As a child, I experienced violence, hatred and harassment. I was demoralized by two, male, grade school teachers who took it upon themselves to ridicule and taunt me in front of my classmates. Grade School! I was sensitive, artistic, soft-spoken, really, for this I was attacked. They must’ve known something about me that, at that young age, I still wasn’t privy to. As a young teenager, through no fault of my own, I was hated because it was presumed that I was gay.
The phenomenon of abuse is such that the victim at some point will turn against him, or herself; abandon and hate oneself. This happened to me.
My voice was silenced by trauma and I’ve been on a healing journey my entire life.
I enjoy writing; I’ve written throughout my life and just a few years ago, in the middle of the worldwide pandemic, at a very low point in my life, I was inspired to pen these words.
It is written to the innocent child I once was; the lost self, the child whom I abandoned in order to be loved, embraced and accepted by world that was incapable of loving. The little boy’s name is Ricky and I’d like to read it for you now.
FOR YOU
I did it for you, Ricky
I did it for you.
All the struggle to have a ‘normal’, happy life-
I did it all for you.
All the sacrifice, the many things I learned to live without-
All for you.
The countless acts of courage, walking through fear time and time again-
It was for you.
Acting as if I were confident, high self-esteem, value and worth,
Letting go of vice-like control to explore new vistas, new horizons-
It was for you.
Getting up and doing it all over again, and again, and yet, again.
I would have it no other way. If it’s the last thing I ever do, it was all
for you.
-Richard Raegan Graziani, January 2021
I would like to close with a quote from Toni Morrison, American Novelist. “If you are free, you need to free somebody else.
If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”