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Theme: The Holy and God; Soul Matters, Courage
Meg Aumann, Worship Associate
Many Names
Rev. Angeline · October 11, 2026 (National Coming Out Day) · The Holy and God, Part Two
On National Coming Out Day, Rev. Angeline asked who still has to hide part of themselves to belong at UUCD, and what a community loses when it holds together by saying less. Drawing on Kansas City’s LGBTQ history, the Islamic tradition of the many names of God, and her own spiritual path, she invited everyone to say what is true for them and to let other people’s words stay their own.
Rev. Angeline began by keeping a promise. The Sunday before, she had closed with a song from her childhood that moves from holy ground to holy hands to holy lips, and that uses the word “Lord.” She had acknowledged that for some in the room that word is a wound and for others it is meaningful. On National Coming Out Day, she said, the congregation had come to lips: the things we say out loud.
She took the congregation to Kansas City, Missouri, where she had joined a tour of the city’s LGBTQ history during DRUUMM’s Beloved Gathering. At one stop the group pulled up to what looked like a pale stone castle, and for a moment everyone wondered what parties had happened there. It was the city workhouse, opened in 1897, built from stone the prisoners quarried themselves. Newspaper accounts from those years showed that while white impersonators entertained audiences across the country, people of color who lived and dressed across gender lines were often arrested and sent there. Some of them might today call themselves trans or nonbinary. No one asked them. Others named them, in courtrooms and newspapers, as a crime.
Another voice on the tour belonged to Lea Hopkins, who did it the other way. She knew she was gay at thirteen, but in the Black community she grew up in, it was not discussed. After coming home to Kansas City in 1974, expecting a son, she went to his school when he started and told them herself, up front, that she was Jason’s mom and a lesbian. She found a church home at the Metropolitan Community Church, where, as she remembers it, her son was the first child baptized. In 1977 she organized Kansas City’s first Pride parade. In that church, Rev. Angeline said, Lea did not have to leave any part of herself at the door: not her son, not her sexuality, not her faith.
Many LGBTQ people came to Unitarian Universalism after churches that would not have them. But for some, the trade was uneven. They could bring their sexuality and gender, and learned to leave their faith in the parking lot, coming out of one closet into another. Rev. Angeline honored the care many bring to words once used against them, but warned that avoiding every word that might offend leaves language too thin to carry weight. UUCD has widened its language before: at the seventieth anniversary service, Rev. Jay Atkinson recalled a time when this congregation would never say “amen.” Now it is the congregation’s own word. Her question: who still has to hide part of themselves to belong here?
She turned to Islam, where God is called by many names, traditionally ninety-nine, and reciting them is a form of prayer. The names do not compete; each opens a different door onto the same mystery. Unitarian Universalism asks something harder, she said, because some in the room believe there is no One behind the names at all. Their honest no belongs as fully as another’s honest yes. What does not belong is pretending. Pluralism is not a room where no one says anything that might hurt, but one where we hear words that are not ours and learn they matter to the person beside us.
Coming out, she said, adds a truth a community did not have before. She was careful to say that naming the holy in a UU congregation does not carry the risks of coming out in a hostile family, church, or country. The stakes differ; the need to be seen whole is the same.
Rev. Angeline shared that she has sat in almost every seat in the room: raised in the Christian Brethren church, then New Thought, then agnostic, atheist, and secular humanist, first walking into a UU congregation in 2012, and later finding faith again. Some days, she said, she is still not on speaking terms with God. She then spoke to four places people sit: those who flinch at words like God or Lord, those who feel no charge at all, those who long for such words and stay quiet, and those who were never offered them. Underneath all four was one question: can you say here what is true for you, and will we hear it?
She closed by returning to the month’s question, “What word do you use for what is most real?” This week, she asked, put it to one other person, then listen without translating or fixing their answer. She also shared the chorus of an original song, inspired by Rev. Nancy Shaffer’s writing on the many names for the holy, which she plans to finish and introduce at a later date. Anyone not ready to say something true about themselves owes it to no one. The people sent to the workhouse were named by others; Lea Hopkins named herself. Rev. Angeline invited the congregation to answer in its own words: amen, ashé, may it be so, blessed be, or simply a breath.
Watch the full service: https://youtu.be/Q1PiiQPzAAU?