Sharing Your LGBTQ Spiritual Practices as a Gift to the People of God

Sheltering in place and social distancing have forced many of us to reconsider our spiritual practices, absent the communities with whom we usually worship. Perhaps even more so now, we need prayer to remain grounded. The deficits are particularly felt this Holy Week. Yet, we are also discovering (or rediscovering) alternative modes of living faith and of being church through which God’s abiding presence and unyielding love is being made known to us.

Needed in this (re)discovery are the unique gifts, perspectives, and traditions that LGBTQ people and allies bring to the church and to spiritual practice. In a sense, many in the LGBTQ Catholic community have long been forced to ‘socially distance’ from the institutional church which has excluded them from full participation. Long before our present deluge of Zoom calls and home liturgies, we in this community have learned to live faith at the peripheries and build new forms of community there. Now COVID-19 has forced Catholics worldwide to do likewise.

Both as an offering to this blog community and as a wider resource for the church, Bondings 2.0 wants to compile LGBTQ-related spiritual tools that have helped you in the past and that you find relevant during this time of pandemic.  We ask our readers, to submit spiritual practices, symbols, images, prayers, and rituals which have been meaningful and helpful to you as an LGBTQ person or ally. Think broadly when you think “spiritual tools.” These things could be spiritual reflections, books, video clips, quotes, songs, photographs, poems, scriptural verses, authors, memes, saints and other inspiring people, liturgies, embodied prayer, and more.

Please use the form below to submit your ideas.  You may choose to make your submission with a pseudonym or anonymously, but please provide an email address in case we need to reach you for clarification. The deadline for submission is Wednesday, April 15th.  If you are submitting an audio or video resource, please provide a link for it.  If your audio or video resource is not available online, please attach your audio or video file to an email and send to [email protected].

Depending on the response, Bondings 2.0 editors will share the results in a post or series of posts in the days and weeks following April 15th.  After these submissions appear in a blog post, we will house them as a permanent archive on New Ways Ministry’s website, along with our other educational and  spiritual resources

The coronavirus pandemic has been a unique moment of pain for this generation.  As LGBTQ Catholics and allies, let’s turn this moment of pain into a moment of grace by sharing our spiritual treasures with others in our church.

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—Robert Shine, New Ways Ministry, April 8, 2020