Queering Spiritual Practice

I encountered lectio divina in 2018 through an unlikely source. I had just finished working on an art show with the amazing conceptual artist and author, Anne de Marcken, and had confessed to her that I felt very confused as to how my spiritual life and artist practice could ever coexist. At the time, I was a minister of a church and a touring musician and songwriter, and these two worlds could not have felt further apart. Anne later sent me a message introducing me to her partner as someone who was also seeking to integrate their spiritual and creative practices.

That person was M Freeman, a media artist, writer, and contemplative. M had a series of short films that defied genre and instantly drew me into a space of deep wonder and presence. I would come to learn that these films were based around the practice of lectio divina. 

Lectio divina is an ancient form of meditation with roots in Jewish mysticism, later developed more fully by Christian monastic communities in the 4th and 6th centuries. These communities used this practice to encounter sacred texts in a more holistic and experiential way, dipping below the analytical part of the brain to encounter a text with one’s whole heart. They did this by returning to a text up to 4 times in one practice, moving deeper with each reading with the intent to encounter and rest in divine presence. It was essentially a contemplative way to read the Bible. 

But M’s films were not centered around the Bible. They were instead taking this contemplative practice and opening it up, utilizing the form of the practice with other texts, moments, and with feelings and experiences. The screenings of these films are also a contemplative ritual, designed to deepen participants’ inner knowing through multiple viewings. M has titled this entire reimagining of lectio divina as Cinema Divina, and I have had the pleasure of attending multiple screenings throughout the years. They feel less like film screenings, and more like communal spiritual practices designed to connect participants with each other and with their own deeper wisdom. 

The first thing that stood out to me about Cinema Divina was how M was able to so seamlessly integrate their creative practice with their spiritual practice - they were one and the same. This was an exciting discovery, but I hadn’t yet uncovered the most meaningful gift that M’s films were offering me. Though I did not know it till later, this introduction to Cinema Divina was also my introduction to queering spiritual practice. 

In a culture so defined by and obsessed with gender, living as a genderqueer person can feel like operating in a liminal space. I began becoming aware of this space a few years after I met M when I came out as non-binary. While it felt isolating at times in those early months, I was also surprised to realize that living from this in-between world helped me see from a new perspective. Many of the unspoken and invisible rules of our culture suddenly became glaringly visible and preposterous. M had been consciously genderqueer for longer than me, and their work reflected this perspective that I was just encountering for the first time. I began to recognize in it something that was more than just artistic - Cinema Divina seemed disruptive in a distinctly queer way. 

Julie Tilson describes the act of queering as “an ever-emergent process of becoming, one that is flexible and fluid in response to context, and in resistance to norms.” So, to queer something is to “question and disrupt taken-for-granted practices” so we can imagine new possibilities. One of my favorite examples of this is in the work and playful clothing style of Alok Vaid-Menon, a gender non-conforming writer and performer. Alok actively queers how we perceive body hair, gendered clothing, and cultural influences on style and fashion in the way they dress and talk about their clothing. In their work as a poet and activist, Alok draws connections between dominant western gender norms and racial stereotypes. One cannot encounter Alok or their work without seeing between the lines as they do. M’s re-imagining of lectio divina deconstructs and challenges dominant cultural and religious foundations of religious practice in much the same way. 

In crafting Cinema Divina, M has employed a generative power to a very ancient and manualized practice. It is one thing to tentatively adopt a practice as outlined by those granted with religious authority to define the practice. It is a completely different thing to possess such an intimate relationship with the practice that the practitioner enters into that “ever-emergement process of becoming” with it. In this action, there is a shift of power away from the appointed “experts” as well as a complete re-definition of what constitutes an expert. This is queer in its most radical and revolutionary sense - the kind of queer that has been so threatening to Church power structures throughout history that people have been killed for it.  

With M’s decision to craft Cinema Divina apart from the biblical text, there is also a necessary re-thinking of where we can encounter the divine. This is, in the words of the church community I grew up in, the “slippery slope.” If we can have a direct experience with the divine in poems, other texts, and every day moments and conversations, then god is out of our control and beyond our reach or understanding. The gates to god are flung wide open, and all of the theological degrees, patriarchal lineages, and institutionalized creeds lose their authority. god could pop up anywhere. 

For the appointed gatekeepers of the church, this is bad news. But for queer and trans people, it is an invitation into joyful ownership of these spiritual traditions and practices that have always been for them. And since we are queering language here, I do not mean ownership as in property, but ownership as in fully inhabiting a space that I know is meant for me. This is an invitation for queer people to do what they do best - play with form and structure and meaning until they have reached something more liberating, beautiful, dangerous, and mysterious. 

For me, Cinema Divina has served as an invitation back into the religion that I thought I might no longer have a place in. It has given me the power to engage with that sacred tradition of my youth armed with a pen and highlighter, writing in the margins and adding new pages.

Mysticism: A Queer Spiritual Home

In 2015, I completed a Masters of Divinity from Fuller Theological seminary. The degree is a common one for those who want to get ordained as ministers in the Protestant church, and the institution at the time could be best described as evangelical Christian, yet was more liberal than any Christian institution I had been a part of yet. Given my past experiences in conservative churches, I thought I was really striking out on a bold new path. 

During my time there, I learned how important it was to the gatekeepers of Christian higher education to be faithful to the Christian tradition, creeds, and theological statements. In this case, I was trained to see myself as a steward of the Protestant Reformed tradition, and revered figures like Martin Luther, John Calvin, and the men who carried on this tradition. Continuity with the historical church and its theological creeds was an anchor to keep us from being lost at sea.

While I was in school, I was also questioning my gender and sexuality, but it wasn’t till a few years later that I realized I was queer. Descriptors like trans, non-binary, gender non-conforming, and pansexual felt more and more like something that was living inside me and not something out there. At this point, you may be able to predict what happened. I was a pastor of a small non-denominational protestant church, and what usually happens to queer people when they come out to a church? They get pushed out, or they leave. Except neither of those things happened. It wasn’t exactly comfortable, but I was accepted, and I didn’t want to leave. The crisis I was faced with though had to do with my relationship with these theological creeds. Queer people have never been accepted in the historical, institutional church. And some of the creeds which govern both Protestant and Catholic churches are rooted in ideas antithetical to the queer experience. I had lived my whole life with the creed of the “total depravity of man” (code for all humans are essentially broken and bad), but my journey of queerness was uncovering something deep within me that to my delight and surprise was beautiful.  My queer identity opened something up in me that gave me so much life. I could no longer accept this creed, which by the way, had been responsible for punishing and ejecting queer people from the church for centuries. But if I couldn’t find myself in the history of the church, how could I stay?

Here is where I discovered mysticism. Another descriptor of this within Christianity is the contemplative tradition. Well, not a tradition in the way the orthodox and institutionalized versions of the church did tradition. Here, there were no creeds, no consistent theological beliefs you had to hold, no gate and no gatekeeper. The Christian mystics always lived on the outside, yet can be traced all the way back to Jesus himself. In the Gospel writings (canonized by the gatekeepers), Jesus’ writings are full of mystery, some of it most closely resembling contemporary Buddhist writings. While these are not the writings emphasized by the developing church leaders, they were carried on by Mary Magdalene in her subsequent gospel, which was pushed out of the canon of scripture (and buried in a deep, dark cave lol). This story continues on with the Desert Mothers and Fathers, pushed out to the wilderness, and later writers like Theresa of Avila, Hildegard of Bingen, St John of the Cross, and later writers like Thomas Merton and our contemporaries, Richard Rohr and Cynthia Bourgealt. While some of these writings have later been admitted into mainstream Christianity, like St. John’s “Dark Night of the Soul”, most have remained on the margins. 

My favorite definition of “queer” comes from Julie Tilsen, who uses it as a verb: “queering is an ever-emergent process of becoming, one that is flexible and fluid in response to context, and in resistance to norms.” Bell hooks describes queer as “the self that is at odds with everything around it.” When I began looking for a way to continue being a spiritual being in community as a queer person, the Christian mystics were there waiting for me. They have always been on the outside, challenging the dominant norms within Christianity, while being firmly and sincerely Christian themselves. Those in other Abrahamic religions might have the same experience as me, and might also have already discovered with delight the Sufi tradition within Islam or the Kabbalah within Judaism. Thomas Merton once wrote that the contemplative traditions of different religions have more in common with each other than with their own traditions. What he didn’t see (silly cishet man) was that these traditions are distinctly queer in both content and structure. 

Mysticism has become my spiritual home that has enabled me to stay Christian, and it has given me the tools, along with queer theory, to investigate, question, challenge, recontextualize, and reify the spiritual tradition I grew up in and love. Everyone has their own version of this journey with whatever spiritual tradition or community they have been in or want to be in. Wherever you are at in your journey, I’d love to come alongside you and help you deepen your own spiritual life in whatever you’d like to call home.

What is the Welcoming Practice?

I’ve recently integrated “the welcoming practice” into my spiritual life, and want to share my experience with it. Like many practices from within the Christian contemplative tradition, it is heavily influenced by Buddhist practice and thinking, but was developed more fully by a lady named Mary Mrozowski in the 80s. Mary was part of the revival of contemplative practice associated with Fr. Thomas Keating, and was part of the very first Centering Prayer retreat in 1983. Sometimes I question my practice of things like this, since it can feel like they are just literally Buddhist practices re-packaged by white Americans (insert “cultural appropriation”), but the more I have learned about the roots of Christian contemplative practices, the more I see how far they actually reach back - all the way to Jesus and beyond. For example, the practice of Lectio Divina has its roots in ancient Jewish mysticism. All of these practices and ways of thinking come from the ancient eastern part of the world. So while Mary may have slapped some new language onto this practice, I’ve begun to see that it is still as deeply Christian as it is Buddhist. 

So here is the practice: you acknowledge what is going on internally during a distressing physical or emotional situation, welcome it, and then let it go. I laughed when I typed out the word “let it go” because wouldn’t it be great if it were just that easy? Of course it is not just that simple, but I have been really surprised by what this practice has produced in my own life. 

I begin this practice by simply noticing what is going on in my body - any tension, aches, fast heart rate, fear, anger, grief, being careful not to analyze, but simply notice. Then I begin to say softly, “welcome, anger.” Or “welcome, fear.” This is the bulk of the practice and it feels so counterintuitive and initially, terrifying. The important point here is that, as Cynthia Bourgeault points out, “what you are welcoming is never an outer situation, only the feelings and sensations working within you at the moment.” For instance I never say “welcome oppression” or “welcome abuse”, since those are external forces and not my response to them. 

It is hard to describe my experience with this practice. My impulse with difficult emotions like this is to run from them. I am a very good runner, and can run for a long time. But I have noticed after many years that this only makes my difficult emotions more intense. It is like walking away from a wall that my shadow is cast on - the further I walk from the wall, the larger my shadow gets. But the Welcoming Practice embodies a whole new stance. Instead of turning away, I turn towards. And just as my shadow grows when I walk away, it gets smaller as I turn and move towards it. The only other way I can think to put this in words is that when I say “welcome”, I am signaling to my body and to my fear that we have a new relationship. I am the host, and the fear is my guest. And while I work hard to care for my guests and make a comfortable place for them, I do not let them run through my whole house, destroying it. As the host, I have the power to welcome in and to cast out. So when I say “welcome”, I am coordinating a new kind of relationship with my emotions. They cease to feel like a giant dark cloud enveloping, and they become a guest in my home. Thich Nhat Han had his own way of doing this, which I really love as well. He writes about how fear always rests at the depths of our consciousness, but if we never invite it up for air, it begins to make demands and grow bigger. So he liked to say to his fear daily, “My dear fear, come up here so I can embrace you for a while.” 

Finally, the last step of the welcoming practice is to let these difficult emotions go, which I try to do with varying success. Importantly, this step is not a blanket vow to never be angry again, only a release of anger in the present moment. Mary Mrozowski actually created a litany for this step, and I really struggled with it at first. It goes like this:

I let go my desire for security and survival.

I let go my desire for esteem and affection.

I let go my desire for power and control.

I let go my desire to change the situation. 

At first, it felt like saying this litany was counter to my actual values, so I refused. But over time, I began to see the difference between these things and my attachment to these things. And the act of letting go of my attachment to security is not the same as letting go of actual security. And counterintuitively, I actually feel more secure after saying this litany. I’ve grown to value it and see it as more of a reflection of my stance - am I holding onto these things with white knuckles, or am I holding them in an open palm? To my surprise, the more I have practiced the whole welcoming prayer, the more I have noticed my capacity growing, and I have been able to welcome more. Instead of just “welcome fear, anger, grief, pain, etc”, I am noticing my capacity to also welcome love, joy, those birds in the lilac bush out front, and the salt smell of the sea just a few miles from my house. 

Life is hard, and there is no easy fix. The welcoming practice doesn’t always help, but I am grateful for the gift of it, and the precious moments of presence it offers me. I hope it helps you a little too.