Cassidy Hall joins host Rod Janz for a conversation about queerness, contemplation, and living from the heart. Cassidy shares how reading Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation led her to visit 19 Trappist monasteries in the United States. That journey opened her to silence as a space of healing and discovery. Together they discuss queering contemplation, mysticism, and how authenticity deepens our connection to God, to one another, and to ourselves.
Resources Mentioned:
* New Seeds of Contemplation – Thomas Merton
* Our Lives Matter: A Womanist Theology – Rev. Dr. Pamela Lightsey
* Upstream: Selected Essays – Mary Oliver
* 1946: The Movie (documentary)
* Contemplify Podcast with Cynthia Bourgeault
* Writings by Thomas Keating, Richard Rohr, and Henry Nouwen
* Quote by Alan Watts
Cassidy Hall:
* Queering Contemplation: Finding Queerness in the Monastic Heart (book)
* Day of a Stranger (documentary film about Thomas Merton)
* In Pursuit of Silence (documentary film, co-producer)
* The Work of Beauty (film project)
* Encountering Silence (podcast, co-host)
A quote by Thomas Merton from his book, New Seeds of Contemplation:
“Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God“
A quote by Alan Watts (“In My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915-1965”):
“I have always done things in my own way, which is at once the way that comes naturally to me, that is honest, sincere, genuine, and unforced; but also perverse, although you must remember that this word means per (through) verse (poetry), out-of-the-way and wayward, which is surely towards the way, and that to be queer—to “follow your own weird”—is wholeheartedly to accept your karma, or fate, or destiny, and thus to be odd in the service of God, “whose service,” as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer declares, “is perfect freedom.”’ —Alan Watts
Mary Oliver's quote (essay “The Artist’s Task”):
“Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart—to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again. It needs the whole sky to fly in. It needs a field of silence. And the voices of critics should be hushed.”
Last Living from the Heart podcast episode on SubStack: The Sacred Work Within: Honesty, Wholeness, and the Journey Through the Low
