#queer catholic

[joanofarcs-stigmata]

God of all creation, your wisdom, your love and your mystery are boundless. You have many names, which are beyond all gender expression. We give you thanks for the gift of diverse gender identity, expression, and sexuality. We acknowledge the times we deny that gift by holding too tightly to expectations of conformity and norms. We have created these divisions and use them against one another. We know this is not your will or your way. Help us to act mercifully and show grace to all of your people, as you have done for us. O Mysterious Maker of women, men, all that is in between, outside, and none at all. We come before you today with sorrow in our hearts. We remember those who have lost their lives because they did not conform to the gender roles society expects. We lament at the continued suffering, oppression, rejection and struggle of our siblings of all gender identities. Grant them strength, support, and love to accept and be accepted who they are.  We acknowledge the harm prejudice and ignorance has knowingly and unknowingly caused. Help soften hearts and give wisdom and understanding that in the sight of God, all are equally Beloved simply because of our existence. Open hearts and minds to embrace and support one another so that all may let their light shine before others by living out their Truth.  In the name of the One who is beyond all norm, amen.

a prayer for Transgender Day of Remembrance by Jenn Luong, Ausburg University Ministries

[thepostburningash]

prayer request:

my academic advisor and i have a strained relationship, and i always get really stressed out when i have to meet with him at year of judgment and doing smth stupid - one such meeting i have tomorrow!

i would just humbly like to ask you all for a quick prayer for it to go well and not leave me more anxious about having to work with him in the future. please pray for there to be no issues and for it to be a quick meeting that’s just a formality.

thank you all and God bless

[ohholydyke]

I’ve received enough asks and messages about my process of balancing Christian bigotry and its harms with my queerness and love for god, so I’m going to make a blanket post, though ofc I still always welcome asks and questions and all:

I was raised Protestant fundamentalist. I’ve known I was queer since I was a child. Trust me, I’ve been through every process you can think of coming out of that. I prayed the gay away, I spent nights soaking my pillows in tears begging God to change me or my family, I wrestled with God and faith and Christianity over and over again, I was angry and bitter and broken and depressed and traumatized and wounded and spiteful and all the emotions that arise out of the grief those circles will put on you. I walked away from God and religion entirely for several years. I spent that time deconstructing, letting myself feel my rage and my grief, tearing out the jagged shards of fundamentalism chaining me down and embedded into my soul piece by bloody, painful fucking piece over and over again. There are still some pieces lodged deep inside me. Things I either can’t quite reach yet or don’t know are there because when fundamentalist Christianity is all you know and all you are raised in it touches every single thought and concept and aspect of who you are and how you exist. Sometimes I still find myself back in that place—screaming and sobbing at the weight of it all, at the childhood and family and life that was ripped away from me and replaced with a CPTSD diagnosis and broken relationships.

The difference is that now, I have found my way back to Christ. Through Catholicism, I was able to pray to Mary and the Saints when I thought God had shut his ears to me. I was able to sit in mass and it was the first time in my life I could go through a Christian service without being dissociated and immediately triggering my CPTSD. I was able to find Catholics who showed love and support and respect for my queerness and my politics and my pain. I am eternally grateful to them. When I was buckling from the weight of it all, I found myself (an agnostic with Protestant roots at the time) sobbing alone in a chapel in the middle of the night, feverish and delirious with grief. And there, in the depths of my despair, like Job I felt God’s presence and heard his voice. I felt Christ sitting by me, holding me, not denying my pain but embracing it and taking it unto himself.

So when I find myself back in the valley of the shadow of death, I breathe and remember I’ve been there before, and I know God is with me. I may not understand why we endure suffering, or why hatred is allowed to exist in the world, or why evil and sin and the fall occur at all, or why God allows bigots to cause such violence in his name. But I can no longer deny that he exists, and that he loves me, and suffers with me, and I love him.

[angelspearlheart]

Latest obsession: pocket shrine/altars

[blood-is-the-life]

[transtheology]

i've seen a few posts recently here & elsewhere where non-religious queer people talk about the pope's homophobia, talking about how it's funny and/or how no queer person cares about his opinion.

i wanna say, to queer catholics: i'm sorry. you are good and holy. you deserve better. you deserve a religious leader who sees how loved you are by God and makes sure you know it, too. and you deserve a community that sympathizes with you, even if they themselves don't share your faith. you don't deserve alienation and demonization. you deserve better. you are good and you are holy.

you do not need anyone's approval but God, who made you as you are, fully loveable. you do not need to reject your faith to defy homophobia. i love you.

[thepsychopompsthrenody]

i'm really sorry but you're gonna find god in the Other Stuff, too. religious trappings are nice. so is tradition. it's good to have buildings to go to and things to wear and holy texts to read and prescripted songs to sing. it's comforting to have lineage and instructions. bless the treasure map.

but god's Elsewhere, too: out on the tips of skinny branches and wading in the weeds, left of center, left field.

so if you decide to test this theory and go rambling around calling out innumerable, unpronounceable names, know that you won't have to look too hard. divinity does a terrible job concealing itself. god willing you will take a shine to the idea that god happens everywhere, in everything, all the time.

[catholicsapphic]

Queer Christian loneliness paired with regular gay loneliness and autistic loneliness is quite the treacherous combo. Which is why I’m honestly quite surprised God would give it to Me, the Whiniest Bitch Who Ever Lived

[shoutsofmybones]

it's pretty funny (not really) that last weekend i, a trans man, was told by a well meaning church friend that i should consider the priesthood, something i've been told multiple times by different Catholics who didn't realize my ineligibility. the very same weekend, news broke that the pope himself had a meeting in which he encouraged limiting the amount of gay men entering the priesthood, shortly after he said that there could never be women deacons. there's something to be said about how the Church doesn't see the spiritual gifts of the marginalized.

[blessedarethequeer]

people always say "your body is a temple" as some kind of pearl-clutching gotcha finger wag to people with tattoos and piercings and body mods which has never made sense to me

cause like.

y'all know what we do with temples right? with holy spaces?

we adorn them in art and precious metals and things of beauty. we make them spectacles of gathering to signal that this is a space we know the Divine calls to us. our Creation does not end the moment we take our first breath, we continue to collaborate in our own Creation each and every day.

get the tattoo or that piercing, fill yourself with delicious things and celebrate in wonder at the mystery it is to live within your body!

[briefblueseason]

Praise be to you my Lord for making me queer

[brainrotisseriechicken]

quick meri doodle for future reference

[ohholydyke]

See the thing about fundamentalists and trads and Christian nationalists and MAGA evangelicals and ethnocratic bigots is that they render the faith so boring.

I take no issue with the fact that they would look at me and say that I’m not a member of the faithful because their faith is radically, inherently, ontologically distinct from mine. My God is too big and too loving and too esoteric to fit neatly into the gendered understanding of an authoritarian white father disciplining his children for not perfectly falling into lockstep. My Savior is the man who told the religious leaders “Caesar can have his idolatrous blood money, but give God your heart and your faith,” challenging the notion of an earthly ruler. My apostles wrote of the throne of man being empty—there are no masters or kings or governments, there is only Jesus Christ, Basileus Basileōn, king of kings. I believe in radical oneness with God through Christ—one flesh and one body, biblical marriage with the bridegroom whose flesh and blood make up the holy Eucharist. My faith is Queer, ancestral, esoteric, anarchist, insurrectionary, anticolonial, antiracist, unorthodox, disruptive, free. When I encounter the divine, or pray to the saints, or sit in the chapel to pray, I am experiencing communion with the sublime, in every sense of the word, the same presence that made the apostles fall to their faces before the transfiguration, that shaped the world from void, that animates the deep care and rage which boil into every aspect of my being.

When conservatives tell me I am not a Christian it is only because they cannot conceive of a Christ and a faith so big, so all encompassing, so beyond anything our human minds can comprehend, and they cannot conceive being in tune with this divinity and being left senseless by the knowledge that the divine above all else is us and loves us more than we could ever comprehend, such that experiencing this love is enough to leave one fundamentally, ontologically changed down to the fiber of their being. I feel sorrow for them. I pray that Christ may reach into their hearts and open their eyes, that they may see not only the horrors that they commit but also the deep love and freedom that awaits them through abandoning their fundamentalism and their bigotry.

Or, in other words, me every time I see another conservative Christian whining about how people aren’t doing Christianity right because they don’t adhere to a super narrow and watered down version of the faith:

[angelspearlheart]

[blood-is-the-life]

I feel a lot of anger at but honestly a lot of pity for bigoted and hateful Christian’s too. I’m sorry they have been so brainwashed and blinded they cannot see their biggest commandment is to love and I want them to be free of that one day.

[beloved-of-john]

A silly little thing. Credit to whoever drew the trans autism creature. Edits by me.

I was going through it today regarding my queer identity and my Christian faith, and how difficult it can be to be both at once, especially when church teachings aren't affirming. So I'm posting this silly little thing I made, to cheer myself up. I hope it cheers someone else up too.