The first time I heard Her name

The first time I heard Her name

I remember the first time I heard Her name. It was during the National March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Equal Rights and Liberation held in April 1993. Between 300,000 people (the typically-low National Park Service estimate) and a half million people (the organizers’ conservative estimate) had come to the U.S. capital city on the 30th anniversary of the Civil Rights March at which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had shared his dream with America. It was also, loosely, the 25th anniversary of the June 1969 Stonewall Riots which marked the beginning of the modern gay rights movement.

I was at the March for personal and professional reasons. Personally it was a welcome homecoming. I had attended seminary in Washington and lived in the D.C. area for six years—the longest I’d ever lived in one locale—and had only recently left to live in Minnesota, a state I could not pick out on the map before moving there and one whose Scandinavian culture did not warm to newcomers. If Washington, D.C. was known for its northern hospitality and Southern efficiency, Minnesota was efficiently inhospitable—but that’s another story. For three days I relished being back among Black people, hearing understandable accents, feeling warm spring air in actual springtime, and hugging folks who hug back.

People came from all over the country that weekend:

Some, notably women and men in the military, used the event to come out about their sexual orientation.

Many came to mourn friends and lovers who had died from AIDS-related illnesses and walk among the 1,900 panels of the AIDS quilt, one of the last times it was able to be displayed in its entirety.

Lots of organizations and businesses set up booths to highlight every conceivable angle of gay culture as well as those you wouldn’t think existed, like Gay Mormons.

There was a handful of naysayers holding up floppy-back Bibles and damning people to hell, which only made the rest of us want to avoid ending up in their heaven.

Some rights advocates carried signs that read Silence=Death; while friends of mine from Virginia, one of whom was a church educator and the other a university counselor, wore t-shirts that said, respectively, “No one knows I’m a lesbian” and “No one knows my partner is a lesbian.”

There were speeches full of righteous anger broadcast over loudspeakers all along the National Mall, and there was music and dancing and vendors selling food and drinks.

I attended a comedy show that featured the song, “Don’t use your p*nis for a brain,” an apt message for heterosexual men too, I still think.

A mass wedding took place on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, where hundreds of same-gender couples symbolically, if not legally, tied the knot and then threw their bouquets and garter belts to the cheering onlookers and kissed.

Some individuals came to find they weren’t the only gay person from their small hometown, while others came to lose themselves in the crowd.

A few bodies wore outrageous clothes, make-up, or hairdos, while most of us looked like your typical tourists complete with cameras, water bottles, and day packs.

Saturday was a work day for me. My professional reason for being at this March was to teach my “Biblical Self-Defense Course on Lesbian and Gay Concerns” at the church where I had done my student training while in seminary, Westminster Presbyterian Church. Conveniently located a few blocks from the Mall, Westminster was one of the first “More Light” congregations in the Presbyterian Church (USA), that is, they had officially taken a stand to welcome into their fellowship and include in their leadership people of all sexual orientations. Westminster was also intentional about including people of different races, government workers and those who were on welfare, folks with a lot of education and those who could barely read. I had chosen to train there simply because they had a female minister; this unique congregation was a huge bonus, and over the course of my three years at Westminster they baptized me into the gay rights movement and then, when it was time for me to leave, they sent me out like the dove from Noah’s ark to search for dry land. The United States was severely flooded with homophobia and heterosexism, but I able to come back on this august occasion with a freshly researched sign of hope that the Hebrew and Greek scriptures do not address “homosexuality” much less condemn it.

Then came Sunday, the day of the actual march, which was due to begin right after noon. Gay marches never start on time, and this one, comprised of about a thousand different groups, each trying to locate their assigned place in line beforehand, would be no exception. Thus we Presbyterians took the opportunity that morning to worship at Westminster. Here hundreds of us More Light folks gathered—Protestant, proud, and pumped up with caffeine. It was a mountaintop experience: a gay minister from Indiana who was open about being HIV-positive led us in a wildly inclusive prayer; a lesbian evangelist from California who’d been forbidden by the religious authorities from pastoring a church in New York preached like there was no tomorrow; the swelled ranks of the congregation easily drowned out the piano accompaniment with every hymn. If worship was like sex—which it is—we were experiencing multiple orgasms that would not quit.

Finally the sermon climaxed and everyone exhaled a deep breath. The point at which some lovers roll over and smoke a cigarette is when we worship lovers pass the offering plates and listen to filler music. Westminster’s small membership had a relatively good choir led by an enthusiastic director who needless to say was gay. I used to be in the choir and rejoined it for this special service so I knew that four regular choir members—all gay men—were going to sing a cappella a very familiar, if traditional, anthem during this final intermission. Which meant the rest of us could cool our heels and dig around in our pockets for loose change.

That’s when I heard Her name, delivered in four-part male harmony:

   “Praise God!

      Praise God in Her sanctuary,

      praise Her in the firmament of Her power!

   Praise Her for Her mighty acts,

      praise Her according to Her excellent greatness!

   Praise Her with the sound of the trumpet,

      praise Her with lute and harp!

   Praise Her with timbrel and dance,

      praise Her with strings and organs!

   Praise Her upon loud cymbals,

      Praise Her upon high sounding cymbals!

   Let everything that has breath praise God!

      Praise Her!”

The entire sanctuary stilled. I was transfixed. All of us protesters and preachers and prayers expressed silent awe.

After the service the quartet was mobbed with accolades. We who knew the original anthem, Psalm 150, asked them how they had come up with the idea of changing the pronouns for God. They explained that during rehearsal they had tried making the pronouns gender-neutral, a common practice at Westminster, but it just didn’t go with the music. So they decided to let God’s feminine side come out.

I’ve been embracing Her ever since, and She embraces me back.