“Thomas Merton says, ‘To be a saint means to be myself,’” says Rev. Dr. Cassidy Hall. “My experience is so much of God lives ... in the liminality and the unknown and the questions. The more I lived outside of norms or expectations, the more I met God, and myself. Because I was more free to be who I am and to me, that’s God’s image—God made us in God’s image.” In Episode 280, Cassidy joins Cynthia and Susan for a conversation about contemplation, and everything else. As Cassidy explains, “Queer is the way I tilt my head to look at the world.”
Notes & Quotes:
Cassidy’s website
Find Cassidy on Instagram here
Find Cassidy on Substack here
Queering Contemplation: Finding Queerness in the Roots and Future of Contemplative Spirituality, by Cassidy Hall
Day of a Stranger, Cassidy’s documentary film about Thomas Merton
Maybe it’s time for me to let go of Thomas Merton, by Cassidy Hall, 12/11/2021
"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
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.—Gerard Manley Hopkins
“When I consider all the wasted energy I’ve poured out in my life, all the ways I’ve made statues of certainty—defining parts of myself, of others, and not making room for the dynamic encounter of all beings—I understand how essential queerness and liminality are for my growth. Together, they reveal our obsessions with definitions and the ways that certitude closes us off from the Divine, and the Divine’s ever-expansive image. They remind us of the ways we’ve used definitions to restrict others’ and our own becoming. Queerness and liminality can call forth our imagination, reminding us of the creativity necessary for basic inclusion, for tender acceptance, and for a loving openness to ourselves and each other.” —Cassidy Hall, (pp. 116-117)
“Queer is the way I tilt my head to look at the world. Queerness, in my life, has been not only about sexuality but also about expanse, curiosity, openness, pleasure, weirdness, love, oddity, and liberation.” —Cassidy Hall, (p. 6)
“Routines and rituals can also meld together. The morning cup of coffee becomes a sacred process of movement and pauses, senses and stillness. The evening walk shifts into a meditative trance of watching the ducks in the nearby pond. My routines become rituals the second I sense an internal bow to the moment’s entanglement with holiness, with mindfulness, with love, wonder and awe. In ritual, I am rooted and invited to dive deeper into the expanse of myself and my own unfolding. The mindful shift of acknowledgment takes me into more spaciousness, questions, and curiosities. Without my routines and rituals—and my routines shifting into rituals from time to time—I don’t think I’d be as alive and awake to my own personhood. I wouldn’t know my true self as clearly or as deeply.” —Cassidy Hall, (pp. 75-76)
“Across the country, other monastic communities are changing as well. The monks at Holy Trinity Abbey in Huntsville, Utah, were aging, and with no incoming monks, the monastery had to close its doors in 2017. But before the aging monastics moved to a nearby senior living center, they organized an agreement to sell the land to local conservationists seeking easements to protect the land, including the cemetery where the remaining monks would join upon their deaths. These surrenders, these deaths—as ends and new beginnings, creating a fecundity of legacy absent of ego—astonish me. These actions are not only free of ego and productivity; they honor the reality of life’s interconnection and cycles of death and life. They honor what is.” —Cassidy Hall, (pp. 84-85)
“I have to ask myself, before picking up yet another work by or about Merton, Who am I listening to who may be prophetically controversial today? What words am I reading now, by those whose experience is tethered to the present moment in the fullness of their lives? What marginalized voices of experience am I listening to? Am I going to the source on these topics?
I’ve learned from womanist scholars that as long as I perpetuate the domination of only a few voices in spiritual leadership, I hinder movement toward liberation for all voices. I cannot learn from Merton what it’s like to be a queer woman, or to be an LGBTQ person who is rejected by one’s church, or to be Black in America, or to be a refugee. Merton can provide historical perspective and observations, but he simply cannot speak into an oppressive situation separate from his identity and experience.
Merton himself was often reminding us to go deeper, look harder, be willing to take the effort and time to seek out, read, and listen to the wisdom of voices missing from our libraries and bookshelves. I wonder if this is his true legacy—urging us to transcend his own contributions. To challenge the status quo, go beyond the comfortable, and heed the wisdom of the marginalized who have been too often overlooked.” —Cassidy Hall
“Might we consider boredom as not only necessary for our life but also as one of its greatest blessings? A gift, pure and simple, a precious chance to be alone with our thoughts and alone with God?” (Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life) —Cassidy Hall, (p. 81)
“But as much as I love boredom, I also fear it. Subconsciously I equate boredom with emptiness, nothingness, limited time, death. Boredom reminds me of the void. I often fear that if I’m bored, I am not doing enough, I am not being enough, I am not enough.” —Cassidy Hall, (p. 82)
“In the moments I’ve found myself questioning my own religion—the choice to even be a Christian—I’ve recognized there’s an aspect of ritual’s boundless limits related to my choice. When atheist friends or friends of different faiths ask me why I stick with Christianity when it has caused so much harm and pain in the world, I usually respond—queerly—with a Buddhist saying: “If you want to strike water, you don’t dig six 1-foot wells; you dig one 6-foot well.” Christianity is the tradition I was birthed into, the well in which I continue to dig without limits. Christian faith is the well I am rooted in through my ancestors, the one in which I have the possibility of going deep in the name of healing, justice, liberation, and love. The water of the Divine can be drawn from other traditions of faith, or no traditions of faith. But this particular well is the one I have chosen. Christianity is the set of religious rituals I choose to engage with—the spirituality I experience as innately queer and find ways to queer—in order to reclaim its possibility for healing, justice, liberation, and love.” —Cassidy Hall, (pp. 77-78)