The Rainbow Connection
“Did I tell you about the pastor and the rainbows?” my friend asks while on our way to a church event. Apparently, some catechists had taught their young class about Noah, and the flood, and the promise of that great bow in the heavens. A classroom full of mini-replicas now adorned the wall used by the faith formation program. The pastor encountered this display and told the catechists, “You need to take this down.” The catechists attempted to explain the genesis of the rainbows, to which the pastor replied, “I know, I know, but…you need to take them down.” My friend and I groan. The rainbows were decommissioned, as if you could tear God’s promise from the sky.
My friend and I arrive at the event. An older gentleman squints at us, but can’t quite place how he knows us. “Are you the parents of….” My friend and I look at each other, trying not to smirk. This is not the first time we have been mistaken for a couple over the years,given our lively banter, comedic timing, and virtual inability to look at each other cross-eyed without laughing. Yet we have never considered dating, specifically because he is gay.
And so am I.
Last summer, I received my first ever piece of Pride paraphernalia — a pair of dangling rainbow flag earrings. My friend Cassidy made them, and I love them. I happened to be wearing them last Thursday while having a Zoom meeting with an unabashedly queer member of Gen Z. “I’m sorry, Angela. I’m just not into Pride month this year,” they said. “I think it’s internalized homophobia.” Their reflection is insightful – it’s not uncommon for LGBTQ+ persons to use homophobic messaging to berate ourselves, or LGBTQ+ persons in general, leading to self-hatred and distancing from our own community. I nodded in validation, trying not to swish my earrings too violently. “We all have it,” I said. “Or many of us do, including me.”
I have winced countless times at a distorted image of myself, sitting on the razor’s edge of sin. And as I did with sin, I learned to fear myself, or to be repulsed, or both.
Coming of age brought new meaning to the phrase, “scared straight.” And I was, or thought I was, at least for a while. Like so many other circumstances in my life, I prioritized being “good,” sometimes to the exclusion of being true, to those around me and to myself. So, some of the things I did while being good didn’t work out so well. I stayed in personal, professional, and ministerial relationships longer than I should have, sometimes when they were directly harmful to me. Sometimes I believed that I deserved that hurt. In the face of failure, I was more afraid. I tried to make myself smaller, unseen. I didn’t want to risk being known. I imagined my friends and family shifting uncomfortably, pulling their babies closer. I figured it was pointless to look for future positions in ministry. It wouldn’t matter if people “liked” me; it wouldn’t matter how faithfully I served others. There was something bigger, magisterial even, between them and me.
Sometimes I wonder what I would have been, if I did not find myself choosing between kneeling outside of the sanctuary, begging for the crumbs of a blessing, or lying prostrate, hiding what surely is a scarlet letter stitched to my heart. Sometimes I wonder who we as Church could be if we were not so hyper-focused on one particular aspect of queer love, because queer love, like heterosexual love, is about so much more than just sex. It is, like all love, about self-gift and honoring the entirety of ourselves in that gift. And dear Church, some of the most loving, passionate, creative, sensitive, and faithful people among us have left and are leaving, because their giftedness has been denied or devalued. People who make us as Church uncomfortable, or afraid, or disgusted. I know this, because at times, I am simultaneously disgusted with myself, and within a hair’s breadth of leaving an institution that sees the LGBTQ+ community for our sins first.
But let me assure you, we also are not going away. We queer folk are accustomed to finding beauty in what has been labeled ugly or just plain absurd. This is not uncharted territory for us. We see the full spectrum, in a world where black swallows color whole and white washes it out. We take the sun and rain together and search for the ribbon of God’s promise and tie it upon ourselves so no one can say it wasn’t there in the first place.
It has taken a long time for me to stop viewing myself in the horror house mirror, in favor of the many-paneled reflections of the kaleidoscope. As I refocus on my surroundings, the repeating and shifting patterns may be at first disorienting and overwhelming, yet they offer a unique and moving way to see the world. I cannot mistake the light shining through. That is what it is to get a glimpse of creation with a queer eye. And I must believe that this vision, too, lives in the imagination of our infinitely creative God.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Angela Paviglianiti was ruined for life in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps around the turn of the century. She is what happens when you mix women’s studies, social work, and seminary. Angela is indebted to Ignatius of Loyola and Dorothy Day, although she probably wouldn’t have gotten along with either of them. She still believes in fairies, and the Gospel according to you and me and us.
