This past weekend was Twin Cities Pride. On Sunday, St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral, the co-cathedral in our diocese, held a special Evensong service in the evening after the parade. Significant enough, but made all the more significant by the cathedral's position on the southern edge of Loring Park where the Pride festival sprawled into the streets. The cathedral's doors swung open welcoming queers of every flavour in from the heat to worship and be nourished.
It was a truly moving experience. I knew it would be good, but I didn't realize how much my soul needed a service like that. The Episcopal Church has been nothing but affirming in my experience of it, but there's something qualitatively different about having a service for us. Our bodies are highlighted as integral to the Body. I prayed there alongside a (totally adorable) 20-something otter who stood there shirtless and in a harness. We were here and queer.
A few weeks before the service, my friend Cody, who was organizing the liturgy, asked me to write a collect for it. The lessons were from Isaiah 56:3-8 and John 10:1-16. The results of my ruminations ended up not being read in the liturgy itself—Cody said I have a beautifully Orthodox liturgical voice, which I think subtextually means my collect was a little too flowery for the occassion—but I wanted to share what I wrote here. May it provide some bit of nourishment to your soul.
O Holy Father, God of perfect and limitless love, whose Son imbued our wandering humanity with his divine light, by becoming one of us and by laying down his life, so that the humbling and breaking open of his body might open up a gate for us into your pasture: guide your sheep into the enclosure on your holy mountain; call us each by name; and establish us within your all-encompassing walls as members of your flock—that the rest of your sheep, wounded and scattered by the thieves and bandits of this world, may join us in recognizing the invitation to your green expanse and the nurture of the Good Shepherd, your Son, who with you, in the unity of your Holy Spirit, dwells in and over and with us all, now and for ages to come. Amen.