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.