Welcome to The Cloister’s Walking the Labyrinth, a journal of the contemplative life for queer men and allies.
If you’re a queer man looking for contemplative resources, you’ve probably noticed the pickings are slim. Most spiritual spaces offer one of two options: either hyper-masculine warrior spirituality that feels like cosplay, or gentle affirming content that assumes you need a spiritual participation trophy just for showing up. What’s harder to find is something that takes you seriously as both queer and as someone capable of doing the actual work of contemplation.
Who We Are (And What We’re Not)
The Cloister is a circle and safe space for queer men practicing engaged contemplation in the spirit of Ignatian and Benedictine spirituality—with enough humor to keep things from getting too serious. We’re not here to be your gurus, and we’re definitely not organizing any full moon howling sessions (though we won’t judge if that’s your thing).
We practice what we call The Rule: a daily practice of centering prayer, Lectio Divina, contemplation, and the Examen. We also believe in getting our hands dirty in the world—feeding the hungry, advocating for the marginalized, fostering shelter animals, and bearing witness. Our motto is testimonium perhibemus—we bear witness. Mysticism without mercy is just spiritual navel-gazing.
Our approach is deliberately solitary. Not lonely, but solitary in the way the Desert Fathers and Mothers practiced without study groups where Jerry becomes everyone’s spiritual guru or Zoom prayer circles where someone inevitably spiritualizes their Instagram posting. We’re different in that our practice encourages you to have a personal relationship with God, Spirit, the Divine, and the bulk of the work is learning to trust your own spiritual discernment.
Our practice may be solitary in nature, but we’re also very much a part of the world. We have families, friends, lovers, and pets. We hold jobs, go to parties, travel abroad, and attend cultural events. Our spiritual practice is private. We don’t feel the need to advertise, proselytize, or convince anyone that this is the path for us. Rather, we take heart from the Bible verse "go to your room and shut the door" [Matthew 6:6], where Jesus instructs his followers to pray privately to God instead of seeking recognition from others. Our practice is a genuine, personal connection with God without performing for an audience with public prayers.
We also engage with the world; we do not run or hide from the goodness and bounty Spirit shares with us. Pleasure, love, anger, loyalty, betrayal — we’re intimate with it. We know the love of a partner, the hug from a friend, the shoulder to cry on, and the pain distance and silence inflict on a person. We do not run from experience; we use it as practice. Everything is an invitation from the Divine to join in the dance that is life.
This might sound strange and even alien to folks raised on Sunday school and small groups, but here’s where we are different: authentic spiritual work requires you to develop your own discipline, make your own mistakes (and boy, have we made some spectacular ones), and learn to recognize the movement of Spirit without someone swooping in to fix or explain everything. It’s hard work, often lonely, but ultimately more rewarding.
Why Walking the Labyrinth?
Contemplation often feels like walking a maze or labyrinth: one turn you think you are close to solving the riddle, the next you’re so far flung from center you feel you haven’t made progress. The kind of contemplation we practice has no way to measure progress or development. We stress experience and what happens at any given moment, whether good or bad. We practice presence in good or challenging times.
A labyrinth isn’t a maze. There are no tricks, no dead ends, no minotaur waiting to devour you at the center (though some days it might feel that way). A labyrinth has one path that winds and turns but always leads both inward and back out again. You can’t get lost; but you can walk it.
That’s what the contemplative life is like. It’s not about finding the secret combination or solving a puzzle. It’s about showing up, putting one foot in front of the other, and trusting that the path itself is teaching you. The joys and rewards, if any, come from simply showing up.
For queer men, this metaphor may sound different from previous religious experiences or practice. Many of us spent years in actual mazes—trying to find the right combination of authenticity and safety, faith and identity, desire and devotion. We hit dead ends, we wonder if we’ll ever find our way, we give up.
The labyrinth says: stop trying so hard. The path is already there. Just walk it.
What You’ll Find Here
Walking the Labyrinth is where we’ll share insights, essays, and personal reflections on the contemplative life from our distinctly queer perspective. We’ll talk about prayer and politics, silence and sex, mysticism and making dinner. We’ll explore what it means to practice Lectio Divina when Scripture has been weaponized against us, or how to cultivate stillness when the world demands you justify your existence.
We’ll also use humor because if you can’t laugh at the absurdity of trying to explain centering prayer to your hookup, or the irony of reading Julian of Norwich while spinning on a treadmill checking out the guy two rows in front of you, you’re taking this way too seriously.
Some entries will be practical. We’ll provide tips for building a daily practice, offer book recommendations, and share ways to adapt traditional contemplative exercises for modern queer life. Others will be more personal or philosophical, wrestling with the big questions that keep us up at 2 a.m. when the centering prayer wasn’t quite centering enough.
What we won’t do is give you easy answers or pretend the path is always peaceful. The contemplative life is demanding. It requires one to sit with discomfort, face our shadows, and accept that unknowing — or silence — is sometimes the most honest response. As we say in our tenets: leave room for unknowing, lean into mystery. It’s okay to “not know.”
Walking Together, Separately
We’re a practicing solitary contemplation community. Maybe not the kind of community where we all hold hands and share feelings (unless that’s your Examen for the day), but the kind where we each do our own work and occasionally share notes from the field.
Think of it like the Desert Fathers and Mothers: they lived in separate caves but occasionally visited each other to share a hard-won insight or a truly baffling spiritual experience. They understood that the most important conversation you’ll ever have is between you and the Divine. Everything else—including what we write here—is commentary.
So welcome to the labyrinth. The entrance is right there. We’ll walk with you, but we won’t hold your hand. We’ll share what we’ve learned, but you’ll have to learn it yourself too. And when you get turned around or frustrated or convinced you’re doing it all wrong, remember: there’s no wrong way to walk a labyrinth. There’s only the practice.