Outside the Lines: How Embracing Queerness Will Transform Your Faith

by Mihee Kim-Kort

But every single time, when I felt on the point of total and utter despair, it was community, a gathering of others, a tribe who would raise me out of that cavernous hole of existential anguish, whether it was too many voices trying to tell me who I am or the absence of a voice within me. It was the realization that my identity wasn’t completely internal and innate, but that the people around me who love me hold up mirrors for me to see myself more clearly. Each time, they would call me out of that abyss by baptizing me in an ocean of love and hope: naming me beloved, adventurer, child of God, sister, wild and holy.

When embodied lives collide and intersect with each other, a kind of bedlam of disintegrating categories occurs. In the unadulterated beauty of that promiscuous intermingling, we discover the ways God is incarnate among us.

The embodied, wounded, and scarred Jesus shapes our understanding of how and why our bodies matter.

The black male bodies were not photographed in a vacuum but by someone with privilege and power, and these dynamics remind us that not only does representation matter but so does the identity of the one behind the camera.

Understanding bodies as sacrament helps me live this more fully. Our bodies are sites for healing, for meaning making, for transformation—in other words, for salvation.

When we embrace queerness, we make meaning through our bodies and with other bodies. We see, we speak, we work, we love, we discern, we prophesy, we dream, and we make meaning. And we do so in community, necessarily entangled and intertwined with each other.