From Censorship to Contemplation: Silence in Queer Life
When I first came out as gay, I was both nervous and excited. It was exhilarating to see a previously unspoken barrier break down that had separated me from others for so long. A great relief came over me whenever I shared more of myself with those who I perceived as supportive friends, family, and community.
At the same time that I began coming out to my community in my early twenties, I became more and more enamored with the practice of contemplative silence. Initially, I think this gravitation toward silence felt like an escape from the pressures and negotiations of myself and my surroundings. I felt a great pressure within me to maintain a sense of personal safety in the context of a highly divided world, both in the church and public life, on the status of LGBTQ persons. I was learning how to negotiate between self-disclosure and censoring myself in varying degrees depending on how much the space appeared welcoming to queer lives or not.
But, over time, I realized that the truth of contemplative silence and living out a queer life were much more complementary than I first thought. For they both, in their own way, exposed who I am, and that the nature of reality is more mysterious and more loving than I initially grasped. Contemplative silence allowed me to reclaim silence as a practice of dwelling more deeply in divine reality rather than simply a powerful means of control and censorship wrought with pain and diminishment of self. Contemplative silence affirmed that my life is grounded in more than what I can know or control. Queer life has helped me understand that we are indeed more obscure, more unknowable, than we may think, and each day is an offering to love ourselves and others as our lives unfold day to day.
Initially, before coming out, I felt anxious and uncomfortable both with myself and with others. The social stigma around being anything but straight became isolating and silencing for me. Contemplative and mystic John O’Donohue in his text Eternal Echoes explores the human soul’s restlessness and inherent desire for belonging, and the various conditions that keep human beings from feeling a sense of true connection to themselves and others.
Donahue lists the gay community as one that struggles deeply with belonging due to a fear of social stigma. He invites his reader to spend time living in the mindset of someone afraid to speak out about their sexuality: “Imagine the years of silent torment so many gay people have endured, unable to tell their secret.” The “silent torment” that Donohue describes is a state that resonates for me.
My silence caused me to close in on myself; I became cautious to share more generally for fear that the “secret” of my sexuality would somehow be consciously or unconsciously found out by others. I found myself silencing myself out of a sense of social stigma and internalized shame.
Each time I sit down for quiet, each time I sit in contemplative silence, it is a different moment. My self-conscious awareness is always relating to what it cannot know, but in a different moment from the one previous. Likewise, each time I articulate or express my love of others and myself, it is never finished, never final, yet offered.
While still risky, my queer identity is something I see as a gift, for it has given me a way of living that is more loving, more spacious, and more trusting of That Which Is. It led me to embrace the obscurity of the human life. Moving from the silence of censorship to the silence of contemplation helped me to understand that my life is inextricably connected to the great reality in which all of life breathes and moves. For this and much more, I am thankful.
(Excerpted from Shalem’s 2023 book Soul Food: Nourishing Essays on Contemplative Living and Leadership)
Excerpt reprinted with permission Soul Food ©2023 Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY 10016