God's coming out. The Nativity from an LGBT+ perspective
"Gianni Geraci and Luigi Testa offer us these texts on Christmas which broaden the perspective, making us participants in reflections, feelings, lights and shadows coming from the LGBT+ world. We are grateful because offering one's inner world and personal approach to faith to strangers is always an act of courage.” With these words, mgr. Arturo Aiello, bishop of Avellino, presents the new free booklet de La Tenda di Gionata titled God's coming out. Reflections on the Nativity from an LGBT+ perspective.
As he writes Geraci Geraci at the beginning of the volume "Christmas, if you think about it, is the celebration of a coming out. Marcela Althaus-Reidt points this out when she observes how, behind the mystery of the incarnation, there is a God who says: "I cannot be God, I have another identity, I need to be man." And truly no transition experience is more radical and transgressive than that of a God who becomes incarnate and who, in becoming incarnate, accepts to become man".
... "it was the most embarrassing and most transgressive choice he could have made, almost an ostentation of his need to say: "I am fragile, I am human!". A necessity that we LGBT+ people must make ours, gratefully accepting the manifestations of our humanity that the environment around us does not like. […] This should lead us to march during Pride events, following the example of David who, naked, had no scruple about dancing in front of the Ark (2 Sam 6.14)”.
"It's the same gratitude," continues, "that we feel in thinking that, before us and for everything, God has put aside the clichés that circulate about him and has finally come out, confessing to the entire universe his endless need to put himself in the shoes of each of us ”.
In the 34 pages of the volume, poems and biblical meditations also alternate Luigi Testa, author of Via crucis of a gay boy (Castelvecchi, 2024, who, reflecting on the disarming announcement of the Nativity, asks:
"Which side do we want to be on? We must ask ourselves this, because around us there are so many people for whom there is no room: there are those who die of cold in cities full of heated apartments; there are those forced to live clandestinely, because they made the mistake of arriving at the wrong time in the wrong country; there are many young people who wonder what future awaits them and risk being overcome by the desperation of those who have nothing left to lose.
We homosexuals can choose not to hide, to be in solidarity with all of them and to accept the experience of those who have no place. […] We can truly represent the vanguard of the many who, after choosing to 'come out', make the angels' announcement their own and tell everyone that God has become one of us and that, therefore, a just world is truly possible".
To download the booklet “God's coming out" click here (pdf file). To request a free paper copy (while supplies last), write to tendedigionata@gmail.com
God's coming out. Reflections on the Nativity from an LGBT+ perspective
Preface by Msgr. Arturo Aiello, bishop of Avellino
If even God does coming out
You too on these streets
Help us to be light
Come fill our void
An irregular's Christmas
Let's get back here
There was no room for the 21 of them
The last time we see you baby 25
All and only mine
