Liturgy of Affirmation: The Substance of Our Lives Nourishes Our Communities
The following testimony is included in Call To Action’s Liturgy of Affirmation, an event hosted by the Alternatives Working Group to celebrate the joy and inclusivity of communities that expand beyond the bounds of the institutional Catholic Church.
In 2023, I gratefully accepted an invitation to become a provisional board member of the Call To Action Metro New York Chapter. I initially surprised myself with this decision because, in many ways, my fellow board members and I are very different from one another. Could I really belong here? Yes, there are a few sons of Ireland present and a fellow caribeño representing, and, of course, what ties us together foundationally is our Catholic faith. And although, at the age of 34, I no longer consider myself young, I am definitely still “Catholic young.” This is illustrated by the reality that my fellow board members are more or less twice my age.
What difference lies in a generation? The substance of a lifetime. I’ve read books and watched movies about Vatican II, the Bronx burning, and the AIDS crisis. Now, I sit alongside people who lived these events in real-time. I only have a few memories of life before the internet, and I became digitally literate at a young age out of necessity. On the other hand, some of my fellow board members are better reached by snail mail than by text. Some came of age during a time when they were able to pay their way through college with a part-time job and used that as a stepping stone to the kind of financial security that is useful for starting a family or buying a home. My spouse and I received our education in a different reality, one that left us with student loans we could not pay and renting in a city we could barely afford. There are even generational differences between myself and the other lesbian women on the board. I don’t know what it’s like to keep my identity secret at work or hide my relationship from my employer. I live a life where I don’t think about sexism every moment of the day only because in the decades before I was born, women like them persistently demanded to be seen by society as their whole selves, as more than the labor and value that women provide for children and men.
Love is patient; love is kind. Relating is easy; empathizing is hard. This is not a tale of older white people befriending a young brown woman or a millennial teaching the Greatest Generation or Baby Boomers proper Zoom etiquette. This is not a flattened story of us realizing that deep down, we’re really the same. Love is dynamic. An affirming space is one where we love one another in and through difference—all saints, all sinners, all humanity, all joy. Any space like that is full of my kind of people; any space like that is a space I need to be. What makes working on the CTA Metro NY Board beautiful is the vast array of views, skills, and experiences we bring in service to one another, borne out of who we each are and the lives each of us have lived. It’s all welcome, it’s all needed—and it’s all offered to God.
Tess Thompson is a Catholic lesbian Caribbean/Irish writer and therapist living and working on Canarsee land in Brooklyn, New York. She is a board member of Call To Action Metro New York and an alumna of CTA’s Re/Generation program. You can read more of her writing on her Substack.
