Viva 2023

Into the flamboyant future

It’s January again, the month named after Janus—the Roman god with two faces.  Janus, the God of change and transitions, uses his two faces to look both forward and backward the way so many of us do this time each year.

I dedicated much of my free time in 2022 to writing. As a gay man who grew up in the relatively conservative Christian Reformed Church, I had been told—and I believed— that I could not love both God and (another) man. I spent much of life’s early years torn by the disconnect between my spiritual and sexual identities.

A year ago, I resolved finish the task of putting on paper what I thought was a story that had begun and ended. After all, I’m out of the closet now, and married—happily, and to another man. I’m at peace now, with God and his will for me.

But as 2022 unfolded and as I poured my thoughts and memories into words and sentences, I realized—thanks largely to the strong encouragement of a host of very patient and compassionate beta-readers—that there was more to say.  “Dig deeper,” they said. “Tell us more.”

While I was digging deeper and trying-to-tell, I found myself at my desk on a June evening in Nairobi, where I stayed late at work to watch the proceedings of the Christian Reformed Church’s annual Synod.  The concurrence of my exploration of my past and the Church’s decision on how to journey into the future was uncanny. And the difference in their outcomes is stark.  I have found peace.  The Church, on the other hand, remains in conflict.

Late last November, Merriam-Webster crowned ‘gaslighting’ as 2022’s word of the year. Merriam-Webster defines gaslighting as the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage. As I reflect on 2022, on my writing, on Synod’s outcome, and on the positions held and reinforced last year by so many other Christian denominations, I marvel at the appropriateness of this word.

After all, it can only be for one’s own advantage that they’d feel compelled to assert that their knowledge of the limitations of God’s love is somehow more accurate or inspired than another believer’s deeply-felt faith in God’s infiniteness and in the infinitude of God’s love.  For decades upon centuries, gay Christians have been gaslighted by those who beg us trust them and doubt God, rather than the other way around.

No thanks, I think to myself. I’m good.

And then, last December, Pantone announced their color of the year for 2023: Viva Magenta. Viva is bright and pink and red and purple. Viva is somewhere between the electrical and the transcendental, somewhere between fuchsia and fire engine. Simultaneously, magenta radiates the sensuosity of pink and the stateliness of purple. 

Like Janus, I look back.  The gaslighting has been exposed. Illusions, once dispelled, cannot regain their power to deceive.  The illusions created and curated by those who would grossly mislead us for their own advantage belong to a bygone year, to a dead past and a to time that has now vanished into nonexistence.

Like Janus, I look forward, too. The future is bright and unashamed.  The future is flamboyant—it’s raucously pink and regally purple. Viva sexuality. Viva spirituality. Viva Magenta. Viva 2023.