‘HOW DEEP dare I go? How far might I reach?’ These challenging questions form part of a framed display of the life story St Ignatius of Loyola on the wall of Loyola Hall Jesuit Spirituality Centre in Merseyside. I went there with an early draft of of my ‘coming out’ story to make an eight day silent retreat, with the… Read more »
TODAY I was at a workshop about sharing good practice examples of LGBT work in schools. The sound I heard today was inspiration. As coordinator of the longest running LGBT youth group in the country, I receive requests to speak in schools and deliver workshops on LGBT awareness for young people. Other colleagues from around the country were there too,… Read more »
I AM very fortunate to be a youth worker, which means often when I’m working, I also get to play! Working with young people aged 13-25 helps keep me young. This is the rainbow umbrella I use to lead my LGBT youth group in the Liverpool Pride march each year. It is a highlight of the year – although a… Read more »
NATIONAL COMING OUT DAY (NCOD) has been celebrated on 11th October in the US and increasingly around the world, since 1988. NCOD celebrates individuals who publicly identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender (LGBT) and coming out about sexual orientation and/or gender identity as a cultural rite of passage for LGBT people. It marks the anniversary of the 1987 National March… Read more »
ON OCTOBER 12th SEEN, the LGBT community magazine for Merseyside, will host the second annual SEEN Awards. This year there are several new awards, including ‘Inspirational Person of the Year’. When the shortlist was announced at the end of August I was pleasantly surprised to find I am on it. Am I inspirational? Clearly someone thought so, otherwise I wouldn’t… Read more »
THIS is a detail of Jacob Wrestling With The Angel, by Alexander-Louis Leloir (1865). I discovered this image as I began writing my coming-out-in-faith story. I believe the story which inspired it has something to teach us about our identity, which may explain its popularity as a source of inspiration for artists, and why it speaks to me of my own… Read more »
IN MY LAST POST I explained how I began to find my voice while contributing to The Exuberant Church by Rev Barbara Glasson. As Barbara and I discussed the coming out process, I had a strong sense that I needed to help her write her story and, in doing so, I began to write my own. I started in Spring… Read more »
I BEGAN to find my voice and share my story in 2009 when an author friend approached me to talk about ‘coming out’ – she wanted to get an understanding of this extraordinary process of identity-claiming to see what it might reveal to those people of faith who struggle to accept diversity of sexual orientation and gender identity in their communities. A… Read more »
TOMORROW I turn 42. In the first novel and radio series of Douglas Adams‘ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything from the supercomputer, Deep Thought, specially built for this purpose. It takes Deep Thought 7½ million years to compute and check the answer,… Read more »
