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.