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June 23 - June 24, 2021
Everybody loves Elmo, right? Elmo is a closer. Elmo gets all the Glengarry leads. Elmo stares into the abyss and the abyss whispers, “Tickle me.” But in real life, I’m a Grover. I have always been black in a white environment, not black enough in a black environment, working-class in an upper-class environment, Christian in a secular environment, questioning in a devout environment, gay in a straight environment. Never quite right.
Every story, whether truth or fiction, is an invitation to imagination, but even more so, it’s an invitation to empathy. The storyteller says, “I am here. Does it matter?”
The internet will quickly remind you that you are not famous; you just did this one thing this one time and that was yesterday so why are we still talking about it?
I don’t know if anyone is actually tracking the movement of the moral universe, but I’d wager that bend is a lot longer than any of us can bear.
To this day I am amazed that someone as chill and Presbyterian as Fred Rogers created someone as over-the-top fabulous as Lady Elaine.
She wore this outfit to funerals and to meetings in which she had to set someone straight. She called it her death suit because if she was wearing it, “either someone is already dead or someone’s going to die.”
But if you were inclined to get to know someone, to show them a piece of yourself, to perhaps fall a little bit in love, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better way than by spending hours picking up books, flipping them open, and talking about what you find inside.
Love seems to have infinite possible beginnings, endings, permutations, subtle shifts, and seismic changes. Love, I’ve learned, is different every time you look at it. Love is every possible love story all at once. Love is a library. And nothing is as fat with possibility as a library.
These were the moments when I was reminded that no matter how passively I engaged with my blackness, it was never not a force at work in my life. And, I found, the knowledge of my blackness could be used as a weapon against me at any moment.
Honestly, I see very little difference between Church and a Beyoncé concert. Maybe that’s the core of my theology: if it makes you feel something ineffable, if it’s bigger than you and yet deeply personal, if it sometimes involves a fog machine, it’s Church.
Some people save a place for Elijah; we saved a place for Shirley Chisholm.
Every family’s story is a tale of becoming, sometimes through oppression, sometimes through achievement, and sometimes simply through the current of time.
A lot of writers talk about their bodies as being cars that drive their brains around, but I never felt like that (I’m special!); I always felt like my body was a turtleneck that was too small and a pair of corduroy pants that was a little too big.
I think it’s important to revel in the small things that make us joyful, to indulge when possible and not problematic, to steal laughter and hoard it.
How are we supposed to live without a meteor bearing down on us? How are we supposed to find the best parts of humanity without a brutal regime at the door? How are we supposed to tell the people we love that we love them if we’re not five minutes from being destroyed? That’s the challenge of being alive.
All of us have, at some point, logged on and thought, This seems like a good idea! And sometimes that changes when you discover that the internet is actually just other people, and other people, scientists say, are terrible.
I love Pride, too, because it began as a riot. That’s important to me; every step, every shimmy, every wave, is a gesture of triumph but also defiance. The first time I went to Pride, I wasn’t legally allowed to get married. I could be fired from my job because of my sexual orientation. My future husband couldn’t be ordained in the church. And yet we were living in markedly better times than we’d lived in before. There was so much to dance about.
This act—daring to say that we believe in each other—is political. Daring to say that we believe in something, anything, is political. Daring to believe that we’ll exist in the future in America is political.
I realize that this night in this church is the world that they will know, this is the world they will see as normal, this is the world they will inherit. A world made by people of all colors and sexualities and ages and faiths and gender expressions who have traveled many roads toward hope. And though we crowd the dance floor in the space that has been made specifically for us, our presence seems to create even more space, for those like us, for those yet to be. All heaven has broken out.
