Saturday, July 30, 2022

“Queer Love Is My Divine Companion”


The Wild Reed’s 2022 Queer Appreciation series continues with my (ever-so-slightly) adapted version of “A Queer Take on Psalm 23” by Rev. M Jade Kaiser (formerly Barclay).

__________________________


Queer Love is my Divine Companion.
In Their company, I unfurl with delight.
They teach me to question the assumed and the rigid.
They lure me with eros, creative and extravagant.
They fill me with the spirit of uprising
and lead me in the ways of “no pride for some of us
without liberation for all of us.”*
Even as systems threaten and forces oppress,
I will forever Act Up; For Silence is Death
and in our holy provocation you are always with us.
You embrace us as chosen family – a comfort in our grief.
You celebrate all that nurtures our aliveness
in the presence of doctrines and policies that deaden.
You bless every trans body.
You declare sacred every sexuality.
Life overflows with possibilities for becoming.
Surely, the glory of the peculiar, the outcast,
the righteous freaks and the weirdos
will inspire me all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell among the thresholds
where the Sacred Strange subverts every normalized terror
and the queers of all ilks fight for the right to grow old.

* This is a quote from Micah Bazant’s artpiece celebrating Marsha P. Johnson.


Above: At first glance this may seem a strange image to include in a post about queer love as divine companion. And yet I don’t believe one has to be sexually active and/or partnered with another to experience intimacy with the Divine Presence. Whenever we extend love and compassion to ourselves, including through comforting and pleasuring the body, we can experience an awareness of – and oneness with – the Soul’s Beloved, the loving and sustaining power of the universe. It is a wild and erotic power, one that resides deep within each one of us and all creation.



NEXT: Dyllón Burnside:
“For Me, the Term Queer Just Opens Up Space”



Related Off-site Link:
Psalm 23 As a Gay Love Letter – Deacon Grant (DeaconGrant.com, May 20, 2022).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
The Soul’s Beloved
Meeting (and Embodying) the Lover God
An Erotic Encounter With the Divine
No Altar More Sacred
Be In My Mind, Beloved One
Your Peace Is With Me, Beloved One
You Are My Goal, Beloved One
Be Just In My Heart
Beloved and Antlered
Awakening the Wild Soul
“Here I Am”
Spirituality and the Gay Experience
The Holy Pleasure of Intimacy
Intimate Soliloquies
Real Holiness
The Many Manifestations of God’s Loving Embrace

Image 1: Subjects and photographer unknown.
Image 2: Anthony Mackie. (Source)
Image 3:Queer Love Is Divine” by Nerdy Brown Kid.


No comments: