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.
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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