One of the oldest members of our congregation, a wise and wonderful woman in her 90s, pulled me aside after our worship service this past Sunday.

 Her eyes were bright.

 “I’ve always believed the saying that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it ultimately bends towards justice,” she said, her voice steady. “This morning, I saw it bend in our worship service.”

I’m still not sure I have the words to fully capture the chaotic holiness of what we experienced yesterday in our worship service, but I’m going to try.

This past Sunday was not just any Sunday.

 It was our town’s first ever officially endorsed Pride Worship, and we were hosting.

 It was also the very first Sunday for our new settled minister, the Rev. Phoenix Bell-Shelton Biggs.

 To top it all off, since my contract as the interim minister expired in May but my work as the founder of Carlisle Pride, and as a community minister for this congregation  is ongoing, we decided to tandem preach. 

It was a way to introduce the new minister to the community, and for visitors to see a familiar face on the chancel. 

To say the place was full is an understatement. 

We packed 136 people into our sanctuary, a joyful, very nearly standing-room-only crowd that included more than a dozen households who had never walked through our doors before.

 The energy was electric. 

Our sanctuary decorations looked like a Pride parade had joyfully thrown up all over our chapel. 

And for the occasion, a talented congregant gifted Rev. Phoenix and me with custom-made, matching,  reversible stoles, complete with faux fur trim, embroidered chalices, and iridescent mermaid fabric. 

They were glorious.

The whole morning was a masterclass in glorious chaos.

 Our chalice was lit by a drag king wearing a “down with facism” shirt and a huge mohawk. 

The pick-up choir, composed of three brave adults and about 18 wonderfully feral children who had practiced exactly twice that morning, belted out “A Million Dreams” from the Greatest Showman.

The pianist wore aviator sunglasses and a hot pink cowboy hat, and kept inserting little Barbara Striesand easter eggs into the music. 

He played Lady Gaga for the postlude. 

 When one of our guest liturgists, the fabulous drag queen Regina Holiday, called the children forward for a story, the entire front of the sanctuary filled with kids, spilling out into the aisles. 

During the offering, drag queens danced with grandmothers. 

And we celebrated glitter communion with two jars of “Unicorn Snot”—anointing one another with glitter blessings, Ash Wednesday (or maybe Lion King) style.

People shouted “Amen!” and clapped multiple times throughout the service, their joy exploding out of their bodies through their voices and their hands. 

It was worship as I have never experienced it before.

 And it was profoundly, deeply holy.

Preaching in Full Color

From the chancel, Rev. Phoenix and I tried to give voice to the spirit that was already palpable in the room.

I went first, feeling the need to name the elephant in the room for many queer folks.

 “For too long, and for too many of us,” I began, “institutions claiming to speak for God have been sources of profound pain, judgment, and exclusion.” 

I shared my own story of growing up in a sepia-toned religious world where my own colors felt dangerous, where the implicit message was that to be queer was to be broken. It took me 35 years to find my way out of that closet and into the full-Technicolor embrace of this community.

 It was, like in The Wizard of Oz, a homecoming for my soul.

I also wanted to gently reassure our longtime members that while this specific service was a unique and focused celebration, the spirit behind it—the radical welcome, the deep care, the celebration of authenticity—is the same spirit we strive to weave into the fabric of every Sunday. 

Pride Sunday isn’t a replacement of our core values; it’s an amplification of them. 

The everyday love and respect are the pigments; this was just adding the glitter that makes the whole canvas shimmer.

Then, Rev. Phoenix took the pulpit and brought us home. 

They spoke of growing up in churches where God’s love “came with fine print,” where they prayed to be “fixed.” 

The Divine, they shared, didn’t show up for them in a quiet sanctuary, but under the halo of stage lights in a club, in the powerful, wordless sermon of a drag queen’s performance.

 “It was like she looked at me and said: ‘You are not broken. You are not wrong. You are already holy.’”

This, Rev. Phoenix preached, is the theology that holds us. 

It’s a theology that draws from the world’s wellsprings—from the Hindu concept of Tat Tvam Asi (“Thou art That”) to the Buddhist call to awaken from separation, to our own Unitarian Universalist affirmation that the Holy is spacious enough for every body and every story.

They then offered a powerful blessing that left few dry eyes in the house.

To their LGBTQIA+ siblings: “You are not a disruption. You are the design… Your love, your gender, your truth is not an error or a side note—it is a sacred testimony.”

To the drag artists: “You are sacred storytellers, prophets in platform shoes… You remind us that resurrection doesn’t always look like a tomb—it might look like a backstage mirror and a glitter lip.”

To the allies: “Thank you for showing up when it’s uncomfortable… You hold space with us, not as saviors, but as co-conspirators in the work of justice and joy.”

And to everyone present, they declared, “There is nothing about you that is too much for this faith… Let your life preach in full color.”

And then came glitter communion.

I was not prepared.

Logically, I knew it would be emotional. 

These are my people, my spiritual family. Offering a blessing to each of them, seeing their faces, feeling their trust—of course, that would fill me with love. But something else happened that cracked my heart wide open.

It was the drag queens. 

Not Regina Holliday and King BeauDacious, who were in full, glorious drag helping lead the service. 

No, it was the row of big, burly men sitting in the pews—local drag performers who had come out of costume, just as themselves. 

As the service unfolded, they wept openly, their shoulders shaking with a catharsis that felt decades in the making.

When it came time for the glitter blessings, they came forward. 

One by one, these powerful performers, these artists who project such strength and sass on stage, bent down so I could reach their foreheads. 

As I gently anointed them with glitter, I looked them in their tear-filled eyes and spoke blessings over them, calling them holy and beloved, whole and perfect.

That’s what cracked my heart wide open. 

To witness their raw emotion at being not only accepted but celebrated in a church—when it is so often the church leading the charge to demonize and dehumanize them—and then to have the profound privilege of offering a personal, ministerial blessing that affirmed their whole, beautiful selves… 

I have no other word for it but holy.

My elderly friend was right. 

On a Sunday morning filled with kids and chaos, with faux fur stoles and iridescent fabric, with loud music and unicorn snot, we didn’t just talk about justice. 

We didn’t just pray for holiness. 

We saw it. 

We felt it. 

We watched the long arc of the universe bend, right there, in our midst, shimmering with glitter and grace.