Anni mirabili quinti.

From a letter to those who have been most influential in my journey out of the closet and into the work of liberation for all.

Today, May 14, I mark five years since that Sunday afternoon when I walked from Pierce Tower to Brent House, and uttered aloud a mumbled version of three words that changed nearly everything, performative speech with transformative power, my own "Here I stand." And I wish again to mark the day with a letter of thanks, one of the most sacred rituals in my life every year, on par with Christmas Eve, Tenebrae, Easter Vigil, and my Birthday Dinner.

Each of you specifically named in this message have, in your own magnificent fashions, been strength, steel, and solace over the course of five years' arduous self-definition work. In conversation with each of you have I claimed and trained my voice - the voice of my intellect, my faith, my ethics, my politics, and my sexuality. Each of you has encouraged ways of growing, being, thinking, and acting that have brought me where I now am. And the trajectory of "then to now" is immense. Most fittingly, I have spent the day in two activities that show how far I have come: I worked at Trinity, one small manifestation of resistance against an ecclesiastical hegemony that - in consonance and collusion with the evils Christianity has perpetrated and perpetuated over two millennia - continues to exclude queer Christians from being ordained and blessed. And I worked on a paper that uses film (!) to ask Christian theologies to speak in new, polyvalent ways about how Jesus manifests God's resistance to that same hegemony, how God in Jesus defies evil in human life. Such things, indeed, are right and salutary for us all.

With a heart that overflows, I want to thank you for the words and deeds by which you have breathed love, marvelous love, into my life. Love of words that matter, words that heal, and words that transform. Love of a well-made argument. Love of remembered laughter. Love of comfort in quiet griefs. Love of passionate justice-making. Love of brilliant imagination, bold improvisation, and brazen integrity.

For my thanks, I have only the gift of my convictions to offer you: in them may you see the sweetest fruit of just, grace-filled friendship. On this day when I remember and celebrate a key moment in my own liberation, I commit again, before you before whom I should be most ashamed to fail, to the joyous, onerous work of liberation for all. This I take to be the only Good News left, the only Good News worth anything: that amidst every form of death, torture, oppression, impoverishment, starvation, homelessness, exclusion, and segregation we humans can devise upon each other, the choice always remains available to protest and refuse, to defy and reimagine; and that in such choice awaits the possibility of new community, that is, of life at all.

Semper reformanda. In our resistance lies our redemption.

With hope, with thanks, with fierce devotion,
I remain,
Jeremy.