An Address for Ipswich Pride 2026
Our service this morning is called Mud and Sunshine, for quite personal reasons which I’ll shed light on later. It may sound a strange title for a Pride Service. Pride is often bright and joyful, rainbow flags, music, colour and protest, it’s about visibility and celebration. Rightly so. A celebration of life and love and a refusal to be erased or hidden. It is great to be part of a church that says publicly and openly, lives that have been pushed to the margins belong at the centre of the story.
These earrings belonged to my Mum’s Great Aunt Ella.
Ella and her sister Dot were unusual women for the 1930s.
Unmarried, they ran a girls’ school together from a rather grand house near Ilfracombe.
In later years Ella met a woman called Connie.
Connie and Ella lived together for many years, running the school with Dot.
It’s not for me to comment on the nature of their deep friendship,
but I do know that when my mum was born and her parents were choosing a godmother,
they chose Connie — so that there could be a church ceremony which ensured Connie was part of the family.
Many years later, I named my own daughter Constance too and I wear the earrings with pride.
Let’s say something as clearly as we can. Something that I believe my grandparents were saying when they invited the original Connie into the family. There should be no reason to hide. There is nothing shameful sex or sexual orientation. If there is shame, it does not belong to the individual who is trying to live truthfully. It is in the systems, the teachings, silences and laws, the failures of love and imagination that have told people to hide who are they to be safe or acceptable.
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That is one reason the readings we have heard this morning matter so much. Joan Javier-Duval’s gathering words begin by saying, again and again, “You are beloved and you are welcome here.” They welcome those who are brave and those who are broken-hearted, those who are defiant and those who are fearful, those with stories buried deep inside and those whose stories have been forced beyond the edges of comfort. That is a profound Pride welcome, because it does not demand that anyone arrive neatly, simply, or cheerfully. It opens a door and says: come as you are, with your truth, your tenderness, your history, your uncertainty, your joy, your grief, your whole self.
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Jay Hulme’s poem gives us perhaps the clearest and most tender image of the morning: Jesus at the centre of the dance floor, full of life and movement, meeting a boy who begs to be healed, begs to be anything other than this. And the answer he receives is not rejection, not correction, not distance, not fear. The answer is blessing: beautiful child, there is nothing in your heart that needs healing. That is such an important image for this service, because it says with holy force that queer identity is not the wound. The wound is the fear, rejection, contempt, silence, and spiritual violence that teach a person to believe they must be other than they are.
He blesses the heart’s spark and sparkle, its capacity to catch the light of sun or moon. And then comes the line that I keep returning to: the longing for “a place and a people who do not want you in pieces.” That phrase holds so much. So many people know what it is to wonder which parts of themselves are welcome and which parts must be hidden. Some have known that because of sexuality or gender. Some because of grief, illness, race, age, disability, neurodivergence, theology, trauma, shame. Pride asks us to honour very particularly the courage of LGBTQ+ people who have claimed visibility in the face of real prejudice and danger but also…
Remember my last service – about seeing and integrating the varied parts of the self – I said it was the sister of this service. It also asks every spiritual community a searching question: can we become a community that is up for helping to heal everyone who is in fragments.
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I do not speak from within every experience represented by Pride. I would never want to pretend that I do. But I do know something about shame. I know something about hiding. I know something about the slow, holy work of gathering back the parts of ourselves we were taught to bury. And that is why this theme moves me so deeply. My own inner work over the last few years has been a movement from shame towards integration, from hiding towards light, from mud into sunshine. I say that carefully, because Pride has its own history, its own cost, its own joy, and its own particular courage. At the same time, the movement from imposed shame into dignity is a deeply human and spiritual movement, and when we witness it in one another, something in us recognises it as holy.
I keep coming back to the image of mud because shame has a heaviness to it. It clings. It gets into the folds of things. It can make the whole self feel soiled, even when the shame was never ours to carry in the first place. And sometimes, in order to survive, we bury parts of ourselves there. We bury the part that was too bright, too tender, too angry, too needy, too truthful, too joyful, too much. The mud becomes a hiding place. It may even protect us for a while. When the world around us is unsafe, hiding can be wise. Silence can be survival. A covered-over self can be the self’s best attempt to remain loved, or attached, or simply alive.
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The therapist and writer Pat DeYoung has helped me understand shame in a way that feels spiritually important. Shame is not simply the feeling that we have done something wrong. Responsibility can be held. Regret can be held. Even culpability can be faced honestly when there is enough steadiness and love in the system. Shame is more dangerous because it spreads through the whole self. It says: I am wrong, I am unacceptable, I am unsafe, and if I am really seen, I will be cast out. Sometimes shame begins as a kind of protection. It says: hide this part, bury this part, keep this truth out of sight, and perhaps you will remain safe, perhaps you will remain loved. For some people, hiding may be necessary for survival. The tragedy is that what protects us for a while can also imprison us.
Yet the soul cannot live forever underground. What is buried begins to ache. What is hidden begins to call out for air. Healing, for me, has felt like the slow discovery that the muddy places are also fertile places. The parts of us that went down into the dark are not ruined. They are waiting. They are carrying grief, yes, and fear, and old judgement; they are also carrying life. Sunshine does not arrive as a command to be cheerful or exposed before we are ready. It comes as warmth. It comes as enough safety to breathe, enough love to risk being seen, enough grace to discover that the hidden part is still beautiful.
That is where the word wholeness matters. Wholeness does not mean becoming polished, simple, smooth, or free from contradiction. We contain multitudes. We are brave and frightened, generous and defended, joyful and grieving, strong and tender, muddy and sunlit. Wholeness means integration. It means that the exiled parts of us are slowly invited back into relationship. It means we no longer have to cut away pieces of ourselves in order to be loved. It means responsibility can be held without the whole person collapsing into shame. It means truth can be spoken in the presence of grace.
CHANT
A few years ago, here in Ipswich, we launched the East Anglia leg of the LGBT+ Unitarian Voices exhibition. That project gathered documents, interviews, memories, photographs, leaflets, banners, and stories from across our movement. It helped tell the story of LGBT+ Unitarians and their allies who worked for welcome, recognition, blessing, and justice, often long before that was easy or fashionable. Since that launch here, the exhibition has toured the country, carrying those stories into many other places. Now it has come back to Ipswich which I’m very glad about.
This Meeting House has already helped hold and share this story.
The exhibition is about the power of stories: telling our own stories, listening to the voices of others, sharing the story of our movement, and remembering that stories can be changed. Shame buries stories in the mud.
A community of love makes room for stories that have been hidden, interrupted, dismissed, or misrepresented. When a person is truly listened to, something new can be born in them. They may receive back a version of themselves held in tenderness rather than fear.
One story from that project has stayed with me. Rev. Dr Ann Peart spoke about coming out as the first openly lesbian Unitarian minister in this country, and she said, “I felt I had a ministry, just being who I was.” I think that is a remarkable sentence. A ministry, just being who I was. It speaks of a life no longer divided against itself, a person whose very presence becomes ministry. At the end of the service, please do have a look at the exhibition and follow the QR code to the online exhibition. The first photo you see will be some of you at Pride a few years back, Linda and Tessa and Liz and other familiar faces.
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And perhaps that is one way we find a way out of the mud and into the sunshine. A hidden story is received. A buried part is welcomed. A person who has been wanted only in pieces is blessed as whole. A community that once told a narrower story learns to tell a larger one.
So today we give thanks for Pride: for its colour, courage, memory, protest, grief, defiance, tenderness, and joy. We give thanks for those in our own Unitarian movement who changed the story including people in this room. We remember those who are still hiding because it is not yet safe to be seen. We honour those whose lives have taught us that there can be a ministry in truthful presence. And we ask that this Meeting House may become, more and more, a place of sunshine: Pride means home in community, where integration means home in ourselves, and where the whole self is gently called into the light.
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