Queer Love: Monasticism, Polyamory, and What They Have In Common
Morning prayer started at 6:00 AM. That meant that I had to be up and out of bed by 5:45 if I wanted to get there on time. If I wanted to shower, I’d have to get up even earlier. The only exceptions were Sundays, when it started at 6:30, and Mondays, which we had completely off. To complicate matters, every day concluded with Compline, or night-time prayers, which ended at 9:00 PM. So in order to get a full eight hours of sleep, between the end of Compline and the beginning of morning prayer, I had to be asleep by 9:30 or so, within half an hour of the end of Compline.
Truth be told, I never got the hang of it.
I always showed up to morning prayer a little tired, a little bleary-eyed, and not quite ready to start the day. As often as not, once morning prayer was over, I’d stumble back to my room and fall asleep for another hour or so, during the time that was supposed to be for personal prayer. Sometimes I really did try to pray, but drifted off, and other times I abandoned all pretense, and simply got back under the covers. But as one monk told me, “If God really wants to talk to you, He’ll (sic) wake you up.”
This is a small taste of what life was like at the Episcopal monastery where I lived for eight months after finishing college. There’s so much more I could write about it, and much more I could never write about it. Because life there was not just about sleep deprivation: it was about building your day around worship, and letting prayer seep into every facet of your being; it was about doing dishes together after dinner, and getting to joke and laugh and chat after a day of work and prayer; it was about the silence in the building’s very stones, silence which could give you peace or drive you mad, and frequently did both; it was about seeing who you are when the trappings and distractions you have depended upon are taken away; it was about learning how to live in community, how to forgive and be forgiven.
Above all, it was about love: love of self, love of neighbor, and love of the divine mystery that undergirds all of existence. And the more I have reflected on this love at the center of monastic life, the more it has struck me that this love is unmistakably, beautifully, queer.
[“Queer,” in this sense, refers to people, practices, and ideas that exist outside of the mandates of society. As bell hooks says in Are You Still a Slave: Liberating the Black Female Body, “Queer not as being about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” Prior to the 90’s, “queer” was primarily a slur, and I understand that it still might be triggering for many folks. But it has been increasingly reclaimed by those whom it was intended to denigrate, and is a useful and powerful term for discussing identities and behaviors beyond societal norms.]
How is monastic love “queer?” It is queer because it flies directly in the face of capitalist heteronormativity, which tells us that happiness will be ours if we earn lots of money, settle down with our soulmate, pop out a couple of kids, and get a golden retriever. All of us have a range of sexual and romantic desires, from asexual to pansexual and everything in between, and we all make choices about how to express those desires. But our society, with the help of “traditional” Christianity, has decided that the only acceptable choice is monogamous marriage to a person whose gender is the opposite of yours (and by the way, neither of you can be trans). If you’re having sex with someone of your own gender, you’re an abomination. If you’re having sex with lots of different people, you’re not respectable. If you’re not having sex at all, you’ve failed.
And yet, these monks have decided to forsake personal property, give up sex, and live together without doing or producing anything that might be considered “useful” to the economy. Within our society, where options are so limited, monastic life is a radical, powerful affirmation of queer love. Monastic life says that not all people need sex to be happy; not all people need to be married to be happy; not all people need two and a half kids and a white picket fence to be happy. (In fact, the number of people for whom that “ideal” lifestyle is actually satisfying is vanishingly small.) The monks with whom I lived built a life together, a community together, outside of the mandates of society. They foster a powerful, enduring love that breaks all the rules.
I now want to turn to the second theme of this article: polyamory. Polyamory, quite simply, is the practice of engaging in multiple romantic relationships at once—or at least being open to doing so—with the consent of all your partners. There is no one way that polyamory looks: it can mean dating multiple people at once, but being seriously partnered with none of them; it can mean being romantically committed to one single person, but sexually active with several; it can mean being romantically and sexually committed to multiple people, who may or may not also be romantically and/or sexually committed to each other as well.
It may seem like a stretch to compare a polyamorous lifestyle with monasticism; after all, the former seems to involve (at least potentially) lots of sex, while the latter seems to involve none. But beneath that difference, the essential affirmation of each is remarkably similar, and undeniably queer: sexual and romantic monogamy is not the only path to happiness, wholeness, and fulfillment. Monks, like those who practice polyamory, seek love and relationship outside the bonds of monogamy. They remind us that there are many ways for human beings to build relationships, and no single way is right for everyone.
This is a lesson we need to learn, and quickly. Because when we try to force everyone into a single mould, the results are predictably disastrous: divorce, infidelity, jealousy…the decline into quiet desperation, disguised as normalcy. As a country, as a culture, we need to reassess our picture of relationships, and expand our conception of how people can love one another.
Having spent so much time talking about monasticism, I would be remiss not to name the love that lies at the heart of the monastic life: God. By God I do not mean a bearded man sitting in the sky, or an all powerful being who watches us and judges us. I mean God as the Ground of Being, God as Being Itself, God as the miracle and mystery at the heart of existence. “God is love,” says the Gospel of John. God is love. For those of us who were raised in the Church, this affirmation can lose its power through repetition (yes, yes, we know, God is love, let’s get on with it). But we should try to hear it with fresh ears. We should hear it as the radical statement that it is: God is love. God is love! The heart of the universe, the ground of existence, is love! This love is not limited, or finite. Love is a fire, not a pie; when we share it, there is more, not less. When we love one another—as monks or married couples, sexually active or celibate, monogamous or polyamorous—we participate in God, in the eternal verb of the divine. Expanding how we love, and making room for many types of queer love outside the mandates of our society, can only bring us closer to the love, the mystery, at the heart of all things.
