Biography
Benedict Reilly is a second year Master of Divinity student at Yale Divinity School from Long Island. He received his BA in Theology from Fordham University in the Bronx, and spent a year after college working with people migrating across the US-Mexico border. He is interested in 20th century Catholic theology, queer theory, and psychoanalytics.
Paper Abstract
What if our most “sustaining” relationship is not with a (gendered) parent but rather with a stone? Queer, environmental, and disability theorist and poet Eli Clare attests to this experience in his book chapter “Stones in my Pocket, Stones in my Heart.” Stones are central to his cosmology, but do not always appear in the same form. According to Eli, stones fill rivers which fill time which fills us; they make up walls which enable hiding, and also viewing, and dividing; they enact pain, and conceal it; they are a beauty to yearn for; and, most importantly, they are trusty companions in our pocket, a real presence warmed by the heat of our flesh. Stones are omnipresent (though not omnipotent or omniscient) across his writings, and they appear on the covers of two of his books, Unfurl and Brilliant Imperfection. Drawing on psychoanalytic and gender theory, this essay proffers Eli Clare’s multivalent relationship with stones as an alternative cosmology and mode of being-with the inanimate and abiotic world, in contrast to the pain of human sociality and the anthropocentric cosmologies which support it. This has significant theological implications, but our compartmentalized language clouds our vision: what if we added “God” after “parent” and “stone” in the first sentence of this abstract? Sometimes what our roots find, what keeps us moving forward, is a stone.