Visions of Glow

The studio was empty when I walked in. The space echoed with possibility; it took my breath away. The fluorescent lights overhead were cold, but the plate glass windows looking out onto Hickory Street filled the room with the warmth of Denton, Texas.

It was the evening of Thursday, September 26th, 2019. In a little under an hour, we would convene the first ever gathering of a brand new queer-led spiritual community called Glow. Armed with a Ministry-With grant from the North Texas Conference of the United Methodist Church (as well as plenty of food lovingly prepared by Open Worship’s own Rev. Kake Nations), a group of Open’s queer leaders had met many times over the past few months to prepare for this moment and dream up what this community could be. Now we were tasking those we’d invited with envisioning what they wanted Glow to be.

As I walked through the space, scattering scissors, paper, feathers, silk flowers, and glue on the tables that had been provided for us, it hit me that what was about to happen was so much more than the fun collaging activity I had volunteered to lead. It was, truly, a ministry. The space that we were inviting people to envision with us through this creative process was sacred. Which meant the process was sacred, too. Suddenly I felt massively under-qualified. I’d taught vision boarding before, but I’d never done anything like this. I’d never felt God so clearly in a space where I had been invited to lead.

Krystal and the rest of the team arrived bearing homemade peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. I scarfed one down, suddenly hyperaware of the fact that I had been awake since 7 AM and was soon going to have to talk to strangers. God, grant me strength.

The exhaustion and the nerves didn’t go away once we kicked off the event. As I introduced the vision boarding to the group that had assembled, I stumbled over my words trying to explain the point of the exercise: that we produce art that was representative of the community we—all of us—wanted to build. But it didn’t matter. The materials Kake, Krystal and I had spent an entire glorious hour gathering at Scrap (picture a consignment store for craft supplies) spoke for themselves. The room exploded with excited chatter, laughter, and the sounds of rustling paper and snipping scissors. I took a deep breath and turned to my own creation.

In front of me on the table was a square of cardboard, roughly 18 inches by 18 inches, the same blank canvas we’d given everyone else. To the left of it, someone (it turned out to be Kake, of course) had laid a beautiful image of the Madonna, painted in brilliant warm colors. I was drawn to her, to the reds and oranges that made up her glowing halo, to the peaceful expression on her face. Carefully I cut out the icon and was trying to figure out where to put it when suddenly Kake, who was rifling through the pile of random scraps on the table behind me, held up a flat piece of cardboard that had obviously once served as some kind of packaging. It was covered in a rainbow gradient.

“Someone should use this as their background! I can’t believe I didn’t think of that sooner,” she said, holding it at arm’s length to examine it the pattern. “Mine!” I cried, shooting out of my chair to claim it. I knew exactly where Mary had to go: in the upper left-hand corner, where the red of the rainbow began.

From there I became lost in the creative process. My anxiety and fatigue faded as I cut and arranged silk flowers, scraps of paper, plastic butterflies and more on my new gorgeously gay canvas. I started to relax and get to know the people at my table a little bit more. Each of us had a vastly different approach to the process, but I realized it didn’t bother me. I was too absorbed in my own work. So absorbed, in fact, that I lost all track of time. When Kake came to ask me to lead us in sharing our work, I stood up and continued to cut and paste while I talked. I felt more confident about this part of the evening; as an English literature major, I wasn’t used to being on the creative side of things. Parsing out the meaning behind things, though, was right up my alley.

As people stood to share, first nervously, then with growing confidence as I prompted them, I was struck by how even though everyone’s vision boards looked totally different, the vision for Glow that inspired them was ultimately the same. We wanted a warm place. A colorful place. An affirming place. A forgiving place. A safe place. A creative place. A transformative place. A place where we could be ourselves and explore what that meant. A place where we could doubt and question. A place where we could feel loved.

Ultimately, we wanted a home, something many queer Christ-seekers don’t ever find in the capital-C Church. So here we were, creating it for ourselves out of glitter and magazine clippings and stickers and discarded sheet music and a thousand other salvaged scraps that other people, for whatever reason, hadn’t wanted. But we saw their beauty, just as God sees the beauty in us. Our visions were much, much more than the sum of their parts.  

I looked down at my Madonna. Her hands were together in prayer and she glowed with the light of heaven, the colors of her halo bleeding into the colors of my board. I felt the Holy Spirit in our space. At the time I thought it was because of the love and the vulnerability being shared, and I know that’s still part of it, but now I think it has something to do with the vision boarding itself, too. God is a creative presence who created us; when we engage in that same creativity, we learn a little bit more about ourselves, about who God made us, in Their image, to be. There’s a kind of reverse-engineering in that: Learn more about the art, and you’ll learn about the Artist, too.

I believe that’s God’s vision for Glow. By bringing together a group of people who are diverse and often pushed to the margins, and by engaging with each other in creative activities—envisioning, embodying, sewing, baking (all of which are scheduled for future meetings, by the way)—we can learn more about the God who made all of us as different and brilliantly colored and whole as our vision boards.

If this sounds like something you’d be into, come see us. Add your light to our space.

Let’s glow together.  

Hannah Phillips (front right) is an intern for Open Worship and one of the queer lay leaders who helped develop Glow, a creative queer-led spiritual community sponsored by Open. To learn more about her and the other Open leaders mentioned in this post, visit our “Team” page.

If you’re interested in contributing to the Open blog, please contact Hannah at hphillips@fumc-denton.com.