Each year the Utah Pride Festival has an interfaith service as part of the festival activities. With the 2013 service, the Utah Pride Interfaith Coalition’s interfaith event was moved from the Saturday afternoon slot to a Thursday evening, beginning the festivities with prayer and worship for all people. The 2014 service will continue the tradition, bringing in Pride with prayer and worship.
The UPIC seeks to promote healing, love, and to include everyone who identifies as LGBTQIA in finding, worshiping and making reconciliation with and to the divine if they have been exiled, shamed, forgotten, silenced, shunned and banished for their sexual orientation/expression and gender identity/expression. The main message that “God loves all” and that “all can worship the Divine” is in their mission statement “Together, we celebrate the divine within each of us. It is tragically believed by some gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people that on the event of their coming-out they lose all rights to consider themselves people of faith, spiritual and capable of holiness. As an Interfaith community we come together from many diverse faiths and cultures, to proclaim loudly and proudly that such is not the case! Each of us is a being of love, created as we are.” – Maureen Aisling Duffy-Boose, 1734 Witch and Priestess.
The theme of this year will most likely stay the same as the festival’s, “Love Equals Love”. This year’s service will be on Thursday, June, 5, 2014 at 7pm at Wasatch Presbyterian Church in Salt Lake City, UT. More to come as future planning meetings and details unfold.
Salt Lake Pagan Society 