Ascension's Message to LGBTQ+ People: Go and Tell

Sandra Worsham

Today’s reflection is by guest blogger Sandra Worsham, a retired English teacher, who had been dismissed from her parish’s music ministry because of her relationship with another woman. Her story is featured in Cornerstones: Sacred Stories of LGBTQ+ Employees in Catholic Institutions.

Today’s liturgical readings for the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord are available here.

At a Catholic conference about 10 years ago, I had a conversation with New Ways Ministry’s co-founder, Sister Jeannine Gramick about making decisions of when to “come out.”. At one point in our discussion she said to me what Christ said to his disciples just before the Ascension: “Go and witness.” She wanted me to go back to my hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia, and “Tell someone.” As the resurrected Jesus told the women at the tomb, “Go and tell.” The more people who know someone who is gay, she said, the better it is for all of us. That is true of anyone in this world that we think of as other. I remember the tee shirt that says, “Beware whom you hate. It might be someone you love.”

But I had a good reputation to lose. I had taught English for thirty years at the same high school I had graduated from in 1965. I was well-known and respected in town as “a good teacher.” I had even been chosen as the 1982 Georgia Teacher of the Year and inducted into the 2000 National Teachers’ Hall of Fame. I was terrified. Telling meant that I would call attention to myself in a bad way. I didn’t feel pride. I felt that I was going to confession, telling my flaw, as if I was pointing out a pimple on my face that was hidden by my bangs. I would be asking people to accept something about me that I had not been able to accept about myself.

‘The Ascension’ by Jorge Cocco

The next week over dinner after choir practice, in a large circular booth at our local Applebee’s, I told the other church choir members that I had realized “in my old age” that I am gay and I wanted them to meet Letha, whom I had met on Match.com. I showed them her picture, and then I explained to them that I loved Letha the same way that they did their husbands and wives. I asked them to imagine how they would feel if they were told they had to be with a same-sex partner. They turned up their noses and shook their heads. “Well, that’s how I would feel being with a man,” I explained.

Since I began to tell people who the real Sandra Worsham is—a teacher, a friend, and also a gay woman–I have felt acceptance and support here in this little town where I grew up. Sister Jeannine has told me that my life is a sermon, that I have a calling. However, she warned me, don’t expect it to be easy. It was not easy for the Lord, and you can’t expect it to be easy for you. The servant is not greater than the master.

Not long ago, I got a phone call from my past. After retiring from teaching in the year 2000, I attended Bennington College in Vermont and received my MFA in Writing and Literature. During the time I was there, I was never where I belonged. A group of lesbians sat together in the dining room, groups of younger people at another table. But I was older, unmarried, childless, and, still steeped in internalized homophobia. I had not yet admitted my sexuality to myself. I went from group to group, but still I felt alone, that I didn’t fit in anywhere.

I didn’t recognize the name of the person who called me. The man asked if I still lived in Milledgeville, and if I could meet him for lunch, for he was going to tour Andalusia, the home of the Catholic writer, Flannery O’Connor. When we met at the Brick Restaurant in downtown Milledgeville, he told me that he had been at Bennington when I was there and that he remembered me from a small LGBT group meeting that met on my last day before graduation. He told me that he remembered how I had stood, my voice trembling, and said, “I have never been to anything like this before.” He said he was touched by how vulnerable I was that day. Then I remembered how much courage it had taken for me to go to that meeting so many years ago.

I realize now that the first person I had to tell that I was gay was myself. Now, at age seventy-eight, when I look back at who I was then, I feel as if Jesus was saying to me, “First, tell yourself. Then tell others.” He told his disciples, “Wait here until the Holy Spirit comes to you. Then go out and tell others.” Others can’t accept us until we realize that God has first accepted us, has created us as we are, has knit us in our mother’s womb. (Psalm 139.) First, we have to tell ourselves and learn to love ourselves exactly as God made us. Then we can allow others to do the same.

–Sandra Worsham, June 1, 2025