“Then afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh;
your sons and daughters shall prophesy,
your elders shall dream dreams,
and your young people shall see visions.” —Joel 2:28

Now I am ready to dream.  To rise out of visions.  To move beyond prophesy.  To live a colorful new reality.

When I was young, inching toward a door I did not recognize as the inside of a closet, I had visions.  Visions of a young preacher going home to Kansas.  Urban ministry was the cutting edge, or overseas development.  I would minister to the rural forgotten.  It turned out another way..

I could not dream of a world in which a preacher could be out.  Much less one where a preacher might marry his boyfriend.  The closet was the spiritual price of ministry–or so my black-and-white visions told me.

My visions turned other directions.  Coalitions for peace and justice.  Nuclear freeze.  Peace walks.  Those days–so long ago–now fade.

When the closet door cracked, visions turned to prophetic action.  I joined another.  We joined others.  Two gay souls, prophetically engaging our world side by side with a company of queer prophets–our fairy godbrothers.  Writing.  Advocating.  Marching on Washington.  Reading the Bible with gay eyes.  Speaking before hostile religious conventions.  Leading rites for the gay male spirit.

But responsibilities took over.  Economic reality and business sense.  Constraints of the body.  Life overtook living.  The world faded gray.

Now I am sixty.  What once I could not dream, seems nearly behind us.  My Gay Old Soulmate and I step excitedly into a world shaped by expectant visions emerging from sons and daughters of movements we saw born.

Does being sixty number me with Joel’s “elders” (“old men” in King James)?  I don’t know.  I am ready to dream dreams.  To dream in the full rainbow of my age, of my body, of my sexuality, of my social and political being.  Of my spirit.  Technicolor!  (That should date me.)

The light of vision and prophesy from our past shines through me, breaking out in every shade of every hue.  Every square inch of my flesh spreads to catch every drop of Spirit poured out.  So I pray:  may this last chapter color the world more deeply than the first..