Openings
Openings is a performance participation ritual originally created for a late night liturgy and communion gathering at the 2016 Wild Goose Festival in Hot Springs, North Carolina. It was inspired in part by the bathroom bill controversy happening in North Carolina that year, restricting access to public restrooms by transgender individuals. But it was also inspired by all the closed doors and closed borders and closed minds, hearts and mouths we encounter every day and everywhere. Even within ourselves. You can read a beautiful reflection by author Laura Parrott Perry on Openings at the festival that year, here.
These days, when there is so much closing off and shutting out all around us, this liturgy opens up the opportunity to lament all the doors that have been slammed in our faces and on others. It offers a call to confess our own complicity in keeping doors shut. And invites us to transform our closed doors into an inclusive table of grace, reconciliation and love.
