Hello friends,
It is good to be home.
Colorado was a gift, and I will carry the mountain air with me for a while, but there is nothing quite like coming back to all of you. I am very much looking forward to seeing you this Sunday for the close of our June series, Pride Sunday: The Self Reclaimed. And I should tell you up front, we are not closing quietly. We have a full two days planned at UU Miami, and I cannot wait. It begins on Saturday night with the very first Lavender Lounge.
I have written before about why this one means so much to me, and now that it is nearly here, I want to say a little more about what it actually is. Lavender Lounge is a collaboration, brought to life by Lost Girls Theater, UU Miami, King Viper Entertainment, the AQUA Foundation for Women, and Pridelines, and it is something our corner of Miami-Dade does not have nearly enough of. A third space. A place that is not home, not work, and not worship, where people from every walk of life can gather and experience the sheer power of human creativity. There will be short plays, book excerpts, live music, spoken word, light bites, and good drinks. There will be LGBTQ stories told by LGBTQ artists, held inside the wider, richer cultural life of this county. You do not need to know anything about any of it beforehand. You only need to come with an open heart and a willingness to listen, connect, and celebrate the many ways human beings express what it is to be alive. Come as you are. Dress up, dress comfortably, or wear the outfit that took forty-five minutes to look effortless. There is a place for you here.
A great many people have already registered, which tells me this is going to be exactly the night we hoped for. If you have not registered yet, please do it now, and bring your friends and family with you. Saturday, June 27, at 7 pm, right here in our sanctuary. You can sign up through our website. I promise you it will be a night to remember.
Then on Sunday, we celebrate Pride with style. Dr. Daniel Sheridan will close out our series by walking us through the work of the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, who developed what he called Self Psychology. Kohut broke with the older Freudian idea that our suffering comes mainly from forbidden drives in conflict with one another. He came to believe that the deepest human need is something else entirely. The need for a stable, cohesive sense of who we are. And he found that this self does not form in isolation. It forms through relationship, through being seen with empathy, through having someone reflect us back to ourselves so that we can hold together. When that reflection is missing in our earliest years, the self grows fragile, and we spend a long time afterward looking for what we did not receive. It is a tender and deeply hopeful framework that speaks directly to where our series has been heading all month.
Because this Sunday, we gather up everything we have walked through. The wound. The mask. The inner voice. And in their place we offer an older word, made new. Pride. The refusal to apologize for being here. The willingness to be known.
I will also share a short story of my own this Sunday, about what it has meant for me to show up authentically in the world. It is a little more personal than I usually get from up front, and it feels like the right Sunday for it.
And we have a special surprise. We will be joined by Empress Reign Chamber-Cox, a prominent figure in the Florida drag community, a dedicated performer, a drag mother, and a former reigning empress in the royal court system. She is the founder of The Haus of Chambers, an all-inclusive chosen family built on the conviction that every person carries worth, and that every person’s gifts have a place in our society. She will give us two performances, and she will share a few words about how the Imperial Sun Court of All Florida lives out the very theme of this Sunday’s service. Chosen family. Mutual care. The fierce insistence that everyone belongs. I could not have asked for a better embodiment of what The Self Reclaimed is reaching toward.
On Sunday, we will also turn our hearts toward Venezuela. Together with Pridelines, we are sending more than sixty meal kits to Global Empowerment Mission, which will carry them to the communities hardest hit by the crisis there. Pridelines is assembling the bags today, and I will bring them to the sanctuary on Sunday. If you would like to bring more nonperishable food to add to the bags, please do so. You can bring them to the Lavender Lounge, the service, or both. You are invited to add something by hand to the kits before they go. Write a note, draw a picture, or simply add the words “Love and Peace/ Paz y Amor” to a bag. On Monday morning, I will drive them over to Global Empowerment Mission myself. It is a small, tangible way to let people we will never meet know that they are not forgotten and that hope traveled a long way to reach them.
It is a full weekend, friends, and it is exactly how Pride deserves to close. Come Saturday. Come Sunday. Come for both. Bring the people you love, and the people who are still looking for a place to land.
I will see you very soon.
Peace,
Rev. Dr. Harold Marrero