Look to the Margins
Friday, February 7, 2025
The prophets continue to invite us into this fearless commitment to the values of liberation, love, and justice. They model these values as far more important than the desire to control, know, or get caught up in respectability politics. The prophet knows their calling is not tidy, pretty, or neat. It is a trudge through the mud of life alongside the few who believe in the same values and hold the same commitments.
—Cassidy Hall, “Queering Prophecy”
Author and podcaster Cassidy Hall suggests that we might use the word “queer” to describe the strange, out-of-the-box ways of thinking and acting that characterized many of the prophets:
The prophetic rarely comes from the usual suspects. It emerges from the odd or strange and typically from groups on the margins of society. In this way, some might say the prophetic is queer. The etymological roots of the word queer come from sixteenth-century Scots, when the word meant things like odd, strange, transverse, or oblique. It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century (1894) that the word began to reference sexuality.
Historically, the prophets often enact strange things—out of the box of what is deemed normal or acceptable in their society. Ezekiel ate a scroll and prophesied over dry bones (Ezekiel 3 and 37). Miriam rebelled against Pharaoh’s edict and pulled out a tambourine to lead women in a victory song (Exodus 15). Their calling requires these beautifully odd expressions that subvert the dominative and normative in order for their messages to be heard. Their wisdom frequently comes from their lived experience on the margins, and, time and time again, they are misunderstood.
What might happen if we queered the way we look at prophesy? Queering something forces us to remove our own anticipations or desired outcomes. Queering separates us from domination because it is concerned with some of the very same values of the prophet: liberation, interconnection, love, justice, and even wonder. What could it mean to engage with the prophetic in our midst without the need to name or claim it as such? What if this commitment could allow us to enter into a depth we couldn’t otherwise reach?
Thomas Merton wrote that in order to know or understand the will of the Divine, “we have to participate, in some manner, in the vision of the prophets: [people] who were always alive to the divine light concealed in the opacity of things and events, and who sometimes saw glimpses of that light where other [people] saw nothing but ordinary happenings.” [1]
Where, I wonder, are the ordinary happenings I am passing over for the sake of my own comfort, ease, or control? We need not only look to the margins—the outcasts of society—but we also look to those who make us uncomfortable, those we might be avoiding, and the issues we might rather opt out of, because when we queer prophecy, we release a need to know or name and instead engage more closely with prophetic values and Spirit’s movement in our midst.
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5 On Friday John Chaffee
1.
“One of the first signs of being a saint may well be the fact that other people do not know what to make of him.“
– Thomas Merton, Trappist Monk
I told someone in a spiritual direction session about a month ago, “The most spiritually mature person was crucified naked for being the most spiritually mature person.”
There is a strange paradox that the deeper we dive into true holiness and true Christlikeness, the more we will be ostracized, scapegoated, dismissed, and even killed. At the same time, our response to such treatment will increasingly be, “Forgive them; they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34)
Within the Christian tradition, there is the idea of the Holy Fool. I loved that idea so much that it was the main idea behind my fourth book, The Wonderstanding of Father Simeon. True saints are not venerated, at least not while they are living.
2.
“If these things are looked at literally, not only will the understanding of those who seek God be dim, but their concept of him will also be inappropriate.“
– Gregory of Nyssa in The Life of Moses
Literalism is simply the first mode of biblical interpretation. It is also the lowest. This is not to say that literalism is bad. I only mean that it is the foundation of understanding. It is important to restate what the text might say word for word and report its contents.
However, literalism does not help us glean wisdom from the Hebrew Scriptures or the Greek New Testament. We must use analogy, metaphor, symbolism, archetypes, teleology, rhetoric, and more for that. These other tools help us to take the timely issues of the Bible and translate them into timeless wisdom that helps every generation.
Here, Gregory of Nyssa warns people that literalism might lead them to interpretations in which God could rightfully be called a monster. If we ever have an understanding of the Bible that leads us to think God is more of a monster than we would be if we were in God’s shoes, then we have failed the interpretive task.
3.
“No one is saved alone; we are only saved together.“
– Pope Francis in Fratelli Tutti
I am utterly convinced that this is true.
There are many passages that speak about the reconciliation, renewal, and restoration of all. However, I believe that we were trained not to notice those passages. Or, worse, we were told those passages should not be discussed in Church (as was mandated of me when I did Church work). The scope of God’s redemption plan has always been everyone and everything everywhere from all of time; it is just that we do not always have eyes to see or ears to hear it.
If you are interested in this line of thought, I created a video series on the topic of “What is the Gospel?”
4.
“If you feel pain, You are alive. If you feel other people’s pain, you are a human being.“
Last week, I talked with a co-worker who knows my background in Church work.
He said to me, “I learned something religious yesterday. I didn’t know that empathy was a sin.”
My reply?
“That’s hogwash. I guarantee that if anyone was empathetic, it was an Ancient Near Eastern carpenter turned travelling rabbi.”
Something is desperately wrong with American Christianity if the politicians have more ability to define the faith than those who went to school to study the Scriptures.
For the record, empathy is not mutually exclusive to accountability, truth, or grace.
If God condescended from the heavens to show empathetic solidarity with humanity, then it is a distortion of the Gospel to tell people it is a sin to show empathetic solidarity with one another.
5.
“It takes courage to rest and play in a world where exhaustion is a status symbol.“
Our perpetual exhaustion does not glorify God.
This world subtly seduces us into dehumanizing habits and cycles of behavior. Not only that, but we are applauded and celebrated with higher paychecks for denying ourselves our humanity. It is sinister and diabolical.
This is why philosopher Ken Wilber calls spirituality a “tender science”; it helps us reconnect with our deepest parts and establish rhythms and habits of rehumanization in a dehumanizing world.
