I sat down early this afternoon to read and listen to Krista Tippett's conversation with Pádraig Ó Tuama, leader of a peace and reconciliation community called Corrymeela in the far north of Northern Ireland, a community grown from the history of The Troubles.
I was drawn to the title of their talk with each other, "Belonging Creates and Undoes Us." Tippett describes Corrymeela as "extending a quiet, generative, and joyful force far beyond [its] northern coast to people around the world." Ó Tuama is a poet, a theologian, and author of an extraordinary memoir, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World, perhaps suggested by a very old Irish proverb, "It is in the shelter of each other that the people live."
The second moment at which I lingered was when I learned that Pádraig Ó Tuama's favorite poem is David Wagoner's "Lost," which I did not know. The poem, inspired by a wisdom tradition of Northwest Indians, expresses familiar thoughts in a distinctive and moving way:
Lost
Stand still.
The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
-- David Wagoner
What is it to treat one's experience of Here as "a powerful stranger" whose permission must be sought "to know it and be known"? As Ó Tuama says, such power can be benevolent or malevolent, as can be such permission, granted or denied. If our Now—our true Here—is unknown, as Wagoner makes clear in his poem—"if what a tree or a bush does is lost" on us, we are surely ourselves lost. We must be silent, still and alert if we are to be found, if we are truly, consciously to be in the forest of our being.
The third time I paused in my reading of the conversation was when I began more deeply to understand its subject of relationship, when Pádraig Ó Tuama described what he called "a beautiful phrase from West Kerry where you say, 'mo sheasamh ort lá na choise tinne' — “You are the place where I stand on the day when my feet are sore.”
I came to admire a short, dark, and deeply affecting poem by Ó Tuama, a poem he calls "The Pedagogy of Conflict":
When I was a child,
I learned 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
because each time
is the first time
that that life
has been taken.
Legitimate Target
has sixteen letters
and one
long
abominable
space
between
two
dehumanizing
words.
Toward the end of their conversation, Krista Tippett asked Pádraig Ó Tuama to read aloud the last lines of his book, In the Shelter. I savor them. They serve as well to conclude these brief reflections.
Neither I nor the poets I love found the keys to the kingdom of prayer and we cannot force God to stumble over us where we sit. But I know that it’s a good idea to sit anyway. So every morning I sit, I kneel, waiting, making friends with the habit of listening, hoping that I’m being listened to. There, I greet God in my own disorder. I say hello to my chaos, my unmade decisions, my unmade bed, my desire and my trouble. I say hello to distraction and privilege, I greet the day and I greet my beloved and bewildering Jesus. I recognize and greet my burdens, my luck, my controlled and uncontrollable story. I greet my untold stories, my unfolding story, my unloved body, my own love, my own body. I greet the things I think will happen and I say hello to everything I do not know about the day. I greet my own small world and I hope that I can meet the bigger world that day. I greet my story and hope that I can forget my story during the day, and hope that I can hear some stories, and greet some surprising stories during the long day ahead. I greet God, and I greet the God who is more God than the God I greet.
Hello to you all, I say, as the sun rises above the chimneys of North Belfast.
Hello.