"From at least the time she was a teenager, [Marsha P] Johnson had a relationship with God that was personal, profound and more than a little mysterious. 'I got married to Jesus Christ in church when I was 16 years old,' she said in an interview for the documentary about her life “Pay It No Mind.”
'He’s the only man I can really trust. He’s like a spirit that follows me around …he helps me out in my hours of need and listens to all my problems and never laughs at me. He takes me very seriously,' she said.
When deciding to move from her childhood home in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to New York City in 1963, at age 17, she remembers talking to Jesus about her desire. 'He said, ‘You know, you might wind up with nothing,'' she remembers. And yet, rather than frighten her, Christ’s words fortified her conviction: 'I said, ‘Honey, I don’t care if I never have nothing ever till the day I die. All I want is my freedom….And that’s how I’ve been living here ever since I came.'
In “Pay It No Mind,” many of Johnson’s friends share stories of her religious devotions. She would light candles and pray at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Hoboken, New Jersey, and lie prostrate praying in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary early in the morning in another church. At home, she had an altar devoted to the saints; she said they help show 'that we’re all brothers and sisters in Christ.'
Though she was raised in an African Methodist Episcopal Church, Johnson frequented churches of other denominations and religious buildings of other faiths, too. In some of these stories you can hear her hunger for and devotion to God. For instance, she would refuse to face the altar when praying in church at times, out of respect for its significance.
But there also a sense of overflowing joy and celebration. 'I would find her in the strangest churches,' remembered her friend Sasha McCaffrey. 'She’d be wearing velvet and throwing glitter.' Like so many of our Catholic saints, her faith seemed both the bedrock of her life and a place of revelation, something that helped other people to experience God’s love." [x] [x]
Today and always, Marsha P. Johnson, Saint of Christopher Street, and Madonna di Montevergine, pray for us. Christ, the Mother Pelican, save us and keep us. Have a blessed Transgender Day of Visibility
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