Beyond Binaries

Wednesday 3 June 2026  Resisting Definition

Everyone carries their own true self in their own way, in their own words, and in their own time.
—Cassidy Hall, Queering Contemplation

CAC team member Cassidy Hall reflects on our impulse to ask questions of those we see as fundamentally different than us:

“When did you know?” “How did you find out you were queer?” “When did you first realize you liked women?”…

We usually ask questions like this—and sometimes over-ask them—because we’re seeking our own comfort or self-understanding. Our questions might come from pondering the vastness of the Divine’s image upon, within, or all around us. But I’m all too familiar with the harm of certitude, assumptions, and internalized dispositions toward norms and expectations.

Even if we let go of the need to know or understand, our society still obsesses about naming, claiming, and defining. As I worked on my documentary film about Thomas Merton, I listened to audio clips of his stream-of-consciousness thoughts from his hermitage, and I especially resonated with this line: “I know in my heart that I do not need to be defined, I do not need to define myself, and yet I have this allergy of definition.”

Like most of us, I’ve spent a large chunk of my life figuring out, naming, and identifying the things around me…. But when we reach to trap anything in definition, we also trap ourselves. A desire to define or know does not give me permission to ask questions simply to satisfy my own curiosity. Rather, the desire to name, define, or identify is a different invitation altogether. It’s an invitation for me to examine and hold openhanded my own definition, my own name, and my own identity, over and over again….

We are ever evolving, ever becoming, and ever unfolding. Identity is an ever-moving target, and any conviction that the self is singular or fixed is limiting and often even harmful. Instead, we can hold what we think we know about ourselves with open hands. We can allow ourselves to become, which offers us room to breathe and blossom…. Contemplative life beckons us to the same: encouraging us to loosen our grip on ourselves, those around us, and the Divine.

Hall encourages us to seek a deeper understanding of ourselves:

Knowing is elusive and closes down potentials outside of certitudes or declarations. What’s more true, more curious, and more exciting is the infinite deep dive into who we are as ever-changing human beings. For those of us who are allergic to definitions: Can we turn inward to unfold our own becoming and blossoming?

This stepping into the spaciousness of our own being will help us hold questions, and also invite questions in. Our curiosity can run wild in the spaciousness of possibility. The infinite expanse of who we are is a place to offer our own unfixed and unmixed attention, a place of prayer, a place where the contemplative life thrives.

Cassidy Hall, Queering Contemplation: Finding Queerness in the Roots and Future of Contemplative Spirituality (Broadleaf Books, 2024), 97, 98–100.

Tuesday 2 June 2026  The Spirit Reworks Us

The Rt. Rev. Michael Curry considers how God is always leading us beyond what we think we know:

There will be a time when God’s GPS points you in a direction that makes people uncomfortable. It may make you uncomfortable. The evolution of long-held beliefs can be a spiritual earthquake; the ground beneath us shaking, the very fault lines of our identity shifting and seeking to resettle. But if we can make it through, we find the reward: not an easy journey but a share of what the Bible calls “peace that passes all understanding,” the peace of knowing we are living love’s way, without contradiction….

We humans are walking bundles of contradictions. I know that I am, and experience suggests that I’m not alone in that. As people often describe relationships … “It’s complicated.” It is and we are.

In 2000, Curry was elected bishop in the Episcopal Church as the church wrestled with questions about the full inclusion and equality of LGBTQ persons in the church:

Experience and friendships had long taught me that gays and lesbians were as Christian as anybody else. Still, when it came to the public blessing of unions (marriage wasn’t yet on the table), I was stuck in the unspoken disapproval of my upbringing. Homosexuality happened behind closed doors, not at the altar.

And yet, during that same upbringing, … “love your neighbor” was held up constantly, forcefully, as a core value and commitment. That conviction fueled the civil rights movement that had given me birth. I heard it all the time. But somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that that truth must be true for gay and lesbian friends in every respect.

As a bishop, I made a solemn vow to “guard the faith, unity, and discipline of the Church.” I had also vowed to “be merciful to all, show compassion to the poor and strangers, and defend those who have no helper.” I was beginning to see that obedience to the letter and the spirit of both of those vows was leading me to a real contradiction….

I was growing, and my own beliefs had evolved. But another way to say it is that I was becoming more and more open to letting the spirit of God breathe through me and make me new. Therein is the source of real personal change, evolution, and transformation, and it’s never ending….

The late [lay theologian] Verna Dozier … was a real mentor, teacher, and soul friend to me. In her book The Dream of God, she offered this wisdom: “We always see through a glass darkly, and that is what faith is about. I will live by the best I can discern today. Tomorrow I may find out I was wrong. Since I do not live by being right, I am not destroyed by being wrong.”

Monday 1 June 2026  Loving Beyond the Boxes

Father Richard affirms God’s desire for us to know and welcome all of ourselves and others:

God is clearly more comfortable with diversity than we are, and God’s final goal and objective are much simpler. God and the entire cosmos are about two things: differentiation (people and things becoming themselves) and communion (living in supportive coexistence). Physicists and biologists seem to know this better than theologians and clergy.

Religious people who use the scriptures to condemn or exclude others seem to have different goals and objectives from those of God or Jesus. Their arguments generally have to do with very secular concerns: power and control, fear of the other and the unknown, and idealization of a family unit that Jesus himself neither lived nor idealized. Check the Gospels if you don’t believe me.

Institutional religion tends to think of people as very simple; therefore, the law must be very complex to protect them in every situation. Jesus does the opposite: He treats people as very complex—different in religion, lifestyle, virtue, temperament, and success—and keeps the law very simple in order to bring them to God:

A legal expert put him to the test: “Teacher, which commandment in the Law is the greatest?” He replied to him, “‘You are to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind.’ This is the first and foremost, and the second is like it: ‘You are to love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hangs everything in the Law and in the Prophets” (Matthew 22:35–40).

Jesus takes the risk of allowing people the freedom to be themselves and to love God according to the shape of their own heart, soul, body, and mind! Religion developed for the sake of social control, but Jesus doesn’t give us much grist for the social control mill. Jesus is asking a different set of questions, ones that take away our private agendas and remind us of the ways we have not yet begun to love. For Jesus, it is all about union—union with God, others, and what is, however it presents itself. We cannot let labels trip us up. We all belong, but how cleverly our moral pretenses prevent us from struggling with what is right in front of us! How ingeniously our ego protects itself from compassion and understanding. [1]

Author Jen Austin considers how God invites us to move beyond neat categories:

It is part of the human tendency to put everything into a neat little category…. However, categories also allow us to include and exclude people based on characteristics that are unfamiliar to us or that we don’t understand. Black or white, gay or straight, we spend a lot of time and waste a lot of energy creating and adhering to labels in our culture, quite often at the expense of basic human dignity and common sense…. God is bigger than all our little boxes. God’s love transcends the lines we draw on earth. [2]

[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Where the Gospel Leads Us,” in Homosexuality and Christian Faith: Questions of Conscience for the Churches, ed. Walter Wink (Fortress Press, 1999), 86, 87, 88.

[2] Jen Austin, Coming Out Christian: Finding Wholeness in Faith and Sexuality (Sources of Hope Publications, 2006), 223.

Sunday 31 May 2026  Moving Beyond Our Binary Minds