Patricia Wahle

For many LGBTQ+ people, Patricia Wahle writes, faith has been a source of harm. For her, it became a path to freedom. Through the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), founded by Rev. Troy Perry, Patricia found a Christian community that did more than simply accept LGBTQ+ people. It celebrated their lives, their differences, and their capacity to love.

Patricia describes the MCC as a place where LGBTQ+ people are understood as fully worthy and fully divine creations of God. Not only was her faith liberated, her understanding of Christianity itself was liberated. An LGBTQ+ perspective gave her a new way to read the Christian tradition, one that centered love rather than shame and inclusion rather than exclusion.

A significant part of that transformation involved reexamining the biblical passages that have traditionally been used to condemn LGBTQ+ people. 

Patricia describes the work of LGBTQ+-affirming theologians who have challenged those interpretations and emphasizes the central teachings of Jesus about loving God and loving one another. For her, love cannot simultaneously be the greatest commandment and something that God condemns.

She extends that understanding to gender diversity. If human beings are created in God’s image, Patricia asks, why would that image be limited to one form of gender or expression? She sees human diversity itself as part of God’s image: no single person can contain the whole image of God; it becomes visible through the extraordinary diversity of humanity.

This theology gave Patricia something deeply personal: freedom to be herself, freedom to love herself, freedom to feel worthy and loved, and freedom to love without shame or guilt. She shares that the steps she has taken through MCC churches have truly been her steps to liberation.

Patricia then asks the larger question: What does it mean to be free? 

Her answer goes far beyond legal rights. Freedom means being allowed to be exactly who we are, including how we express ourselves and whom we love. It means feeling safe enough to live authentically, having our basic needs met, and being free from intimidation, harassment, and danger.  But true freedom also requires love, connection, security, and a sense of purpose.

From there, Patricia offers one of the most beautiful visions of “Heaven” in the collection. Heaven, she suggests, is a place where everyone feels loved, wanted, beautiful, and worthy. It is a community where people care for one another, protect the vulnerable, treat one another fairly, and recognize the divine worth in every person. It is a place of justice, mercy, compassion, grace, dignity, and respect for difference.

And Patricia does not believe we have to wait until death to experience that kind of heaven. She understands Jesus’ teachings as a call to create that experience here and now. The goal is not simply to hope for a better world someday, but to build communities in which people can experience love, belonging, justice, and freedom during their lives.

She acknowledges that the freedoms gained through decades of work are again being threatened and, in some places, stripped away. Yet she sees the present moment not only as a time of danger, but potentially as a moment of awakening, a chance for people to recognize the harm created by discrimination and to imagine what becomes possible when everyone is treated as worthy.

Patricia ends with a hopeful vision of collective liberation. We can create communities where everyone is free to be exactly who they are and to love freely. Freedom is not something we wait for.  It is something we create together, here and now, by loving one another.