In this episode, Irish theologian, storyteller, poet, conflict mediator, and host of the podcast Poetry Unbound Pádraig Ó Tuama speaks of the thrilling notion that “all language can do the work of delight or terror in us.” In this conversation, Leader’s Way hosts talk with Pádraig about the complex relationship between poetry and prayer, the timeless wisdom of Meister Eckhart, and the delightful tradition of the Irish civil servant poet. Pádraig reads several of his poems throughout this episode and shares some of his own story, including his early call to the priesthood and its rejection by the Catholic Church.
61: Poetry by Heart with Pádraig Ó Tuama
Credits, Transcript
Host: Brandon Nappi with Whitney Coe and Misty Krasawksi
Guest: Pádraig Ó Tuama
Production: Goodchild Media
Instagram: @theleadersway.podcast berkeleydivinity.yale.edu/podcast
Brandon: Welcome to season four of the Leaders Way podcast. This is so exciting and auspicious moment.
Misty: It is.
Whitney: I’m glad to be here.
B: I’m so honored to be in the presence of wonderful students, Misty and Whitney, who hopefully listeners have met. Go back and listen to the episode in which we share your presence with us. Two radiant humans, brilliant students, deeply holy humans.
M: Oh my, that’s very kind.
B: And two Tennesseans. Oh, what’s the word? What’s the, is that it? Tennesseans? I got nervous halfway through it. It’s such a long word.
M: All those E’s and S’s.
B: I fell off a cliff in the middle. So we’re beginning a semester here. We’re beginning a season of podcasting. We’re all coming back to town. Tell the people, because the people want to know, what did you do on your summer vacations?
M: Oh my. Well first I had to move to New Haven. So that was a whole job.
B: You hadn’t been living here in the Elm City.
M: I hadn’t been. Yeah. So we did that move, which was very exciting. And then I’ve been doing CPE. So that is clinical pastoral education. And I worked at the VA as a chaplain for the summer, which felt like I had so much to learn and it was such good work to be doing. And I heard such amazing stories from people and it was really a really great experience.
B: At the bedside, people are sick, broken arms, people dying. Like everything.
M: Passing away. All the things. Yeah. I miss a lot of them a lot.
B: Yeah. Oh gosh.
M: It was a good summer.
B: We’re glad you’re here in local and not flying.
M: Thank you. Not commuting.
B: That’s a commute. New Haven to Nashville. Monday and Wednesday. Last year I was going back and forth each week. So that was pretty intense. So I’m very grateful to be 10 minutes up the road now. Yeah. Well we’re thankful too. Whitney, what about you? How was your summer?
W: Oh, it’s been a great summer. You know, to be a Tennessean in Connecticut is just delightful. So I’m married. My husband works here in New Haven, found a job in the school system and he decided to teach summer school this summer and I decided to keep on working at Yale. And so he and I stayed up here and we sent our children back home to Tennessee to be with their grandparents. And that was a really good decision. Matt Coe and I have been married for almost 20 years now and he’s definitely one of my favorite people. But sometimes, you know, in the thick of all the work you’re doing and child raising and being a seminarian, you forget to spend time with your partner. And so Matt and I have been making up for that by taking little trips on the weekends and finding out more about the state where we’re living now, Connecticut. At the very end of summer, we went to Maine and I just kind of fell in love with Maine. And now I’m having dreams of Maine. So it’s just been really delightful.
B: Do you have any recommendations in terms of Connecticut places to explore and visit that you really liked?
W: Oh, well, you know, we did the Gilmore Girls tour, which isn’t technically an official tour, but, you know, the Gilmore Girls is modeled off of several small towns in Connecticut. And so we went to those small towns and sat in the gazebo and visited the coffee shops and the bookstores. And that was, you know, that’s probably more fun for me than Matt. Think about it.
M: He’s such a good egg. He just goes along with whatever you want, Whitney. He just loves you so much.
B: I mean, he’s a better egg than Luke. From Gilmore Girls.
M: He’s excellent. I mean, yeah, they’ve got to be real close.
B: His hat was on backward all summer. Oh my gosh.
W: What about you, Brandon? What did you do this summer?
B: Well, I was in there against it, Rhode Island at the beach. That’s an annual tradition of ours. But we just got back. I just got back from Colorado. I was at a beautiful retreat center, Cathedral Ridge, an Episcopal retreat center up in the mountains with our curates who are starting our virtual curacy program, 11 new spiritual leaders and priests, soon to be priests, who are just taking those very first steps in leadership. And to watch them support each other, ask the hard questions, both down in the weeds, but also the biggest questions that the human heart can hold. It was stunningly beautiful and so moving, at least after the altitude sickness…
M: Oh gosh.
B: … ceased, which was real … Holy cow. Yeah.
M: Holy cow is right.
W: You really did experience that?
B: That’s right. Kicked me in the face. Yeah. Just for 24 hours, thankfully some people had it for longer. But the Rocky Mountains, whoa, I’d never been before.
M: Beautiful. Just beautiful.
B: Magical. I mean, so you walk out of the back door to this retreat center and you are in wilderness and just miles and miles of trails through the Rockies. It was just amazing.
M: Fantastic.
B: I had a full summer.
W: That’s wonderful.
M: You all had more fun than me, I’m just saying. It’s not really fair. So I don’t know how we’re going to make up for that, but anyway.
B: Yeah, you got to double down on next summer.
M: Next summer’s going to be a party, let me tell you right now.
B: So we have such an amazing guest. You know, when Padraig O’Tuama said that he’d love to come and have a conversation about spirituality and poetry, it did feel like a dream come true for me. His voice has sort of been in my head, his words and my heart for so long. And what a luminous soul.
M: So today we are delighted to have with us Padraig O’Tuama, a renowned poet, theologian and conflict mediator. Padra is widely recognized for his profound and insightful contributions to the fields of poetry, spirituality and peacemaking. As the former leader of the Corrymeela community, Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation organization, Padraig has dedicated his life to fostering dialogue and understanding in divided communities. His work has brought healing and hope to many through his unique blend of poetry, storytelling and theology.
Padraig is the author of several acclaimed books, including In the Shelter, Finding a Home in the World and Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community. His poetry and prose explore themes of belonging, identity and the human experience resonating deeply with readers around the world. In addition to his writing, Padra hosts the popular podcast “Poetry Unbound,” where he shares and reflects on poems that illuminate the beauty and complexity of life. His deep appreciation for the power of words and his commitment to peace shine through in every aspect of his work. We’re glad to have him with us today.
B: Welcome to the Leaders Way podcast, a show for people who are not ready to give up on the world. We convene sacred conversations with luminaries, scholars and spiritual leaders who explore the creative vision needed to lead change in our aching world. I’m Dr. Brandon Nappi, lecturer at Yale Divinity School and executive director of the Office of Transforming Leaders at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. I’m so glad you’re here.
Padraig, welcome to the Leaders Way podcast.
Padraig: Thanks very much, everybody. It’s nice to be with you.
B: I’m so thankful. I want to share a story about how you came into my awareness of late. I mean, your books have been around my house and in my life for a long, long time. But last summer, my children for Father’s Day bought me tickets to the Hozier concert that was happening at Woodstock. And it was magical, one of the most amazing concerts if you ever have a chance to see Hozier. It’s really worth it, wonderful Irish artist. And anyway, your name came up on stage through Alison Russell, who I think you had worked with internationally. And the crowd erupted at the sound of your name. And I thought, “Isn’t this fantastic?” And I hoped someday I could ask you about how this has come to be in your life, that you stand in the place of poet and spiritual teacher and theologian and cult hero among the folks who are gathered here at this Hozier concert. Anyway, so could you tell us a little bit of the story of how words came into your life and how words became your heart’s work? I presume you might name words as your heart work and not, I don’t know, auto mechanics or something like that. Can you tell us the story of how you got to do what you do?
P: Well in many ways I’m just a product of Ireland. I’m 50 this year, and when I was going to school, I just went to the ordinary local school in our village. We were learning poetry off by heart every week, one poem in English, one poem in Irish. And so at the end of every year, kind of from the age of five to 17, you needed to have about 70 poems off my heart in order to be able to answer them in your examinations. We weren’t being asked about our personal opinions about the poems. It was a very particularly kind of 1980s version of what did the poem mean in stanza two, or how many similes were there being employed.
But I loved poetry and so I used to read ahead every summer and have the ones of my favourites already memorised. I’m number three of six siblings so I would have heard my older siblings memorise some of the poems or complain about them. A curriculum like that doesn’t necessarily make for a nation of poetry lovers, it just makes for a nation of people with opinions about poetry. My youngest brother, number six, can’t stand poetry but he can quote Sylvia Plath at length to tell you why he can’t stand poetry. So in many ways I suppose I feel like I’m part of the legacy of that.
Many of the poets that we were learning in Irish language were poets who were writing about occupation and British presence in Ireland over the previous centuries and so there was never, and I am just one of billions of people around the world for whom this is just the absolute reality, there was never an imagination that poetry wasn’t concerned with public life and politics and execution and independence and land and in enforced borders or partition. So yeah, poetry was just part of the way of looking at the world for me.
B: Is there a poem that, when you tell that story of memorising poetry, that instantly springs to mind whose lines still sort of reverberate in the back?
P: Yeah, I mean there’s one during, you remember during Covid we were, I’m not sure what it was like in the United States but at home when people were being told to wash your hands all the time, they were being told to sing Happy Birthday for the length of time that they washed their hands, which is terrible advice, it’s like torture. Because then you imagine your friends and cake, you know, instead of sitting around by yourself or whatever was going on or going to interminable shifts under stress at a hospital and people who were, anyway I decided to recite a Yeats poem that I’ve known since I was 11 and I hear it and it’s called To a Child Dancing in the Wind.
Dance there upon the shore,
what need you have to care for wind or waters roar and tumble out your hair that the salt drops of wet.
Being young you have not known the fool’s triumph, nor yet love lost as soon as one, nor the best labourer dead.
What need you have to dread the monstrous crying of the wind?
We were 11 when we learned that. We were … “the best labourer dead.” I loved the full stop, the oomph of that, even as a child. I also loved the modification of tempo. “Dance there upon the shore, what need you have to care for wind or waters roar and tumble out your hair that the salt drops of wet.” That line itself also tumbles, so there was just a percussion and a beauty to that.
Not too long ago, in the last 10 or 15 years, friends of mine in Belfast, on the odd occasion that they went out they had a Palestinian friend who would babysit their kids and Lena, the Palestinian friend, would bring poetry in Arabic from Palestinian poets and recite it to the kids. No, they didn’t speak any Arabic but they used to look forward to her coming so much because they just loved the percussion of it and the sound of it. There’s something essential, and I mean that in the essence of us in the attunement to some kind of meter and rhyme that reminds us perhaps of the primal experience of the heartbeat. Who knows?
B: Thank you.
M: That’s so interesting to think about the love for the cadence and the rhythm that you talk about, and I wonder if there was someone else in your family who kind of modelled that love for you?
P: I don’t think so. No, there was nobody else who loves poetry as much as me.
M: Wow. Amazing.
P: I’m an anomaly. Of the six of us, four of the siblings are scientists and engineers and biologists and I have a sister who’s a social worker and we are referred to disparagingly, she and I, as the humanities department of the family. Zero respect from the scientists and engineers.
B: That’s amazing.
P: We’re all musical though, I should say that, then. So yeah, there’s a lot of music in the family.
M: So the rhythm comes out there.
P: I suppose so, yeah. But it was just in school. I mean, I remember being shocked the first time I met somebody who came from a country where poetry, they might have done it for a couple of weeks, maybe in the autumn semester, for a few years, rather than every week, every year in school. So I’m very grateful for that literary focus and the importance, the recognition, I think, of the strange position and voice that the arts have.
W: I wonder, Padre, does your love for poetry also extend to stories and storytelling that might be not considered so much poetry, but the prose and writing?
P: It does, yeah. I mean, there’s something about the restricted form of poetry that I love, especially, and the line break, the visual of that, if you happen to be looking at a poem as you’re considering it. All language can do the work of delight or terror in us. And I find myself thrilled by both.
I, last year, read Tobias Wolf’s short story “Bullet in the Brain,” which is thrilling and shocking and frightening and playful and all of the things. And so that’s just an example of artistry. I love good style in writing. And I love prose or short stories or recited or orated, just told live stories that have attention to style, not as just kind of demonstrating cleverness, but demonstrating something else.
B: Of course, we’re here at Yale Divinity School and Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. And so we think often about sort of the biggest questions.
And sometimes I kind of want to comfort some of our students and ask them to maybe relax a little bit because sometimes there’s this sort of sprinting after the most intense existential question, but it’s inevitable. It’s how we’re all hardwired. And I heard someone say recently, “Don’t bother with theology. Just go read Mary Oliver.” And I was really taken by this and really quite…Oh, I felt quite compassionate because it’s almost like the difference between eating a meal and reading a cookbook. I mean, I love cookbooks, right? But the cookbook at the end of the day doesn’t nourish your body in quite the same way as a meal, especially a meal with friends. And so I’m wondering about the place of poetry and theology and the relationship to one another. And I think what this person was pointing to is like the primacy of an encounter, having some kind of direct experience. And yet is there a role also for the form to help hold the formless? I don’t know. Do you have a sense of what I’m fumbling to ask here?
P: Well, certainly, you know, theology and poetry have things to say to each other, perhaps from different… looking out different windows. And there can be an overlap thematically. And of course, within theology, you’ve got some propositional theology and some apophatic theology that really is saying about what we can’t say. I love Meister Eckhart’s line, “None of us can say what God is.” I’m very definitely a friend of Meister Eckhart in that way. And so similarly, there’s poetry that does things. There’s poetry too that tries to describe things exactly and tries to exhibit itself as an item of control to say, here’s how you should think. You know, it isn’t just that… it isn’t just some of the corners of theology that try to convince some of the corners of poetry due to… I suppose what the hope is when it comes to questions to do with asking how does a theological intelligence and imagination inform your brain, inform your life, inform your language, inform your relationships. There’s going to be a need for a bunch of things on the table, you know, a sacred text with which you can wrestle and then a whole variety of interpretations and theories of interpretation and then a whole variety of things that occur because you’re in the vicinity of that sacred text, not to try to extrapolate it or to convince, but just to say, well, this happened near me as a result of this text. And some of those are violent. That’s some of the places where poetry occurs.
Kai Miller is a great Jamaican poet and almost 20 years ago he released a book called There is an Anger That Moves and he has a sequence of poems in that book, “Book of Genesis,” “Book of Exodus,” “Book of Leviticus,” those are the titles of the poems. And he just responds to a title like that with something that’s happening in his life or some thought that he has. The one on the Book of Genesis, we made a Poetry Unbound episode about it, is just about the word let, which you find in the English translation of the kind of creative commandment of the God character in Genesis chapter one. So I love the way that he is not trying to say this is a piece of theology, but he is definitely in the conversation field with these source texts. And he’s just one of many, but there was something that I felt was transformative when I read that. I read that book when it came out. I loved his book so much that I didn’t read any of the next few books. I got them all. I put them on the shelf, but I was so in love with that first book of his that I’d read. He had written others previously that I couldn’t bear to risk the heartache of having a different relationship with his later books. I have subsequently read the other books and enjoyed them very much.
B: You mentioned Meister Eckhart. I have to invite you to go back there. And I mean, some folks who are listening will be really, really familiar and others less. So I wonder if you can share just a little bit about what in Meister Eckhart’s writing and his theological vision captivates you over a half a millennium later.
P: Yeah. So Meister Eckhart, he died probably in around 1327, 1328. I think he was in his 60s when he died. He was a Dominican priest and a Meister. So he had been to Paris to study at the institute there. So he was an academic. He was renowned within this. This is while he was alive, especially in the later part of his life. It’s when the papacy was in exile in Avignon. And so there were big fights between the Franciscans and the Dominicans, you know, as to whether the soul is composed of the mind, will and emotions or different orders of those things. Oh, my God. He had trained formally in scholastic philosophy. And so in many ways, his Latin writing would be considered to be of the secular project of scholastic engagement, which really is what one of the things the scholastics were doing, you know, trying to think how can you apply reason to the world, apply reason to the question of the existence of God. So Meister Eckhart’s Latin writings do say things like, and fifteenthly, because that’s what the scholastics did. I read the Latin writings, the translations of them and kind of his preparation for reading his sermons, which he delivered in the vernacular. A number of them, it seems, to communities of women, religious convents, nuns.
And those he takes one text and kind of free associates with it in a delightful, medieval way that is of its time and also timeless. So he says things like, you know, the famous one is “The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me.” What on earth does that mean? Nobody knows. And he says things like, “None of us can say what God is.” He also says we can say some of the things that God is not, which I think that’s an interesting point. He says he has a deep interest in time. The opening words of what’s considered his opening sermon or his first, you know, sermon in terms of the earliest one that we have is “Here in Time,” which gives an indication that he recognizes that we live in time. Much later on, he says we are the hinge point of time and eternity, that our lives unfold in time, but our soul is linked to eternity and that the task of prayer is to somehow find an echo between one and the other. I think in many ways, were he to have been born much later, he might have gone into theoretical physics of time rather than theology, because I think there’s something of him that’s fascinating.
At one point–and this feels like a little postcard from the 1320s. At one point, he is giving a sermon and he interrupts himself almost, although he scripted this where he is talking about love. And he says, for instance, he must have been speaking to nuns. He said, one of you yesterday, I noticed as I came in to say mass, had placed fresh flowers in the grave of your sister who had recently died. And he just leaves that there. And you know, for all the mystical things that he says, it’s his absolute groundedness and the here and now to notice, to be present that interests me so much. His defense when he was accused of heresy, his defense shows a pristine intellect that did not suffer fools lightly. I kind of hate when he’s called a mystic, even though of course he is within the mystical tradition. But the implication is that he wandered around the place saying, “Hello, my name is Meister Eckhart. I’m a mystic.” When, you know, he was a teacher, he was an intellectual, he was vicious if you if you went after him for political reasons and justified those using shallow thinking. And I admire him so much.
B: Oh, thank you. And he was also an administrator. I think he was in charge of hundreds of Dominican houses. And in our time, we tend to think of those tasks as totally separate. You know, our spiritual folks, our mystics are in one place, our theologians do something else. And then God forbid our administrators are doing something wholly different. I love that integration. So thank you for celebrating this wonderful soul.
P: There’s a great tradition in Ireland of the civil servant poet. You know, the Welsh tradition has all of these priest poets. But in Ireland, there was loads of the Irish language poets were lifelong civil servants, you know, it’s difficult to fire a civil servant in Ireland. So maybe that, you know, they had a kind of the life of Larry, you know, able to work a few hours a day and then sit back and write poetry.
W: So I wonder if we could go back to you drop the word prayer. And I’ve also heard, you know, folks describe poetry as a form of prayer or as praying as you write. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your prayer life and how do you pray or do you see a connection between the writing you’re doing and prayer?
P: Well, to think about the word prayer, I think about the source of it in English anyway, the French to ask, which is therefore linked to desire. And what does it mean to be a person who’s in relationship with your own desire? And what does it mean to be a species who have a complicated relationship with desire? And so therefore, for me, the question about prayer is … is a psychoanalytical one is a living one is an artistic one is an ethical one. I think we’re all caught up in in desire and what we do with it, how we communicate it, how we repress it, how we moderate it, how we exploit it, what we do to other people to get what we say we desire, what happens when we get what we say we desire.
Years ago, I needed to buy a new bag for travel. It was during covid that I’d had to rush home to Ireland when Ireland was shutting down and my bag was damaged beyond repair. So I thought, oh, I should get another one. There’s a bag. There’s a company that makes these nice recycled bags. And I thought, sure, I’ll keep an eye on that. And whenever the right color comes up, I’ll buy it. Nobody was going anywhere. Anyway, a number of months went by and I checked whenever I’d remember maybe once every 10 days or so. And after a number of months, a bag that I liked just came up and I bought it and put it in the back of the wardrobe because nobody was going anywhere.
But a week later, even though I was very satisfied with the bag that I’d got, I was back on the website looking and I missed my looking. I missed my desire. And there was something sweet about that. It’s small and mild, but it shows, I think, that the relationship to want is not necessarily in the direction of satisfaction, that the relationship to want is sometimes to continue to be in the position of want and to continue to circumnavigate absence.
That’s relevant to me when it comes to the question of prayer, because it is given to me to pray, but it is not given to me to believe. I have been in and out of religious life my whole life, I’ve been kind of burdened by a religious culture that was pretty awful to gay people. And also, in its formal voice, lacked courage to speak about British occupation and sectarianism regarding partition. And I don’t know, it’s just not given to me to be too good a believer, but it is given to me to be in the nothingness of prayer and to think about what happens there.
M: That is such a beautiful way to think about that. It really, really is. I wonder if you find that poetry helps keep that hope and desire alive and if it can be really useful in that way, because it keeps us sort of simmering in the things that we desire?
P: Well, I mean, unfortunately, I think the human condition keeps us simmering in the things we desire. But I wouldn’t use the word hope. I would just, no, I’m not sure what hope means, but I would talk about desire and the strange space that sometimes is contemplative, sometimes is compulsive, that we’re caught in when it comes to the relationship with desire. Look at politics, you know, look at, you know, so much of politics is about exploiting what it is that people think you say you want and doing really what you want, which is to win. Somebody might say, well, let’s go for a win-win strategy, you know, in a bipartisan way. Who’d want that? If your main desire is to win or if your main desire is to cause, is to see the other shamed, why on earth would you go for something that’s going to see the other dignified if your desire is to see the other shamed? And that too is in the realm of prayer. If a spiritual tradition’s teaching about prayer do not force you to think about the seriously damaging way that we relate to our own desire, well, then I don’t think that spiritual tradition is worth the paper it’s written on.
I have a poem, actually, I have 16 poems in the latest book of poetry, all of which have the same title, “Do You Believe in God?” So here’s one of them. This is a sonnet, it was a 14 line poem at any rate. And the first 13 lines all end with the same word, which is you, the lyric address, the great emptiness to which we address.
Do You Believe in God?
I turn to you,
not because I trust you,
or believe in you,
but because I need a direction for my need.
You—
the space between me and death; you—
the hum at the heart of an atom; you—
nothing; you—my favorite emptiness; you—
what I turned away from and will turn to; you—
my ache made manifest in address; you—
silent you, what my friends saw as they died; you
contain what’s not containable; you
are the shape of my desire—
B: Thank you. You know, what’s coming up for me as someone who has for a long time stood at the intersection of Zen practice and Christian spirituality is this push and pull over desire. And some of our Buddhist friends will talk about the spiritual path in Zen as a kind of extinguishing of desire, nirvana meaning extinguishing literally. And then in the Christian tradition, desire is a classic Augustine. Desire has been planted within us so that we long for the one that can ultimately fulfill our desires at some, usually at some future point. And so I wonder, how do you stand amid that push and pull? As you said, some of the things we desire are absolutely horrific and terrible. Other things we desire are sweet and there’s maybe most of life is somewhere being tossed around in between. How do you hold all that?
P: I don’t know. How do we not explode?
B: How do we not explode?
P: So yeah, I really don’t know. I mean, I do, of course, you’ve got some practices, you’ve got friends, you’ve got tradition or you’ve got people who tell you, you know, you’re being a terrible human being, hopefully, you know, or you’ve got some text that you turn to as well that tries to moderate you. Because even in desiring something good or something fairly good, we can do terrible things for that purpose, you know. So it is a very complex thing that we try to work. In that way, the question about spirituality and desire is an entirely secular one because it plays itself out in the here and now with people who are around us, whether or not you are co-religionists with each other.
I really like Ignatius of Loyola and he encouraged his followers to practice this thing called active detachment, which–of course, he wasn’t unique in proposing that you find this in called different things in many traditions around the world. It kind of picks up on certain things that the Stoics also proposed, which was to consider the day that’s about to come, maybe the night before in your examen, and to think, What am I thinking is going to be atrocious and how can I separate myself from some of this fixation on that that might be coming up. But also what am I thinking that’s going to be absolutely perfect and how can I separate myself from the fixation of that? Because it might be that you’re surprised by what it is you thought you dread and deeply disappointed by what it is you thought that you would love. And he says that both dread and disappointment can lead us away from the principle and foundation, which … that is really a way of asking who is it that you feel called to be in the world with your friends, with your people, with yourself and what’s going to take you away from that. So it isn’t an emotionless life he lives, really it’s about a life of deep indigenous integrity to what it is you feel most called to. And don’t let anything steal that away.
W: Did you find over your years of life that you’ve been called to be something different over time? I mean, the things that were knocking on your door, the desires you might have had, the longings, the wisdom you might have acquired when you were 25 and now you’re just admitted to being 50, yay.
P: Yeah, well in October, yeah, I’ll be 50.
W: Okay, I just wonder, yeah … has that call changed for you over time?
P: Well, I don’t know whether it’s changed. I mean, like when I was 19, 20, I really thought I was being called to the priesthood, the Catholic priesthood. And so for a number of years I did pursue that, you know, visiting different monasteries or orders of priests and thinking about this group or that group. And I started a pontifical degree in theology, which is– and I completed it too, but– I did that as part of a kind of a preemptive way of having talked to a bishop in the diocese in which Belfast is in, saying, look, I’m interested in kind of peace and ecumenical work. And I find myself with these, with this work and this relationship and this mediation work; is there a possibility for finding a way to fold that in? So he said, “Well, you’re doing the pontifical degree. When that’s finished, you know, move into the seminary and then we’ll take things from there.”
But during that time of the degree, Pope John Paul II died and Benedict became Pope. And I had read, I mean, it was a very, very conservative degree that I was doing. And I had read much of what John Paul II had written and much also about what Benedict had written. And Benedict had made a kind of an edict when he was in the congregation for the Doctrine of Faith to say that people with the homosexual “tendency” that lasts longer than two years would not be admissible to the priesthood because of a psychological incapacity to maintain healthy relationships, either with men or with women, which is absolute idiocy. I mean, that is a … the Catholic church proposes that it is a church that, that follows science. And that is a scientific statement to make that. If you’re going to say in a psychological incapacity, you need to be able to go well, verify that shit. And you can’t, you know, because it’s an ideological statement that is designed to justify something that was pre-decided. And so, yeah, it’s moral ideology rather than moral philosophy. It’s not even that moral.
And so I, as soon as that happened, I knew that something was up unless I was willing to be in a closet, in a closet, in a closet. And anyway, the bishop came and said, the plan isn’t going to work. And I called him a coward and he said, “Yeah, you’re right, but I lose. This isn’t a battle worth fighting.” So he brought me a bottle of wine. So kind of a … a kind of a consolation statement. So in many ways, like many people, it isn’t that my vocation changed. It’s that … it’s that you’re caught up in a system that hates you and you’re caught up in a system that denies you something because of the system’s chosen misunderstanding about who it is they think you are. And what do you do with that, that kind of exile, that kind of rage, that kind of pain, that kind of yearning, you know, certainly for me, I turned it into poetry. I was writing poetry all along, but I turned it into poems specifically, I suppose. That’s all I could do or explode.
B: I wonder as you were reckoning with the moral failure of the Catholic church at that time, a faith community that you were, I presume, really invested in, invested enough to get a big, long degree and contemplate, you know, priesthood, did that shift your relationship with the divine in any way? I know for many, many folks when they encounter in their churches, in their faith communities, just utter hatred, that this also has a way of throwing a real hand grenade into their relationship with the divine. The most intimate relationship is impacted by the community relationship that’s also fractured. Did any of that unfold for you?
P: Oh, yes. But I think that was, yeah, I think that was going to happen anyway, though. I think any tradition that tries to look at the question of God will ultimately look at the question of nothing and absence. And so that was just part of spiritual development. So I’m grateful for whatever complicated circumstances kind of might have pushed me a step or two along the way, but those steps were going to happen anyway, as they happen in all of our lives, as you face the unexplainable, as you face the inadequacy of the language that you thought had previously been adequate.
B: Well, I’m appreciating you normalizing it because so many students or, you know, as a spiritual director, folks will come to me as if that experience of nothingness or like when the bottom falls out, that the ground I thought I was standing on has disappeared. Often, the first response is, “There’s something wrong. There’s something wrong with me.”
P: Yeah, of course.
B: Right? And I remember describing the inevitability of it. And I wonder if you could flesh that out, how that experience was for you or how you counsel and support people who come to you with, “Gosh, it all just disappeared. Everything that I trusted as part of the architecture of reality just turned to sand.”
P: I mean, one of the great benefits of being brought up by Irish Catholic was that, you know, the lives of the saints were just expected to be discussed in school, you know. And so throughout my whole life, you know, I remember kind of at the age of eight hearing about the terrible desolation of St. Theresa, the little flower went through. Or you know this phrase, “dark night of the soul,” and it’s poetically appealing, even if you don’t comprehend what John of the Cross meant by it as a child, I mean. And so I encountered Protestants at the age of 11. My life really has been shaped by evangelicals and particularly a kind of an American charismatic evangelicalism as well. I worked with a group called Youth with a Mission for a long time in my twenties. And so I mistakenly thought that they were quite Catholic when I joined them in Dublin, and … because the Dublin outfit was very Catholic, so this was before the Internet.
And so I, but I was shocked when I encountered people for whom the experience of doubt seemed to be something of devastation and the experience of change and the experience that you have something to learn and the experience that, of course, you’re going to talk differently, but the idea of God and God as present and God as absent at 50 than you are at 15. And if somebody at 50 is using the same terminology that they were using at 15, pardon me, I’m curious as to how that works, because it’s, the world has a terrible way of convincing us about its chaos. And if the language used in spirituality is in denial of that, well then it occurs to me that the crisis and distress that we live through just by being human is going to be deepened by putting yourself in a situation where you’re desperately trying to cling onto something that plainly isn’t true in terms of certitude or predictability.
M: You talked about earlier about the desires and how people’s desires conflict, and you also talked about reconciliation work, and I wonder if you might tell us a little bit about Corrymeela, the community, and what that was like and how that affected your writing.
P: How it affected my writing, okay. I’ll probably forget that part, so you might need to remind me of that. So Corrymeela is an ecumenical community set up in 1965 to kind of give a bit of historical context. There was all of these ecumenical communities set up all around Europe after the Second World War. These days we’d probably call them centers for public theology, so they weren’t necessarily, they weren’t monasteries, they weren’t necessarily places where people were living together, but they were places where people were saying, “How could we have been involved in silence or certain amounts of silence as a result of that?” There’s a whole load of them in Germany, so there was this whole outbreak in the 50s on of these ecumenical communities. The Iona community had been kind of a precursor to that. I think that started in the 30s or the 40s.
Ray Davie had been a Presbyterian minister and a volunteer padre with the YMCA in the Second World War, and he was captured and incarcerated in a prisoner of war camp outside Dresden. He was released from that prisoner of war camp because of the Allied bombing of Dresden. So his freedom came with what we now understand and what he understood at the time too to be a war crime, the annihilation of an entire population of people, enormous amounts of people in Dresden. So he came back to Belfast, and Belfast hadn’t been that long. They know the north of Ireland hadn’t been that long, partitions that had happened in 1921. Of course, there was nothing democratic about that partitioning. It was creating a Protestant state for Protestant people and entire gerrymandering. We know a lot about that in Ireland over the last hundred years, and we have active policies to go against it rather than active policies to facilitate it.
The dogs on the street could see that the society in the north of Ireland was moving towards the increasing of conflict. He worked as a chaplain from 1945 to 1965. Then in 1965, the Evangelical Holiday Fellowship had a house on the very north coast of Ireland. They sound like a barrel of laughs, don’t they? They had a house on the north of Ireland on a piece of land for sale. He contacted students who’d been through the chaplaincy in Queens and Belfast over the previous 20 years and said, “I think things are bad and they’re going to get worse, so we need places for people to meet to have very serious arguments about peace.”
I think they’d raised most of the money within a month or so, and they purchased this. The field on which this house was built was called Corrymeela. In Ireland, all the fields are called townlands, or it might be a cluster of fields. They just looked at the name of the townland and called it the Corrymeela community. It’s entirely based on that. It’s right on the north coast, 14 miles across to Scotland.
Since 1965, the Corrymeela community has been a place where people come for a day or a week or weekends or a course of programming over the course of one night, a week, over years or whatever to look at questions about what does it mean to share society together. There is an affiliation to Christianity within it, but right from the word go, Corrymeela was a place where loads of people who were like, “Gosh, I’m affiliated with this denomination or that denomination,” but they weren’t that concerned. They happily put up if you want to start something with a little prayer, the start lovely, but they’re much more interested in the here and now rather than in the hereafter.
Corrymeela is not a very holy community. There is a live-in volunteer program there, but the Corrymeela community has dispersed people going about their ordinary life who have a commitment to being a member of this ecumenical community. I got involved in 2002, 2003, and then from 2014 to 2019, I was the leader of Corrymeela, and I’m still a member. And how it changed my writing? I actually remembered it now.
M: Thank you.
P: I don’t know. I’m probably the last person to say how it changed my writing. I was poet in residence for lots of groups where I was kind of writing occasional poems for them on the occasion of their meeting, people who met across terrible circumstances and wanted to figure out how do we talk about what we’ve been through or how do we meet people who represent a community that might tell what we suffered in a different way or how do we meet people who represent the force that took up arms against us? Nobody’s forced into that, but lots of people had curiosity, so Corrymeela was involved in lots of that kind of encounter work. And of course, to try to put language around that is important and to look at ways in which language fails or language points or language contains.
I wrote a short poem called The Pedagogy of Conflict after one. There was people from all across Ireland, north and south of a whole variety of political opinions and most people had been involved or affected by murder, and there was a whole bunch of Palestinians and Israelis in the room too. And we were in the room for three days trying to talk about … Can we find any language that works? and somebody used the word murder to talk about what they’d done and somebody else said Shut up, you didn’t murder, you were just following orders. And somebody said Well I only ever killed legitimate targets and somebody else said Well that must have made me a legitimate target when your group shot me. And so we were talking about language which I found so interesting. I can recite one of those poems that’s very short. It’s called The Pedagogy of Conflict.
When I was a child,
I learnt to count to five.
One, two, three, four, five.
but these days, I’ve been counting lives,
so I count
One life
One life
One life
One life
One life
Legitimate Target
has sixteen letters
and one
long
abominable
space
between
two
dehumanizing
words.
The poems like that were written in the space of emptiness created by people who were using language to say probably the last thing they wanted to say about the circumstances that they never wanted to live through. There is courage in people from all political approaches to what we were doing because they’d come to the room and I suppose part of the aim of trying to think how can I listen into the emptiness that’s created together is to allow something of art to pick up and something of language and see what happens.
B: Can you talk a little bit about how what your writing process looks like or is there a single process that you can point to or is it different every day? How does a poem … how do you catch a poem out of the air? Talk about the development and your creative process if you would.
P: Well it’s different at different times of the year. If I’ve got a deadline it’s different. If I had a deadline of today for a poem I wouldn’t start writing that poem today. I would have been trying to listen into things for months in advance. But I read poetry every day. I always wake early so I read poetry in the mornings and that typically makes a bit of space for things. I try to edit poems. You’re always kind of working away on a few poems and I think by making the space for it well then you’re likely to be able to listen in to when something of a poem comes to you, some line comes. And often those things don’t come during that time, they come much later on you know. But I think having the practice means that you are practiced in listening for when it comes. And so they’re two very different things but I think they can support each other.
And of course then there are times that go through months really where you think I’ve written the last poem I’ve ever gone to write but I still keep on reading it you know. But I know enough to know that when that happens to go, Well I’m just part of a great community of people. I look over my shoulder and find probably every poet ever going “Hi welcome, yeah we’re all part of this, yeah us too.” You know somebody might go “Yeah I didn’t write a poem for ten years and then I wrote the book that I’m known for.” Or whatever. And so I’m not distressed by the ways in which the relationship with the production of something comes and goes. It’s not a strategic plan, it’s not a pathway to being known. It’s something that corresponds to the phenomenology of art in a sense for me rather than something that’s a commodity where I feel a pressure that I have to release something.
W: I was going to take a little bit down a darker hole but I wanted to ask what does distress you right now? Oh. What is keeping you awake? And also you were speaking of the Corrymeela community and that being kind of a, I guess sometimes we call them third spaces where people can come together from different backgrounds and have those hard conversations. So I guess double-sided question, what’s distressing you and are there those sorts of spaces? Are you seeing those spaces now that you’ve been in the States for a while or is there anything that’s comparable to what’s going on and what is going on at Corrymeela?
P: Well I’m sure there is, yeah. What distresses me, there are so many things that distress me. Of all of the wars going on at the moment I only know the ones that I see in the headlines that I look at. I try to make sure to read across different news sources to make sure that that which is distressing people elsewhere is not just going away because it’s not on the news feed I have. You know how can I not be distressed of what’s happening in Gaza. One of the poems we learned, I think we were 11 in school, was a poem in Irish about Palestinian children and so that’s, what’s that, 40 years ago. And so the Irish cause and the Palestinian cause have been linked sometimes problematically throughout my whole life and so like the question of the complicated overlap of religion and land and power and partition and the question about creating states where people are or aren’t free to live as citizens, you know, those are things that have shaped my life and so and shaped my politics in terms of who I vote for and shaped my politics in terms of how I think about what it is that’s possible and necessary for democracy.
And then you know being shaped similarly by an absolute love of Midrash and an entire indebtedness to Jewish religion. There’s been a lot of exchange between Ireland, the north of Ireland and people from Israel and Palestine, South Africans, people from Cyprus, people from both sides of the partition, although particularly the southern side in the Korean Peninsula, you know, I’ve been part of all kinds of exchanges of people from places and seeing ways within which there can be an idea that being as virulent as possible in public is going to contribute to the cause of justice causes me some distress because I don’t think it’s useful. It’s totally understandable. I’m there. I’m outraged too. But I’m a pragmatist. What can we do that’s going to help? And I don’t know the answer to that. So I mean, protest is definitely one of them. But awareness-raising, you know, the awful inevitability when we think of some of the conflicts is that when, please God, somebody emerges who can operate as a leader of some kind of negotiation towards some kind of increase of safety is that lots of people will cancel them because they don’t think that person has the right politics either. You know, so the loneliest thing in the world is to be a leader in those kinds of situations, the loneliest thing. And I wish whomever that is, I wish them safety and their family as well as the intelligence and imagination to be able to get something that’s better than what we have now. So all of those things distress me.
You know, the easy way, it seems to me, of public participation in absolute sectarianism of the us and them dynamics that we know and have learned century after century after century and our sacred texts and literatures are filled with ways within which that absolutely denies and diminishes human dignity and the imagination. Like why on earth do we have Romeo and Juliet for God’s sake, if not for a serious consideration about what it is that happens in communities of people where they are reared to hate each other. And that’s just in the absolutely local environment of the city in which that’s set.
W: Yeah. And so I guess the other … the other half of that question about Corrymeela and also where are those spaces or where are those actions happening that maybe you see where we are having hard conversations about language, about how we characterize what’s in front of us, all of that.
P: I mean, I’m a foreigner living in the United States. And so I my kind of disposition is to see the ways in which this stuff is already happening. Of course, there’s higher-level ways and more public ways that people would want it. But my guess is in many situations, there’s many people who would be categorized as being part of the problem who themselves are possibly doing quite courageous things when it comes to the people with whom they’re in relationship in their local communities or in their in their farming communities or in their in wherever they’re working. So I suppose I want to recognize that and applaud it. It’s too easy to be a foreigner thinking, well, here’s who the problem is. What do I know? I might have some ideas, but even those ideas would need to be shaped.
You know, I see anything that’s willing to fact check itself as a really good thing. And anything that’s willing to say we got that wrong is a really good thing. And to say if you write to them that they are publicly obliged to have to pay attention to your to your critique and to ask themselves were they wrong. That’s a good idea. You know, it’s not perfect, but it’s a pretty good idea because that’s what we’re looking for in integrity. I think of some media spaces that that have shaped their public witness around that. It’s a pretty fine thing to do.
I … there’s so many in the States, you know, I know so many civic groups that are doing the work, you know, Centers for Public Conversation and Centers for Dialogue and centers that are trying to say we vote differently, but we all do care about rainfall for crop growth and ways with them within which people are trying desperately to say, not let’s find a neutral flaccid middle around which, you know, we don’t talk about anything, but to find a way within which serious tension is maintained for the purpose of saying, well, here is an agreeable outcome that might be worthwhile trying to work on together.
I play the guitar and so, you know, musical instruments that are string based have a lot to teach us, of course, about what happens when things are held in tension and where you can tune the tension for the purpose of a chord.
B: Oh, thank you. I’d love us maybe to end with a poem. But before we invite you to read something for us, we have a custom of ending with five questions. We sometimes call it Holy Cow, because we get to learn something astonishing about you that we might not otherwise know. And of course, our mascot here at Berkeley at Yale is the winged ox.
M: OK, the first question is, what do people most misunderstand about you or about what you do?
P: I don’t really know. I could say rage, you know, there’s so much rage behind my work. Yeah, we’ll leave it at that.
W: Oh, I get a good one. What is your go to comfort food?
P: I love tinned tuna with corn and peas.
B: Like all together, like mixed up. Is that an Irish thing?
P: No, I don’t know what it is.
B: Wow. Yeah, I want to try that.
P: It’s probably a …I’ve got five minutes to make lunch thing.
B: Oh, my gosh. I want to try that. That’s so good. I won’t be allowed, though, because we’re not allowed to have canned tuna in the house because when my wife was pregnant, I opened up a can of tuna from the other end of the house. She smelled it and I was universally banished.
M: And now it’s never allowed.
B: It is never allowed.
W: That’s how I feel about tuna. Sorry, but I’m happy for you. I’m so happy for you.
P: You just lied to me. I could see your face. You judged me. There’s no happiness. There’s no acceptance.
M: There’s no desire. There should be reconciliation.
W: This is a judgment heavy podcast.
B: Look at how red Whitney has suddenly turned.
P: Blushing in the radio.
B: What’s a bad habit you’re willing to share?
P: Grey’s Anatomy.
B: Oh, yeah. You and many of us.
P: I mean, it’s kind of a good bad habit, but certainly when I was mediating some conflicts that were going on for a long time, come home exhausted and I’d watch an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. And over the course of 40 minutes, a couple would get divorced and then the others would hook up with somebody. Somebody would decide, I want a child and then they’d adopt one. Somebody else would operate on somebody who had a bomb inside of them. And meanwhile, the kind of the involved love lives of people would sort themselves out by the end of the episode. It was so, so satisfactory.
B: I love it.
M: That’s perfect. What life lesson are you still learning? You can answer that real fast, I’m sure.
P: How, yeah, rhythm. How to have rhythms that are sustaining.
W: And what keeps you going when your inner critic is telling you to give up?
P: Probably that I’m giving far more attention to myself than anybody has ever or will ever give to me. That we’re all focused on ourselves. And I don’t mean that in a terrible way, but just that I’m probably experiencing the shame of whatever it is my inner critic is saying on a very intense level. And strangely, other people are much more focused on something else, not me.
B: Well, Padraig, thank you for taking time to be here with us at Yale to join us for a conversation as we begin our semester. Thank you for all the work you’re doing and thank you for being in the world and your voice. It means so much to us. I wonder if you’d leave us with some of your voice, either an English or an Irish or whatever you feel moved to share.
P: Yeah, I’ve got one here.
This is a poem. It’s the final poem in Kitchen Hymns called “Untitled Mass.” Let me say it finishes with the word who and I chose that partly because of the Nietzschean reference to the question of who that Nietzsche asks, but much, much more so because I wanted the sound of an animal to be the end of this book. So there was an owl living in the backyard where I was writing this book.
[untitled/missæ]
I bless myself in the nameof the deer and ox,the heron and the hare,evangelists of land and woodand air. The fox as well, that redpredator of chickens, prey of cars.And the salmon and the troutsleeping in the reeds.When the wren wakes, I’ll askher blessing, and if she comes outshe’ll bring it. The squirrel burieswhen she thinks no one else cansee. I bless myself in her secrecy.There’s a fieldmouse I’ve seenscampering at dusk, picking up the seedsdropped by the finches and the titsthroughout the day. Some nest of frenzywaits her kindness and her pluck.I go in the name of all of them,their chaos and their industry,their replacements, their population,their forgettable ways, their untame natures,their ignorance of why,or how, or who.
B: Thank you for joining us today on the Leaders Way podcast, a show for people who are not ready to give up on the world. We hope you found the episode expansive and nourishing. If you enjoyed the episode, please be sure to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on your favorite platform. Your support helps us to continue bringing you sacred conversations with luminaries, scholars, and spiritual leaders who are dedicated to transforming our world. For more information about our guests and to catch up on past episodes, visit our website at berkeleydivinity.yale.edu. Follow the show on Instagram at theleadersway.podcast to stay updated on future episodes and events. Until next time, I’m Dr. Brandon Nappi, walking with you as you lead with courage, wisdom, and compassion.