Un-Queering Contemplation
No one has exclusive rights to Liberation
I received a newsletter the other day, the title of which was “Queering Contemplation.” Reading on, I discovered that the author was defining Queering as “expanse, curiosity, openness, pleasure, weirdness, love, oddity, and liberation.” They positioned Queer contemplation in opposition to “Western Christian expressions formed in heteronormativity, patriarchy, and Eurocentricity/ whiteness.” Furthermore, the author claimed that the contemplative life had to be disentangled from “manipulation, power, abuse, and violence.”
I don’t know about you, but my experience of contemplation has absolutely NOTHING to do with patriarchy, heteronormativity, whiteness, Christianity, power, or violence. NOTHING. How does sitting in stillness or silence, allowing ourselves to quiet the mind and simply listen for what is true or real relate to any of those concepts? The mystical experience of contemplation is non-conceptual, and that is true across traditions.
I understand the desire to deconstruct dominant repressive or oppressive norms (and many of them need to be deconstructed), and to position contemplation as an oppositional, deconstructive act. But that desire is a political orientation, not a spiritual one, and is actually counter to the experience of contemplation. Contemplation itself leads to the experience of expansiveness, openness, love, and liberation, the polar opposite of destruction or division. While those qualities definitely go against many cultural Western norms, they are not exclusive to anyone, any group, or any tradition.
Contemplation itself leads to the experience of expansiveness, openness, love, and liberation, the polar opposite of destruction or division, and those qualities are not exclusive to anyone, any group, or any tradition.
Mystics from all traditions have described one of the fruits of contemplation as the experience of returning to Source, union with the Divine, or merging with Buddha-Mind or the Dao. Unity is the most common experience of a contemplative life. That union is accomplished through the transcendence of identity and self; it’s a subtractive process or what Christian theologian Matthew Fox calls the Via Negativa or the Kabbalists call Bittul. It’s Samadhi, Nirvana, Enlightenment, Awakening.
In contemplation, we move from the egoic self to the trans-egoic; release the “I” of Identity to see the “I” in everything, or everything in the “I;” or let go of “self” with a small s to experience “Self” with a capital S. In other words, the deepest experience of contemplation is the dissolution of personal identity itself into the transpersonal One; there is literally no one there to call “Queer.” It is an expansion of self, freed from all limiting concepts, including Queerness.
Branding expansiveness, curiosity, pleasure, love and liberation as Queer does us all a disservice. It also denies the contemplative experience of those qualities to anyone who does not identify as Queer. It says that only by “Queerness” can one have a direct experience of the Divine. Really? Tell that to Thomas Merton, Teresa of Avila, The Buddha, Jesus, Moses, or the Daoist sages, all of whom spent their lives in contemplation and certainly didn’t identify as Queer.
Ironically, making those qualities exclusive to Queerness, creates division between the Queer and non-Queer, and a judgment of one being better than the other, which is the exact opposite of what contemplation engenders: unconditional acceptance and unity of all.
We don’t have to put another label – Queerness – on those innate qualities that are available to all of us through contemplation, whether we are white, Christian, Buddhist, brown, black, male, female, straight, gay, or gender-non-conforming.
We don’t have to put another label – Queerness – on those innate qualities that are available to all of us through contemplation, whether we are white, Christian, Buddhist, brown, black, male, female, straight, gay, or gender-non-conforming. In fact, labeling spirit is the antithesis of spirit itself. Enlightenment or Awakening is when you see that all labels are constructions of the mind, fictions that aren’t true and have nothing to do with the Great Mystery itself.
It’s fine if you want to identify with Queerness as a social, sexual, or political orientation, or even to argue a kind of Queer theology, but Identity Politics – radical though they may appear to be – simply have no place in contemplation. No label can limit the contemplative experience of unity, expansion, joy, love or liberation, and doing so is actually a form of power, violence, and repression itself.
“Contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is a spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness, and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant Source. Contemplation, above all, is an awareness of the reality of that Source.” – Thomas Merton
Thank you for all of this. I generally agree: we in the educated West tend to assume that politics and especially political identity are at the centre of everything, in ways that harm our ability to contemplate and learn.
That said, I could think of one way in which "queering contemplation" does make some sense: when people's contemplations are already focused on deities identified as male and female. Then there would be ways it might be helpful to centre a figure like Ardhanareshvara, the half-male half-female Indian deity, in a way that might make one's practice both more queer and more nondual: treating the gender binary as one of the many binaries that a nondual practice breaks down. It doesn't sound like that's what the "queering contemplation" newsletter was talking about, though.
Just yes ❤️