“Not Queer like gay. Queer like, escaping definition. Queer like some sort of fluidity and limitlessness at once. Queer like a freedom too strange to be conquered. Queer like the fearlessness to imagine what love can look like … and pursue it.’’—Brandon Wint

Tens of thousands of Pride parades and LGBTQ+-friendly events are celebrated every year in the month of June to honor a bar full of gay men and lesbian women who decided to fight the cops and riot in the streets for the right to love whoever they wanted. That’s what happened in the wee hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village—a neighborhood gay bar fed up with police harassment—and the five days of protests proved to be a decisive force for LGBTQ+ activism, inspiring such organizations as the Gay Liberation Front, Human Rights Campaign, Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.

Such defiance and risk is usually what it takes to change the world.

Today’s dynamic LGBTQ+ movement is scarcely recognizable from those early days, but all the parades and events continue to defy the idea that some body types and certain kinds of sex are wrong. Pride parades normalize these bodies, as well as the full spectrum of love and sex between consenting adults. They send the message that you can’t cancel someone’s existence simply because you disapprove of the way they look or act.

In today’s interview with Kristine Morris, Queering Contemplation author, Cassidy Hall, talks about her endeavor to reclaim the word “queer” so that it conveys the full breadth of her physical and spiritual queerness.

Your book expands the term “queer” beyond its association with sexual identity/affectional preference to include characteristics like eccentricity, unconventionality, oddness, being free-spirited, non-conforming, or unpredictable. What is there about you that makes your self-identification as queer so appropriate and meaningful to you?

The etymological roots of the word “queer” come from 16th century Scots (a language primarily of Scotland) when the word meant things like odd, strange, oblique. It wasn’t until the late 19th century (1894) when the word first began to reference homosexuality. This kind of reclamation of the word as an embraced term of positivity has been a place of courage for many LGBTQIA+ folks, and for others it has been painful. There is no doubt the word “queer” has caused a tremendous amount of harm, violence, and pain for many LGBTQIA+ lives, and I don’t ever want to minimize that.

My own reclamation of the word in many ways goes back to when I first came to accept “weird” as a compliment. “Weird” is often what we say to things or people we don’t yet understand. “Weird” puts discomfort on full display. And precisely because of these things, I see weirdness as a compliment––because it stretches us, boldly points out our growing edges, and challenges our own binaries, boxes, and categories. Growing up in a creative family, I learned to embrace being “weird” and any other uniqueness as something expansive and human. “Weird,” I’d come to view as a word of creativity, possibility, play, and even delight.

I’ve also always sensed a deep connection between my embodied expressions and my spiritual enmeshment. In other words, as I say in the book, “My queerness and my contemplative life have become a union of joy, pleasure, and infinite possibility.” More poetically stated, Brandon Wint writes with much more eloquence: “Not Queer like gay. Queer like, escaping definition. Queer like some sort of fluidity and limitlessness at once. Queer like a freedom too strange to be conquered. Queer like the fearlessness to imagine what love can look like … and pursue it.” This fearlessness to imagine what love can look like and pursue it is a kind of centerpiece to both my queerness and contemplative life.

Why have those who demonstrate such characteristics been less than welcome in so many religious groups/communities?

Some religious groups/communities rely on domination through predictability, structure, false certitude, and/or mandatory ritual. They’re often concerned with their own comfort and maintaining the status quo. And in many instances these religious groups and communities have been built by patriarchy, heteronormativity, whiteness, ableism, and other forces of domination. Queerness is antithetical to domination––it points us toward everything loving, justice-seeking, and liberative. When we queer our religious groups or communities we not only permeate them with questions and curiosities, but we also seek to remove anything that has caused harm, violence, or domination. Author bell hooks writes that “whenever domination is present love is lacking.” If our religious groups and communities are truly beacons of love, we must begin by removing all the barriers preventing love.

The crux of my own spirituality has been this releasing of control and stepping into discomfort. All this to say, I think the way towards relinquishing control and removing the barriers preventing love, begins in our own hearts and bodies. In order to really allow ourselves and each other to flourish, to bloom, to grow and expand, we have to open our own clenched fists unto the possibilities beyond our limited views and understandings of the world.

Who determined what contemplative practice should look like? Why, and to what degree, are their views on the topic still in vogue today?

Great question. It’s my opinion that no one ought to determine what another’s contemplative practice should or shouldn’t look like. The Rev. Dr. Barbara A. Holmes speaks of how contemplation can happen amid noise and can be a communal experience involving shouting or silence. Not only is there a spectrum of contemplative experiences, but in many instances it lives off of all spectrums, as it is also recognized as a doorway into mystical encounter.

In my book I write about how when we yield to definitions designed by a dominant culture, we should consider critiquing them. Historically, some definitions have been created as a means to maintain power, control, or even harm groups on the margins. But when we reclaim definitions for ourselves—like “queer” or “contemplative”—we not only subvert the dominant culture, but we also give ourselves embodied permission to navigate our own most natural and true expressions.

What does the exclusion of “queerness” from religious/contemplative settings do to diminish the religious/contemplative experience?

One of the many beauties about queer folks is that we’ve always been here. We’ve always been in religious, spiritual, and/or contemplative spaces—we’ve always been everywhere. Unfortunately, some religious and contemplative settings haven’t felt safe enough for queerness to be expressed, haven’t felt safe enough for one’s true self to emerge. There are, however, many contemplative spaces which have modeled great ways to be places of safety through groups for the LGBTQIA+ community and by naming and enacting their commitment to inclusivity and safety.

Exclusions all too often limit our view of what is possible. For those of us who believe in the image of the Divine being upon all people, we quite simply lose a fuller vision of the Divine when people or identities are missing from the practice, the space, the moment. That being said, in order to truly be a place of love, inclusivity, and safety, it must be clear that the space first begins with innate belonging, and that perspectives antithetical to everyone’s innate belonging, blooming, and liberation will immediately revoke the space’s safety.

To learn more about those who express “queerness” in their lives you went to people on the margins of society: people of color, the disabled, the LGBTQIA+ community, women, and others. How were you accepted among them as a white woman with the privileges that come with this, yet who still identifies as queer?

I was warmly welcomed by those I was lucky enough to speak with. Every person I went to, I assumed my proper place as one learning and heeding wisdom I do not hold or experience. I came to each conversation eager to learn, knowing that my privilege of identity limited my worldview and thus I needed (and still need) to learn. The intersectional aspects of identity within the queer community are vast and crucial aspects to understanding the great expanse of the queer experience. No two queer experiences are exactly alike and that’s what makes the image of the Divine all the more expansive, colorful, and brilliant.

Of all that you learned from those you met, what most affected you personally?

I think every experience of queerness I’ve encountered in my life has revealed something new to me. In many ways, each person has shown me that I have so much more to learn, and that there are infinite expressions of queerness’ beauty and brilliance.

How would a contemplative practice that has been “queered” be expressed? What aspects of this queering might “turn off” more mainstream communities, and how might this be dealt with?

First, it’s important to say that I am no queer theorist, and my experiences of queering something may vary from that of others. The queer experience and engagement of queering hosts measureless multitudes.

“To say that I am Queer,” writes Womanist theologian, the Rev. Dr. Pamela Lightsey, “is not only my self-identity; it is also my active engagement against heteronormativity.” From this expression of queerness, I might glean that when we queer something, we pursue the disruption of the “normative,” we subvert the status quo, we destabilize empire, we engage a kind of trickster image so that we might eliminate domination.

My thoughts are that when we queer a practice, or even queer something about ourselves, we are often permeating the impermeable, shifting the solidified, and moving what we once deemed immovable, even in ourselves. Those times we say that we or our family member or partner has “always” done something this way, or the moments we tell ourselves we could “never” accomplish that thing––those are great examples of opportunities for queering the moment, peeling back our clenched fists to open ourselves and others up into possibility. And it’s important to note here that when we queer something we are always moving it towards greater love, liberation, delight, and wonder––queering something never moves us towards harm or violence.

An example of this might be, “I’ve never been good at contemplation or a contemplative practice like meditation.” Okay, let’s queer the way we look at that: How do you define meditation/contemplation, what would happen if we tilted our heads to pick that apart and examine it more closely? If we understand a contemplative practice as related to silence and solitude, how are you already finding sacred pauses within your day? Do you ever catch yourself looking at a tree? Do you ever pause to take a deep breath? What if you’re already doing contemplation? What if you instead recognized your current level of contemplative engagement? And then, if we understand a contemplative practice as something more like shouting or dancing: When was the last time we danced and sang to the point of being so elated or moved into Divine connectivity?

One way of queering, for me, is an invitation that brings the lens of our true self to definitions, expressions, and ideas: How can I engage this contemplative practice in a way that resonates most deeply with my own soul?

Do you see any growing tendency for contemplatives to embrace queerness? What would have to occur for queering contemplation to become more accepted, and how could the changes be implemented?

It’s my hope that by queering contemplation, and seeing its innate queerness, we might recognize the ways our structures are constricting. That we might begin to recognize where and why our spiritual practices have been formed by domination, the status quo, or even uninformed by our own life experiences. These hindrances might be in our religious settings or spiritual practices, but they might also be in our own minds and hearts. And when we release ourselves from these things, including binaries and boxes, we deepen our roots of connectivity to ourselves, others, and the Divine.

In my experience of the contemplative world, I do think there is a growing tendency for contemplatives to embrace queerness, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the language being used. What I’m seeing in some spaces is contemplative life pursuing more openness, honesty, and curiosity––thus allowing for a deepening connection to all beings.

Please describe your own spiritual/contemplative practices and how your queerness is reflected in them. What benefits have you experienced in life and contemplative practice as a result?

When I engage in my contemplative practices I release control, I remove my agenda, I soften every muscle in my body––often to the point of tears. Contemplative practice is where my roots of compassion deepen. It is where I meet my true self, in all of its ugliness and beauty. We could say that I queer my own contemplative practice by simply being a queer woman, lucky enough to be comfortable in my own skin. But I’d also add that I queer my contemplative practices by embracing the strangeness, oddity, and even weirdness they bring into my life.

Can we hope for another book? If so, please share what you can about it, and if not, what else might be in your plans for the future?

I’m currently working on some writing focused on queering mysticism and seeing its innate queerness. In this work, I am looking to hear from the mystics of old in conversation with the modern-day mystics whose lives point us towards subverting domination, transcending the status quo, and dissolving into the Divine. Some of this work will be on my podcast, Queering Contemplation, as the writing begins to unfold.

Kristine Morris
June 21, 2024

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