Contemplative Silence

An Interview with Cassidy Hall

In Good Faith host Steven Kapp Perry sat down with Cassidy Hall, an award-winning filmmaker, a podcaster, and a leading voice in contemplative spirituality. Her films include In Pursuit of Silence and Day of a Stranger. She’s the co-host of the Encountering Silence podcast and creator of the Contemplating Now and Queering Contemplation podcasts. Here, she discusses her coast-to-coast tour of monasteries and the importance of contemplative silence.

In 2011, I was working as a drug and alcohol counselor in Iowa. But one day, in the midst of being overwhelmed with paperwork and my caseload, I had a panic attack. What really shifted for me that day was recognizing: Okay, something needs to change. But what is it?

At the time, I was reading Thomas Merton's book called New Seeds of Contemplation. And I was literally picking up this book in between client sessions and just reading and falling in love with these words.

At the time, I didn't even know how to pronounce contemplation or contemplative or any of these words. And that's one thing that's so important to me on this journey are the ways that contemplation is so accessible for everyone. It's not about saying the word right.

It's about taking that sacred pause to look out the window. And I was in love with what Thomas Merton was writing. So, I looked up where he lived. He was a monk who lived at the Abbey Gethsemane in Kentucky, and he died in 1968. That day, I decided I needed to go see where this guy lived, where he wrote these words.

So, on my next long weekend, I traveled to Kentucky, and I did an overnight retreat there and fell in love with the silence and solitude of monasteries. And as I was leaving, I noticed there was a map that pointed to all seventeen Trappist monasteries in the United States.

I took note of that, went back to my work, went back to my high anxiety. And eventually said, "I think I got to go to all these places." I started looking up monasteries and asking if I could come stay for a retreat.

So, I put in my 30-day notice at my job, and I spent my savings to travel to these monasteries, not knowing why. All I knew was that the silence and the solitude was something that felt good and right and important. And I met with monks or nuns to talk about contemplative life and ask them about silence and solitude. It was a strange journey that ultimately led me to numerous things but allowed me to emerge in my own spiritual life.

Your book is called Queering Contemplation and for a lot of folks, they'll hear queerness as a definition of sexuality or orientation. But you are expanding that into really anything that's something different than the norm?

For me, the way I see queer is not only related to my sexuality, but it's the way I tilt my head to look at the world.

What those two things coming together mean to me is to see beyond boxes and categories, to see through binaries. And I think queering something can invite us into not just seeing things differently but also allowing us to see beyond what is . . . for what could be. What are those things about us that are unique about us that we often don't reveal or don't become in our own lifetime?

I wonder if I could have you read from 151 in the book. This is the whole idea of what contemplation is.

Yeah. "When we let go of the contemplative status quo, there are more voices to listen to, more experiences to learn from, and more life experiences to understand. When we queer the things we once thought stagnant, like the monastery or rituals, we can bring to experience the possibilities in practice and encounter.

When we queer silence, we can fall into its loving embrace while fighting against its opposing toxicity. When we acknowledge the innate queerness of mysticism and the liminal, we can engage our imagination and eroticism more deeply. When we embrace the queerness of attention, and even boredom, we can center ourselves more deeply in the is-ness and the enough-ness of the present moment.

When we queer the deserts of our lives, we can rid ourselves of the parts no longer necessary for the journey ahead and stretch our roots of interconnection."

So, let me describe a moment that I had and ask you about it. I had chosen to go to the Oregon coast, which is my favorite place on Earth.

So, I was at Rockaway Beach. And that particular crisp, sunny October day, I walked out on the beach and I was seeing this rock that has an arch in it, twin rocks out in the water. And there was this mist that was coming in with the sunlight. And I remember for about two minutes thinking, I'm not sure if I'm in a painting or if this is my real life.

Yeah. The best part about those moments is that they're inexplicable. You try to tell that story to somebody, and they don't fully get it or feel it because that moment was just for you. That moment was something that they might experience in a totally different way.

All of us can relate to at least one moment in our lives where we've had such deep childlike awe or wonder. Whether it's a butterfly or the ocean or a tree or a moment of such great pause, we get to this place of bafflement. We get to this place of deep awe where we kind of just release and let go. I've found that those are the moments that deepen what is present and deepen what is true. And if I know anything of God, if I know anything of the divine, that is it for me.

You bring up some categories about silence, contemplative silence, toxic silence, and loving silence. What is toxic silence and loving silence?

My experience of toxic silence is harmful and even violent. Toxic silence is the kind of silence that leads us to not speak up at the exact moment when something matters. Toxic silence also shows up on a larger scale in terms of politics, by not helping the hungry, the hurt, or the marginalized.

On the other hand, contemplative silence is a place of discernment, and it teaches us when to speak. Therese Taylor-Stinson, she has one of my most favorite definitions of contemplation, and she talks about contemplation's wholeness relies on both inward solitude and reflection, and an outward response to what we find ourselves present and awake to. In this way, to me, contemplative silence is innately tethered to action.

And loving silence is boundless. A monk once told me--when I was going around and asking these monks and nuns, "What does silence mean to you? What's solitude? What are all these things?"--when I asked him what silence was, he said, "It is the tomb of Christ, it is the place of infinite possibility."

Loving silence is a place of resurrection, a place of holding us, a place of moving us beyond, and awakening. It's necessary to know toxic silence to meet and understand the loving and contemplative silence that's generative, that's creative, whereas toxic silence is destructive.

I'm wondering about the inner toxic silence. Is that a mystery to people, that whole idea that do we know ourselves and do we dare listen to ourselves? What's your personal experience with that?

One of the important aspects of my journey to understand myself as a queer woman was meeting myself in that place and knowing myself. I was lucky enough to grow up in a family where there was no need for a coming out process and I was blessed to be comfortable and allowed to be who I am very easily. Not everyone has that, but yes, the importance of meeting myself in the silence and finding out who I was, was a necessary part for me to step forward in wholeness.

So, this is really intriguing to me that you chose to go to these monasteries because they are places of silence and contemplation. You're also entering a place that doctrinally does not support part of who you feel you are at your core. Was there a tension there?

I didn't come upon any difficulties or problems in being who I was in those spaces. I'm not saying that that would feel the same to every queer or LGBTQIA+ person.

That might just feel that way for me based on my own history and experience. And so, I'm not saying that that's a safe experience for everyone. For me, it felt incredibly safe, incredibly freeing, incredibly enlivening.

There's a story in the book that I talk about. Where I talked to the monk at this Abbey in South Carolina, I just said, "Why have you chosen to stay here? What's the deal? Why, why are you still here? I could make sense of it spiritually, but I couldn't quite make sense of it beyond that. And he told me just one of those stories of awe.

He said, "You know, Cassidy, one time I went out for a walk. And I was discerning whether or not to leave or stay. I was discerning whether or not to get married or to go find a different job. On that walk, I saw a deer and we looked each other in the eyes. And I knew I needed to stay."

And that story really moved and changed me because every time I walked into a monastery, I couldn't figure out why I felt such freedom. You know, I was surrounded by this structure and schedule and bells and expectation, but there was something accessible there that I hadn't yet reached.

The monastery taught me that when I make commitments in my life, to place, to a person, to a value, there's something I cannot otherwise access without that commitment. In our society, we often view commitments as limiting, but I learned in these spaces that it opens me up to something I couldn't otherwise access.

On the personal side, was this journey an answer to prayer?

Oh, that's a great question. I think it was definitely a new experience for me. And I think a huge part of my spiritual journey has been about trusting myself, trusting my inner wisdom. And in turn, it has meant this larger trusting of God. It seems the more that I've leaned into my true self, my own becoming and growth and evolution, not only the more I get to see of God, but the more I feel led by the Divine.

You’re making me wonder now, can I really know God if I don't know my true self?

I just want to say yes. I think the beauty of the true self is that it's always happening, right? Like we're creatures that are always, quite literally, growing.

We're all aging. We're all moving and becoming. And so, I think the gift of that is that in turn, we get to keep seeing that alongside the divine. And I think that we never fully come to know ourselves, because it continues to happen throughout our lives.

On the In Good Faith podcast, host Steven Kapp Perry aims to build bridges of understanding between religions. In talking with believers of different faiths, he highlights personal experience and commonalities across traditions.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length. Listen to the full episode here.

Art by Paul César Helleu (1859-1927).