The Cloister
The Cloister is a circle and safe space of engaged contemplation for queer men in the spirit of Ignatian and Benedictine spirituality with a healthy mix of humor. While open to all, our content primarily addresses queer and gay men's spiritual experiences.
We maintain independence from religious institutions, dogma, and denominational affiliations. Members are free to interpret scripture personally and develop a contemplative practice through direct experience and inner knowing. As mystic Teresa de Avila wrote, the soul is a mansion with many rooms—we encourage each person to find, make, and keep their own room in God's home.
Our Approach
The Cloister follows a solitary mystic’s path inspired by the Desert Fathers and Mothers. We don't organize study groups, go on group retreats, or howl at the full moon once a month. Instead, we encourage members to “be a light unto themselves”—developing personal discernment and an intimate relationship with the divine through contemplative practices such as centering prayer, Lectio Divina, mindful walking and meditation, critical academic study, prayer, journaling, and practicing silence. We also don’t remove ourselves from the world. We encourage community involvement like volunteering, clothing and feeding the homeless, minority advocacy, teaching and mentoring, fostering or adopting shelter animals, traveling to holy sites, bearing witness (our motto: testimonium perhibemus), and serving our families and communities in whatever form we can.
Our role is to support your journey with encouragement and insights from our own spiritual experiences. Consider us guides instead of gurus or teachers.
Solitary Spiritual Practice – What It Means and How to Embrace It
Solitary spiritual practice is foreign territory for many folks raised on Sunday school classes and group Bible studies. But in the deeper mystical traditions, it’s been the gold standard for centuries—though admittedly, it’s frowned upon by religious institutions and mistrusted by celebrity pastors.
Solitary practice, however, is crucial for serious spiritual work because it forces you to rely on yourself: you develop your own discipline, trust your own discernment, make your own mistakes (and boy, have we made blunders ourselves), and learn from them without someone swooping in to fix everything. There’s also no spiritual teacher’s pet gold star system—one of the hardest lessons for recovering church kids to learn.
Like the anonymous author (our role-model) of The Cloud of Unknowing and many other a mystic, we warn our members not be tempted to start or join a study group. When you’re developing authentic spirituality, you’re not cramming for a theology exam—you’re learning to discern the movement of Spirit, which requires self-reliance and trusting your own spiritual gut.
Study groups inevitably produce an alpha spiritual director whom everyone else defers to. This short-circuits the protective discernment you’re supposed to be developing. Instead of learning to recognize Spirit’s voice, you’re learning to recognize Bob’s voice—and Bob might be having his own spiritual crisis on Tuesday.
Experiences need to be genuinely yours, not influenced by dramatic visions or someone’s tendency to spiritualize their grocery shopping. You need to discover you’re tougher than you think when it comes to maintaining spiritual discipline alone. This builds the foundation everything else stands on, and how the Desert Mothers and Fathers learned to live as hermits in desolate places. Sure, you might want spiritual companionship, but you might also want to be the wise spiritual guru everyone looks up to. That’s the first pothole on the mystic’s path, and there are many more where that came from if your ego starts driving or you take a peek on Patreon.
Community and Loneliness
True solitary practice is tough—like eating kale tough (apologies to Brother Clifford, our resident cook), but more rewarding. A genuine mystic needs resilience, and in a world that encourages spiritual codependency, learning to stand on your own two feet, or planting your butt on a meditation cushion, is spiritually revolutionary.
The contemplative path The Cloister advocates isn’t for everyone. If you need constant encouragement, feedback, or spiritual participation trophies, you might want to stick with group settings until you’re ready for the deeper dive.
Remember: the Desert Fathers and Mothers didn’t have WhatsApp groups or Zoom prayer meetings. They had God, themselves, and occasionally a very judgmental camel. And look how that turned out—pretty well, actually.
The solitary path teaches you that the most important spiritual conversation you’ll ever have is the one between you and the Divine. Everything else, including our words, is commentary.
We are Queer & Christian
We believe every person is a sacred expression of the Divine—however one understands or experiences God. Regardless of gender, identity, race, ethnicity, or spiritual path, each human being embodies inherent worth and dignity. We affirm the full humanity and divine spark within every individual.
We affirm, support, and embrace love – in all its colors and forms. Love transcends boundaries and manifests beautifully across the spectrum of human experience. We don’t believe sex is something to be ashamed of; rather, we celebrate it as a sacred expression of intimacy, connection, and joy between consenting adults.
We take Pride in gay, queer, trans love and we celebrate it as a gift from God. Every authentic expression of love reflects the divine image within us. The courage to love openly, the resilience to build families and communities, and the strength to remain true to oneself despite adversity – these are testaments to love’s transformative power.
Queer relationships teach us that love cannot be confined to narrow definitions. They expand our understanding of commitment, partnership, and what it means to choose each other daily. From the tenderness of first love to the deep roots of lifelong partnerships, from chosen families to supportive communities, queer love creates spaces of belonging and acceptance. The Cloister is such a space.
We celebrate the joy of couples finding each other, the beauty of authentic self-expression, and the profound truth that love, in all its forms, makes us more fully human and more closely connected to the divine source of all love.
Why subscribe?
Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and publication archives. We are new to the Substack publishing platform, so at first there will not be much to read or think about. But as we get up to speed and learn how to link pages and pictures together, we hope to create a living manuscript that will help you, and our community, grow and share the wisdom that is common to everyone and accessible to anyone who dares to look within. We hope, in future, to add to our Notes and Posts as well with publications:
Coming soon:
Walking the Labyrinth – The Cloister’s official publication.
Scriptura Divina – selections from the personal journals of The Cloister.
We are glad you are here, and if you are ready to walk the labyrinth with us:
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