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.
References:
[1] Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island (Harvest, 1983), 62.
Cassidy Hall, “Queering Prophecy,” ONEING 12, no. 2, The Path of the Prophet (2024): 44–45. Available in print or PDF download.
Image credit and inspiration: Eddie Kopp, Untitled (detail), 2017, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Prophets break things down in order to make room to create something new.
Story from Our Community:
I’ve long considered myself a black sheep. This lived experience has allowed me to avoid falling in line with the status quo. Yet even in Christian spaces today, where truth-tellers should feel welcomed, I often find myself and others maligned and misunderstood. Too often, we speak of prophets as if they are some lost artifact, whose purpose failed to keep up with modern technology and thinking. It’s refreshing to be part of an evolving conversation about how our relationship with God drives our intuition and hunger for social justice, while acknowledging the often difficult and lonely path that many prophets must walk.
—Heath S.
