Joy in Every Step: Reflections from the Pride Parade
JOY—“Joy” was the word that kept springing to mind when I told others about our experience at the Pride parade this past Sunday.
LaSalle was present that day in a few ways: First, we sent three representatives to march in the parade with the Chicago Coalition of Welcoming Churches (CCWC), holding a “LaSalle Street Church” sign and declaring a message of God’s love and embrace to the more-than-one-million people who gathered to watch the parade. Our marchers passed out granola bars bearing a label with our church info, a message of invitation, and the full text of 1 John 4:7: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.” Other LaSallers also gathered to watch the parade together, spending a few hours cheering and greeting those who marched, sharing stories with each other, and using our hands and feet to contribute to the atmosphere of peace, love, and liberation. Many of us began the day at an outdoor worship service hosted by Broadway United Methodist Church, a gorgeous and poignant gathering that included worship, Communion, prayers, and story-sharing.
If you’ve ever attended Chicago’s Pride parade, you know it’s a huge, celebratory, overwhelming, colorful, multilayered gathering: Where else do you encounter so many advocacy organizations, international corporations, religious groups, political campaigns, educational institutions, and LGBTQ bars and businesses? And, of course, parade attendees encounter all those (advocacy organizations, national corporations, etc.) in the form of humans—humans marching, dancing, chanting, cheering, sweating, smiling, and moving. You might be aware that the history of modern Pride parades around the country stretches back to the first Pride parades in the summer of 1970. Those parades (in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago) marked the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, a major turning point in the movement for LGBTQ rights.
You might also be aware that, even for people who support a spectrum of LGBTQ-related rights and policies, today’s Pride parades are controversial: Whom are they for, and whom should they be for? What is their purpose in 2024? Do they actually accomplish their stated purpose? Should the mood be one of joyful celebration or solemn activism? People of faith might ask ourselves a few more questions: What does it mean for a church to march in a Pride parade? What does it mean to attend and watch a Pride parade?
LaSalle’s history of visible participation in the parade stretches back to 2015, the first year we sent representatives to march with a “LaSalle Street Church” sign along with the other churches that make up the Chicago Coalition of Welcoming Churches. (That parade happened just a couple days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage across the country.) My own history with Pride parades is a long story, just like yours might be. I first attended Chicago’s Pride parade in 2012, at a time when the question of whether God’s love for me—a cisgender gay man with a complicated church history—felt altogether uncertain and scary. Seeing the wide expanse of churches marching with the CCWC, bearing the names of dozens of specific churches in Chicago where I was explicitly welcome, made an enormous impression on me. It made an impression the next year, too, and continues to make an impression every time I attend the parade, even as the meaning of that impression for my own heart has changed over time from a mysterious surprise into a joyful, urgent declaration.
Last year at LaSalle, we started using new language to describe our identity as a church community: Expansive faith. Generous Community. Invested in God’s justice. As is always the case with these kinds of identity statements, the phrases are simultaneously a description of something true about us now and a visionary description of who we aspire to become, if we trust God and lean into our best instincts. My own best instincts feel especially fragile for me these days: I think most of us at LaSalle feel the heavy atmosphere of tension and anxiety in our public life in light of ongoing wars abroad, recent SCOTUS decisions, and a looming presidential election. Attending the Pride parade on Sunday reminded us that the tension and anxiety includes many specific, high-stakes uncertainties for LGBTQ people, and for all of us who are voting and raising children and caring for friends and trying to be good citizens and neighbors: uncertainties like access to health care and public spaces for trans people, inconsistent laws related to discrimination against LGBTQ individuals, or even the possibility of the Supreme Court overturning decisions like Obergefell.
One of my absolute favorite things about LaSalle—one of the main reasons I am proud to call LaSalle my home—is that we strive to create a hospitable and brave environment for all, and we invite genuine, rigorous discernment about questions that are neither simple nor straightforward. That includes questions about all the “specific uncertainties” I mentioned above. We hold honest conversations about identity and justice in light of our shared love for Jesus and all the ways we encounter Jesus, like Scripture and worship. Somehow, in a (literally) miraculous way, working all of those things out together in loving community has the potential to be healing and life-giving, not just for us but for our world.
Those of us who marched in or attended the parade on Sunday would likely each give different answers about what motivated us and how the day affected us. For all its complexity, for everything that is beautiful and frustrating and controversial about Pride in 2024, I hope the environment we create at LaSalle as we discern all this and share life together can capture some of the buoyant joy I encountered on Sunday. I hope we can participate together in this exchange not as disembodied ideologies or opinions but as people, in all the fullness of our physical and emotional and spiritual and human condition. And I hope the invitation we extend to one another will be the same invitation that Jesus offers to each of us, the invitation we offered to the folks at the Pride parade on Sunday, written on a sticker attached to a granola bar:
“Bring ALL of yourself to church.”