Photo: Cover artwork of 'Queering Contemplation: Finding queerness in the roots and future of contemplative spirituality'.
Queering Contemplation: Finding queerness in the roots and future of contemplative spirituality
By Cassidy Hall
Quakers are a queer people. Cassidy Hall defines ‘queer’ in two ways: one relates to sexuality, the other relates to ‘the ways we find ourselves subverting the status quo, forgoing norms, and engaging one another with open hearts and hands’. Both are areas where Friends have a long history.
The double process of queering in this book arises as much from what Hall calls ‘the way I tilt my head to look at the world’ as from her sexuality. Her text is easy to read and full of spiritual wisdom, without the jargon that is sometimes found in those who draw on queer theory.
Quakers are also a contemplative people – a word not much found in Quaker faith & practice (though quite often in the Friend), but which captures well our expectant waiting. Hall’s work arises from a different tradition of contemplation than that of Friends (the rhythms of monastic life in which the author has spent much time, and from whose practitioners she draws throughout the book) but its insights closely parallel our experience.
So Queering Contemplation is very well placed to speak to the condition of Friends. Hall applies the queering process to nine areas of the contemplative life: the monastery, silence, mysticism, ritual, boredom, the true self, the liminal, attention, and the desert. The book partly arises from several series of podcasts that the author has hosted, and each chapter contains an extended quote from an interview, often with a black, minority ethnic or trans person, since Hall says she is very aware of her own limitations as a white cisgender individual.
Some chapters feel especially relevant to Friends, most obviously that on silence, which Hall describes as ‘already innately queer in its ambiguity and possibility… [pushing] beyond binaries and spectrums of existence’. This is language that might be unfamiliar to some Friends, but captures well our experience. She also draws a distinction between silence that is loving and life-affirming, and silence which can be controlling or toxic – one which many LGBTQ+ people would find familiar, but is hopefully quite different from Quaker silent worship. More familiarly (and echoing Margaret Fell), Hall writes: ‘silence isn’t always easy or simple, because silence reveals’.
Two further chapters might especially speak to Friends. The first is on mysticism, which Hall says cannot be fully named or contained, but is inherently connected with activism. Quakers have often found both of these to be true. The second is on liminality, the doorway spaces between one reality and another, which Hall calls ‘a place where the known opens unto the unknown… a place of possibility’. This brings to mind the empty canvas we encounter at the start of each Meeting for Worship, the possibility of encounter with the Divine.
Hall ends with a challenge that Friends need to hear: ‘when we queer the things we once thought stagnant… we can begin to experience the possibilities in practice and encounter’.