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Friends,

As Vancouver prepares for Pride and we head into the BC Day weekend, I keep coming back to a line from Romans 8: “Nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Paul writes those words in the midst of suffering, danger, accusation, and fear. They are not, perhaps, the words we think of hearing on a stunning August long weekend. For at their heart is a reminder for people who needed to know that whatever happened around them, they had not been abandoned by God.

So perhaps that isn't such a stretch after all, because, I would hazard a guess, many of us have known something about abandonment. Sometimes it comes through the Church. Sometimes through a family. Sometimes through a version of God handed to us early on that did not seem to have room for the way our lives had taken shape.

Years ago, when I was preparing for ordination, I went through a series of interviews with people from dioceses across the province. They were a little like an extended job interview, though the questions reached much deeper than whether someone could perform the work of a priest. We were listening for whether priesthood was truly the life God was calling each person to live.

One candidate came with the strong encouragement of their home parish. There was genuine care in that encouragement. There was also a quiet unease this person had carried through the whole process. At the end of the interviews, they were not recommended for ordination. I was shaken, worrying about how the decision would affect them. I expected grief. What I saw instead was relief.

They came out of the final interview lighter than they had gone in. Something in them had settled. They were finally able to say aloud that priesthood was not the life they were being called to live. That was not a failure. They had been released from the pressure of becoming the person others had imagined for them. I have never forgotten that moment.

The circumstances are different, of course, but I think about it every year around Pride because I have seen what happens when someone no longer has to manage how much of themselves is safe to show.

We stop editing every sentence before we speak. We introduce the people we love without hesitation. We tell the stories of our lives without bracing for the room to change. Something settles because, I think, we begin to feel at home within ourselves. That is not only a gay or straight experience. It is a human yearning we all share.

Pride holds that kind of relief, but it holds much more than relief. It holds grief for the places that were not safe and sometimes still are not. It holds memory for those who were shamed, excluded, criminalized, abandoned, or lost.

And it holds joy too. Real joy. The joy of being known. The joy of finding community. The joy of loving openly. The joy of discovering that a life once treated as a problem is, in fact, a life full of gifts. The more I wrestle with this, the more I think Pride reveals something true about love itself.

Love is more than good feelings or a tidy story with a happy ending. It is the harder and more beautiful work of learning to live alongside another person, to support them, to be changed by them, and to navigate life together, morning grogginess, arguments and everything else in between.

That kind of love is not confined by sexuality or gender. It is one of the ways, I think, human beings become more fully alive.

Which brings me back to the words of St. Irenaeus: “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” Those words have become the guiding motto for my ministry because beneath them, for me, is another conviction: belief becomes visible through love.

Faith is more than what we say about God. It takes shape in the way we receive one another. It becomes visible in the room we make for another person’s life, in the care we offer, in the stories we are willing to hear, and in the love we give without asking someone else to become smaller.

A human being fully alive is not a polished or perfected person. It is a life becoming more truthful, more able to love, more able to receive love, and more at rest in the knowledge that it belongs to God.

I have seen this love at St. Francis from the moment I arrived.

I have seen it at coffee hour, when we move beyond small talk and begin to know one another more deeply. I have seen it in the conversations we have shared, in the joy of weddings, in the quiet presence offered to families at funerals, and in the ordinary ways people keep showing up for one another.

That matters because it reminds me that love here is more than a vibe or a nice feeling. It is a way of life we keep choosing together.

When Paul says to the Romans,  that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God, He’s telling us, I think, that our belief in that promise becomes visible when our life together begins to resemble it.

Perhaps that is what this weekend is all about after all: not only what Pride has had to fight for, but what all of us might be for together — a love abundant enough to hold every life God has made, and a glory wide enough to be seen in more forms than we can count.

This Pride weekend, I give thanks for all of God’s dearly and queerly beloved. And for the timeless promise beneath all of the celebrations:

Nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Happy Pride, St. Francis.

It is a gift to be the Church with you.

Alex+