There’s a way queers who grew up in the black church hold spirituality. While we might not be religious or call ourselves Christian, some of us still pray over oil and anoint each other...
thank you for weaving and reflecting the complexities of being Black, queer, southern & of the Black church tradition. Also so grateful to be put on to Yvette Flunder!!
you put such poetic words to and expanded on things i reflect on in relation to my relationship to the black church as a sapphic black woman. i left christianity for a myriad of reasons around 2018/19 in university. but the memories i have from childhood in old churches with red carpet and that smell only old churches can have are sacred to me. (also definitely had some of my first gay crushes on church ladies haha) after some years of being triggered by christianity lmao it feels like a great softnening to be able to commune with the black church on special occasions and find joy in it over the past year or two. when i'm home i'll visit my uncle's baptist church where the median age of the congregation is 65. there's not many places where you can see black elders and its so sacred seeing them find joy and solace and release. seeing women donning suits and matching hats and gloves. <333 also yes, yes gospel music is magic and medicine and i always come back to it. there's truly nothing like it.
i quite adore this. i still find home and solace in God, in the church, but it also makes me smile the way that we are able to find light in all the places, and create it with each other, for each other, from those old remnants and rememberings in spite of [].
Ahh reading this made me feel like I was back at Helton kneeling next to a random person smiling at each other as we took communion. The church is within me, I’ve internalized the good parts of it, maybe some of the bad parts too, but being Queer and having to distance oneself from the physical church, there is a loss. I don’t know why you told me this post was meh, it is so profound. Watching bishop Yvette’s wife sing, took me back, but it took me to something that was always there too. I love the videos of old church mothers playing the piano while the choir sings accompanied by nothing else but the piano and voice. It’s such a weird tension, I find so much warmth in it, yet at the same time Christianity partly made life hard in childhood. I guess there is beauty in this tension, this coexistence of joy and pain.
thank you for weaving and reflecting the complexities of being Black, queer, southern & of the Black church tradition. Also so grateful to be put on to Yvette Flunder!!
you put such poetic words to and expanded on things i reflect on in relation to my relationship to the black church as a sapphic black woman. i left christianity for a myriad of reasons around 2018/19 in university. but the memories i have from childhood in old churches with red carpet and that smell only old churches can have are sacred to me. (also definitely had some of my first gay crushes on church ladies haha) after some years of being triggered by christianity lmao it feels like a great softnening to be able to commune with the black church on special occasions and find joy in it over the past year or two. when i'm home i'll visit my uncle's baptist church where the median age of the congregation is 65. there's not many places where you can see black elders and its so sacred seeing them find joy and solace and release. seeing women donning suits and matching hats and gloves. <333 also yes, yes gospel music is magic and medicine and i always come back to it. there's truly nothing like it.
i quite adore this. i still find home and solace in God, in the church, but it also makes me smile the way that we are able to find light in all the places, and create it with each other, for each other, from those old remnants and rememberings in spite of [].
Wow. Thank you for this!!!1
Ahh reading this made me feel like I was back at Helton kneeling next to a random person smiling at each other as we took communion. The church is within me, I’ve internalized the good parts of it, maybe some of the bad parts too, but being Queer and having to distance oneself from the physical church, there is a loss. I don’t know why you told me this post was meh, it is so profound. Watching bishop Yvette’s wife sing, took me back, but it took me to something that was always there too. I love the videos of old church mothers playing the piano while the choir sings accompanied by nothing else but the piano and voice. It’s such a weird tension, I find so much warmth in it, yet at the same time Christianity partly made life hard in childhood. I guess there is beauty in this tension, this coexistence of joy and pain.