Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Standing Strong

As I did this time last year, I’ll be sharing during the month of June a series of posts marking Gay Pride Month.

To get The Wild Reed’s “Gay Pride 2010” series underway, I share today the music video for “Standing Strong,” a stirring and uplifting Wendy Matthews song from her 1994 album The Witness Tree.

In many ways I hear the lyrics of this song as God’s words to LGBT people. They are words that speak of the power, strength, and liberation that comes from coming out; from engaging, in other words, in that sacred journey by which LGBT people of faith experience God’s loving presence and guidance as they move out from the closet of denial and fear and into a life of integrity and truth.





. . . Oh, I can feel it the air.
The freedom’s on the wind,
It’s whispering in my ear . . .

I’ll pick you up and turn you 'round,
I’ll leave you standing strong on solid ground.
To save you from these, these shifting sands,
to join the earth right here where I stand.

They can keep on telling you what’s wrong and right,
and spell it out in black and white.
But don’t you listen to a word they say.
It doesn’t matter anyway.

I’ll pick you up and turn you 'round,
I’ll leave you standing strong on solid ground.
To save you from these shifting sands,
to join the earth right here where I stand.


Last year’s “Gay Pride 2009” series:
A Mother’s Request to President Obama: Full Equality for My Gay Son
Marriage Equality in Massachusetts: Five Years On
It Shouldn’t Matter. Except It Does
Gay Pride as a Christian Event
Not Just Another Political Special Interest Group
Can You Hear Me, Yet, My Friend?
A Catholic Presence at Gay Pride
Worldwide Gay Pride

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Dan Furmasky: Why We Have Pride
Coming Out: An Act of Holiness
Daniel Kowalski: “I Can No Longer Fight Who I Am”
Ian McKellen’s Two Greatest Achievements: Playing Gandalf and Coming Out
Darren Hayes, Coming Out . . . Oh, and Time Travel
A Girl Named Sara: “A Person of the Resurrection”
Matthew Mitcham: Making a Splash
Openly Gay Diver Wins Olympic Gold
Coming Out in Africa and the Middle East
No Matter What

And for my own coming out story, see The Wild Reed series, In the Footsteps of Spring:
Introduction
Part 1: The Light Within
Part 2: Shards of Summer
Part 3: Intimate Soliloquies
Part 4: Coming Out
Part 5: No Stranger Am I


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