Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hi, Joe.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: It's so good to see you too.
Welcome to another installment of Unraveling Religion. I'm your host, Joel Lessees. I'm here with Padraig Atuma, poet and theologian, fellow traveler through these years. Padraig agreed to have a conversation recorded with me way back when we met at the 40th anniversary of the Wick Poetry Center's gala in Kent, Ohio, where I had attended university. I had attended undergrad as an English literature major, and I formed a kind of wonderful, sweet friendship with Padraic. And he was so kind to assent to come and have a conversation record with me today. So, Padraic, I just. I was just asking, like, as a poet and theologian, I'm just wondering what informed that for you, or how did this come to take shape, that these things of poet and theologian are the ways your identity expresses itself?
[00:01:05] Speaker A: Well, first, thanks, Joel. It's nice to see you here a year after we'd met at the Wick Centre gala.
In some ways, I just see myself as a product of the era of Irishness that I'm from.
The Irish school curriculum, when I was growing up, and still is, was filled with poetry. We were doing poetry every week from the age of 5 to 17, learning two poems off by heart, one in English, one in Irish.
And so I started to write poems when I was about 11. It just felt natural. And it wasn't only in literature classes in Irish and English that we were looking at poetry. Some of the major poets that we were learning about had also been summarily executed by the British in some different uprisings. And so the idea of poetry having something to say to. To common life, to public life, was everywhere. Some of the poems that we learned were terrible laments. Some of them were defiant. Some of them were love poems, some of them were nature poems. Some of them were all of those things where you can look at one thing. There was a particular period of time when some Irish language poetry of resistance was written, and it might address a farm animal. And the idea was that by looking at the farm animal, you're also looking at the land on which this farm animal lives. And so to speak, with dedication to this farm animal was also to speak with dedication to the land. Some of that was about resistance and kind of a joke to think, well, if any of the British did understand Irish, they just think, oh, you know, the stupid Irish writing a poem to their cow, when actually there was a codification, which on the one hand is a symbol of. Of resistance, and on the other hand is A symbol of oppression that you have to codify yourself.
And also artistic innovation and playfulness. So I just found all of this enormously enlightening and energizing. I thought it was magnificent. And we were learning these poems at 8 or 9 or 10, you know, it was a very rare children's poem that we learned in school.
And then when it came to religion, I mean, I grew up in a very Irish Catholic environment, and everybody my age did. It doesn't mean that everybody has got the kind of the wrestles with religion that I've got. Some people just have no interest in it, and other people have a kind of a devout relationship to it. I. I have interest without devotion.
So I. Maybe some of that is because of the struggle, because of being gay, because of hearing the kinds of things that were being said in the world about gay people in the 80s when I was. Became. When it was becoming clear to me that I was gay. That's when HIV was being spoken about more publicly with. With such secrecy and with such terrible information or misinformation, I should say.
So all of those things, I suppose I see myself as a product of my culture, a product of my. My culture's religion, a product of change, a product of wrestle, a product of time. And somehow maybe I'm just not very good at resisting all of those products. They found their home in me.
[00:04:10] Speaker B: It's interesting because I thought to myself when you were talking about how the English may perceive the dedication of poetry to the farm animal, be it a cow, how they would not understand that because they divested themselves of anything sanctified in the attempt to take something that was not theirs.
[00:04:27] Speaker A: Sure. I mean, the awful thing is the soul of the Irish then after the diaspora, after the starvation, the Irish joined willfully, maybe out of hunger, but nonetheless, they still did join in many of the initiatives of the British further afield. Every culture that has been terrorized can become terrorizing. It's an awful truth.
[00:04:47] Speaker B: But I do know that from the time that I did hear of your name, one of the deepest things that I had associated with you, which I associate with myself, is that of a peacemaker, a mediator and peacemaker.
[00:05:00] Speaker A: I mean, yes, there can be ways in which personal pains orient me to having an interest in something better than estrangement or hostility.
As the years have gone by, and professionally I worked in conflict resolution for a long time in Belfast.
What the outcome of some courageous movement towards each other will be is unknown.
I don't think that people can or should go back to the Way things were, as if pain had never happened. That's impossible. The pain did happen. The question is what does it mean to live courageously with it now and.
[00:05:40] Speaker B: How to make meaning out of it? I mean.
[00:05:41] Speaker A: Right, yeah.
[00:05:43] Speaker B: The pain dissipates when the meaning is, is made understood and then shared in community as wisdom.
[00:05:48] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It's lightened a little. Yeah. I. I suppose it interests me to look at those. I mean, I'm no apologist for a carte blanche reconciliation or forgiveness approach. You know, I think there should be. Maybe let's just choose a nice prime number five good options about how to respond, you know, and, and you can choose a number of them. Safety, you know, as. Or as much safety as you're able to get for yourself should be part of that. But then there might be the pathway of understanding or there might be the pathway of dialogue if you wish or if you're safe or if there's consent.
There's all kinds of interesting ways to think about what it means to, to live well in the aftermath of pain. It could be the pursuit of justice also that. That is a living well in the aftermath of the pain alongside a self care so that your every waking moment isn't consumed by imaginations that's continuing to give control to somebody who has wrested control from you by their painful intervention. There's others.
All of those options interest me and there's so many different options depending as to the circumstances, to what living well might mean. Maybe you want to write poems about flowers. Maybe that's a demonstration of flourishing. That's what having Andy Fabdura keeps speaks about in some of his poems.
[00:07:03] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I really wanted to touch on when you're describing landscape of like Irish resistance and the poetry of Ireland and you know, the framework of Christianity is there and really the framework, the mental construct of Christianity is really informed by the land of Ireland. The spin of Irish Catholicism or Irish Christianity has its own unique flair, informed by the deep spirituality of the Irish people in the land.
And I'm sure that that's informed in your poetry. And I'm wondering, could you talk a little bit about the interface of like Irish poetry, Irish daily life and the spirituality that is now framed or the paradigm is Irish, Irish Catholicism or Irish Christianity.
[00:07:53] Speaker A: I mean these are such long histories to look at, aren't they?
I don't think that there's a spirituality in the world that isn't informed by the place from which it grew. You know, when you look at all indigenous Spiritualities in the various parts of the world where there was spirituality everywhere. Primarily much of it was people looking at the land and the elements and the sky and their imagination of the future and trying to think, how can we stay alive? And so you come up with rituals for the shortest day of the year, the longest day of the year, or commemorating these things. The harvest, the time of plenty, the time of lack. And so many traditions grow around those. Traditions appealing to the skies or to the earth or to the space between the sky and the earth. Traditions appealing to yourself, moral traditions. So when you look at any old traditions of the world that began first of all in. In mythology and survival, I think there's always going to be an orientation to land and harvest within the context of those more. You know, in the last number of thousand years, more religions that have more proposals regarding the character of the God that might be or the gods that might be spoken to have become more powerful. And I suppose as the centuries go by, the further people are from subsistence living, the more that you can separate the question of land from the question of the practice of religion. I don't think Ireland is in any way unique from having a great Celtic religious heritage.
And then these days trying to figure out what does it mean to remember that and to wrestle with it. One of the things that we say about Celtic spirituality is that the veil between the living and the dead is thin. Again, it's really important to me to say there's nothing unique about that. You find that in so many traditions. I. On the world, I don't want to in any way imply superiority to it. I do love the remembering of the dead. The. The traditions of funeral, like from I was a child, you know, at. At funerals, there was an open casket, like there are in many traditions where it was appropriate. And that was shocking, but it was also meaningful. It was a confrontation with that. There are quick and strong and immediate traditions about remembering the dead in. In funerals and the month after somebody's died, there's a month's mind mass, you know. You know, and anniversaries, and there's. There's a kind of a cultural adaptation to trying to find a way of. Of honoring this in. In practical ways. Especially in the north of Ireland, the. When somebody's died, the body will not be brought to a funeral home. More than often the body's brought home, and so people will come to awake and the person who's died is in the house. And that can be tragic and terrible and also meaningful. People stay up all Night with the body.
And these are traditions again that go far and wide all across the globe that have arisen their provenances within the cultures and context of where they've started. But what's so interesting is so many times cultures have landed on some very similar practices of remembering, of modifying your life for a year after death, of finding a way to mark anniversaries, of honouring the body, of staying with the body before the body is, you know, cremated or buried. All, all of these practices are, are very powerful.
And I think the orientation to the body is the orientation to land. Because we are nature, we are this.
[00:11:13] Speaker B: Moment and we are nature. Right. We are nature and this moment. We are time and space. There's an element to us that is outside those things. Right.
[00:11:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:23] Speaker B: Well, so when you were talking about the thin veil between the living and the dead, I think, boy, the one of the harshest or most difficult things that's happened to us is that that battle has seemed like a wall humanity. Because people begin to cling to life in a way that is unhealthy. That the natural order of things is there's birth and there is death. And so the in between birth and death, what we offer back to our maker is the meaning that we offer to community.
[00:11:54] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:11:55] Speaker B: Reina Maria Rilke has a wonderful passage that I came across in the Snow Leopard about this very thing.
At bottom, the only courage that is demanded of us to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That humankind has in this sense been cowardly. He has done life endless harm. The whole so called spirit world, death. All those things that are so akin to us have been by daily pairing, so crowded out of life that the senses to which we could have grasped them have atrophied. To say nothing of God.
[00:12:33] Speaker A: That's so interesting.
Spirit world. I I'm always brought to mind the etymology of spirit Spirare, from Latin thinking of breath. The spirit world is also the world of the breath. What does it mean in breath to have a connection with those who you love and who have died? Some of that is the physical act of speaking, of saying a name aloud. You know. Recently bereaved people might, especially if the bereavement's been a shock. They might regularly say other people are frightened to mention the name of my loved one around me, you know, and people might say, oh, because I just don't want to upset them. But by mentioning it as if the bereaved person isn't thinking about the person that they've lost every second of every day, you know, as if there could be any moment, any fraction of a second where they're not thinking about the person that they've lost.
To give, you know, the spirit world in that situation is to give breath to the name of the person and to speak about them in the past and the present with love, with dedication, not only as dead, but also as somebody whose memory is alive. That, I think, is a way of thinking in a very tangible way about what it means to. To be in connection with the spirit world, which is the breath word, to speak about this, to not let it be unvoiced.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: In Judaism, we say, may your memory be a blessing after.
[00:13:50] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. I love that. It's such a beautiful blessing to say.
[00:13:54] Speaker B: Would you. Would you read your poem?
[00:13:56] Speaker A: Yeah. Here's a poem called the Long Table.
It has an epigraph from Marie Howe where she says, the dead seemed more alive to me than the living.
And it's obvious what this poem is. It's the long table of people I love who've died today I get up early because Mag said it's the best time of the day.
She wore yellow trousers and oxblood boots and died when she was 20.
And Georgie told me to be thankful when I'm busy. Relish everything you're doing she said to me that Saturday Dead by Friday.
So I make time in demands to remember.
And when I read a book, I place my hand on it and honor Glen who worshipped words and friendship. He packed three times love into half a life and when I swear, I swear from my gut breathing out the words like smoke Just like Cathal said I should. I saw his mother at his grave a few years ago. She smiled and said, you come here too.
Not a question, just a statement.
I say what I need to say because of Graham Faithful as foundations and as hidden. And though I never met him, I think about Ignatius every day down by my prayer tree. Jerry said a lot can be achieved with precision and a bit of patience. He sang songs to rivers. I listened for his voice.
Eugene cut logs into his 90s and lit lovely lively fires. I light candles when I can.
Dan made handmade gifts, so I do too.
Bridget wrote a letter every day. I managed two last year.
Brendan tried to mediate all things, singing kitchen hymns every morning no matter where he was.
I hear his sweet humming as I pick up my guitar and strum Already on the page of the book that I read from I've written the name of other friends who've died since the. This poem was written and published. You know, this is a poem for me that will expand until maybe somebody writes my name into it.
[00:16:02] Speaker B: How important that recognition to square our shoulders to what is coming.
[00:16:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
Yeah. And so many of the world's traditions of spirituality have a tradition of, of praying with a mind to your own death. You know, it's. It's terrible that in so many of those traditions that arose because of occupation and colonization, but even without those human made infarctions, people were living lives that were shorter, often because of. Well, for all the kinds of reasons that they were living lives that. Lives that were shorter, that are outside of, you know, human causation and within that there is a reckoning of. Given that I do not know how long life will be, how do I want to act today in conversation with what I know the realization might be when I'm facing my own death.
And we know that from all the traditions of what it is that somebody says when they face a moment where they think, oh, this might be it, whether it ends up being like that or not. The clarity of certain things, the courage of certain things, the disattachment to pray like the Hail Mary prayer now and at the hour of my death, even that very simple prayer within worldwide Catholicism is.
It's a recognition of how is it not in a morbid sense, but in a sense of electrifying and imbuing your life with clarity. How do I want to live today?
Calling to mind that I am not the one in control about how long my life will go.
[00:17:28] Speaker B: Isn't that wonderful? Isn't that beautiful? Yeah. It ties itself to the fact that the very body and consciousness within it, what in Zen traditions we call the old rice bag, is it in and of itself a gift. It is given.
We don't get any kind of bill at the end of this. This is just a.
An unconditional gift of this time and place. And so when we recognize that it's limited, we can really begin to live it. And one of the things that I was thinking of, both with the British occupation of Ireland and in American culture. I know you're in New York City. One of the huge things that I see so that I think about so much is this absolute divestment of the harmony of life that we, we carpe diem, seize the day, live for today. You live only once. Like what delusiveness, what ignorance? I don't understand that. That there's this mass emphasis and intention to gather name and things and relationship and work really like work identities in ways that in relation to what we are, are meaningless. But we are so divested from what we are that we've. We're in it and can't see, to pull back. You know, the word religion means to bind back.
And so we really. To bond back and to fall into consciousness and begin to see with curiosity where we are and ask where we are would diffuse some of these very driven people from these very driven things that are not constructive, that are harmful, and they ain't gonna last. You know, I mean, this is. It's counter to kind of what the universe wants. But there's this element of free will in existence that when God gives, he doesn't say, you must do it this way.
Dad says, choose. He may have whispered, choose carefully, and many did not. But he did say, just choose.
[00:19:21] Speaker A: There is something for me about. About recognizing, you know, the. The different energies that course through different kinds of people. You know, where would we be without people whose. Whose intellectual curiosity was obsessive to the point of driving their loved ones to distraction, but they might have discovered something that has helped the population to survive beyond a certain illness.
So I'm very grateful for the drive and the ambition towards things that are bigger than a person that interests me. And in a way, partly people that I've known who've been like that, they have demonstrated already a deep detachment from the things of the world. They are interested not even in the. Well, I'm sure they're somewhat interested in the. In the achievement and the recognition of that, but they're interested in what might happen afterwards as well. And that's what's so interesting. Whereas when I think of the driven for the sake of attachment, the driven for the sake of renown, well, all of that will fade. All of that will be gone. Even when you said there, you know, what the universe wants, I think we're relevant to the universe. Universe, we're spec. I don't know that the universe wants anything, boy.
[00:20:34] Speaker B: I think it's Padraic. I think it's both. And I also think we're supreme in the. In the universe's heart.
[00:20:39] Speaker A: Oh, you do?
[00:20:40] Speaker B: Oh, oh, absolutely. Yeah. I think we don't understand what love is, and I think love is both two sides of that coin. That you're supreme and your importance to God. And yet when God manages the totality of creation, you are also insignificant to God, must manage things or itself. Yeah.
[00:21:01] Speaker A: I'm not there, but I like how you say it.
[00:21:05] Speaker B: You touched on. Ties us back to the beginning of the conversation, which is the mountains and rivers of this moment are the actualization of the way of ancient Buddhas. Each abiding in its own phenomenal expression realizes completeness. Because mountains, waters have been active since before the eon of emptiness. They are alive at this moment because they have been the self before form arose. They are liberated and realized. It ties to a line. The old man had. Had done something with the river, I think, in the.
[00:21:39] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. He sang songs to rivers. Jerry. Yes. Yeah, Jerry. Jerry Reynolds was his name. He died when he was 80. We were good friends.
He was a priest in Belfast.
Grown up in a farming family and done lots of things as a priest. He joined the priesthood early. Lots of things to do with language, writing, running the Jesuit publications or the Redemptorist publications. I might have said Jesuit earlier on. He was a Redemptorist priest, and he was running the Redemptorist publications. And then when he was around 50, he landed in Belfast. And really that defined his public life was these extraordinary gestures of dialogue, of meeting, of coming together not for the purpose of agreement, but for the purpose of comprehension, which can often be much more difficult.
[00:22:29] Speaker B: Oh, boy.
[00:22:29] Speaker A: And shared grief.
And, you know, he knew that I had a very troubled relationship with the church. I found what Benedict, when he became Pope, was saying about gay people abhorrent and idiotic also, you know, so Jerry and I used to debate and argue while we took walks.
And so he had to take a long walk every day. A, because it's good, but B, because he had some health conditions, so he needed to make sure to keep the blood flowing. And so I'd pick him up in my wagon, as he'd called it, a car. And then we'd go for a walk. Not every day. I mean, he went every day, but we'd just go once a week or once every fortnight. And one time I'd said to him, you know, I'm. I'm thinking of leaving all of this behind when it comes to questions to do with spirituality.
And he was no stranger to wrestles with the church.
Anyway, as months went by, I said to him, no, I am discovering a way with the Gospels, a way with prayer that's outside the question of formal belief, but that is, nonetheless, nurturing the heart.
And the next day, I got a voicemail on my phone. And he said, I was so moved by what you said yesterday and so glad to hear that you haven't abandoned the. You only found a way into the language of the heart that he said, I went to the river and stood by the river and sang the Gloria for you.
I must have listened to that so many times. It was such a beautiful thing that he went and sang a song to the river, a song of praise to the river. And that it wasn't that he went to a chapel, but he went to the river. And in many ways, he.
He is a light for me in thinking, what does it mean to sing the song to the river?
[00:24:13] Speaker B: You know, it reminds me of my own. I had two very prominent mentors. One was Mage Reagan from Kent, Ohio. And he actually has a poem which I think you'll appreciate, where he said that, you know, he used to go to.
In the church he'd go to drink, and in the bar he'd go to prayer.
But the other was John Bernard Chuk, who passed in 2012. He was 40 years older than I was. And in our first, very first conversation, I'd gotten back from Israel and I was looking for a Zen Buddhism group, and he led the Zen Buddhism group.
And our conversation lasted maybe a little more than an hour in the first meeting. And I was asking questions, you know, I'm 24 and really not formed in what I'm asking, but I'm asking about past lives. And he said this thing that will penetrate me forever. He said something in our karma, in our resonance. He said, I hope the difference in our age is not an impediment to us being good friends.
[00:25:13] Speaker A: Beautiful.
[00:25:14] Speaker B: We were best friends for, for the duration since that time. And he was a very profound impact on, on my life. And in the same way Jerry may have been in yours. And.
Yeah, so, I mean, even that mentorship, how, how powerful that, that transmission of wisdom from one an elder to a younger is. Oh, yeah, do you have people, do you have young, younger people that you are able to share with?
[00:25:43] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, friends. Yeah. I mean, one of the great joys of, you know, the poetry world and the world of, you know, that I was more involved with back in Ireland. The people, peace and reconciliation world is the great intergenerational encounters. So I love it. It's magnificent to have friends in their 70s and friends in their 30s and friends in their 20s. And, you know, that the kids of friends of mine have become friends in their own right as well. There's something joyous about that. And whatever ways that communities can lend themselves to that is a great thing.
Sometimes people can feel a little bit initially, as you were saying, you know, self conscious to think, how can I have a friend who is this much younger, this Much older. But then something happens, the heart happens, and you find all kinds of ways of connection with each other, which is a joy.
[00:26:34] Speaker B: Do you. You have a couple. I think you had two books out when I. When we were speaking earlier. You had two books out this year?
[00:26:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:40] Speaker B: Is it more than that or is it just two right now?
[00:26:42] Speaker A: Just two, yeah. I mean, I've had.
But just this year there were two. Yeah.
[00:26:48] Speaker B: Yeah. There's the one, the Poetry Unbound.
[00:26:50] Speaker A: Yeah. And then Kitchen Hymns. That's Kitchen Hymns is what I just read from there. That poem, the Long Table, is from the Kitchen Hymns. Yeah. Poetry Unbound is an anthology from kind of from the Poetry Unbound podcast, where I take a poem from somebody else and write a reflection on it. The podcast is I read the poem, reflect on it, and read it again.
And in the book it's roughly similar, except I only have the poem in there once.
I'm interested in.
In reflecting on a poem as a text for conversation with your own life.
And the. The Poetry and Bound book that came out this year, there's. That's. It's the second of Poetry and Bound Books. There was one that came out a few years ago as well. It's called 44 poems on being with each Other. So I was interested in poems that are alert to human interaction, to the dynamics that happen between a person and another person.
And. Yeah, so all those poems were chosen for that. Some of the poems are very well known. Some of them are not so well known. And all of that interested me to put poems alongside each other and then to write an essay for each.
And then Kitchen Hymns is a volume of my own poetry that came out this year, too. I've been writing that for about six.
[00:28:01] Speaker B: Years with chapbooks included. And separating the chapbooks in the full length books, what does that look like? How many full length books do you have? How many chat books do you have?
[00:28:13] Speaker A: I probably have. I'm not sure, actually. I think maybe 10 books. 10 full length books.
[00:28:17] Speaker B: Chat books. Do you have any chat books?
[00:28:20] Speaker A: There's. There's one. There's one volume of poetry, Feed the Beast. That is probably. It's somewhere between a chapbook and a full length collection.
Depends as to where you go. But yeah. It is its own small explosion of rage. That book. I'm very proud of it.
Yeah.
[00:28:36] Speaker B: Yeah. Terrific, terrific.
You know, it's funny, I wanted to share this, that I think that one of the. I had a rabbi from Jerusalem teach me this framer, a Jewish theologian. Frimer said better A good question than a bad answer.
And I love that. I just think that that's so powerful. And especially when we talk about the interface of Gaelic spirituality and the kind of Christian frame or Catholic, the Catholicism in the Dao de Jing it says when you over esteem great men, the people become powerless.
And I think Christianity is very guilty of this. A priest may utter this or that, but really my actions will speak for me. And that's naked before God, right? You're not, you're not going to hide that, that's naked before God. So you may have, you may pay a lot of money to have someone say something. Really not going to factor into your experience when the rubber hits the road, you know what I mean?
And so that better a good question than a bad answer. But I've done some time studying Hasidis and Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism. Jewish mysticism. Let me just start with Jewish mysticism. Kabbalah, it's through the lens of Torah. But really one of the Preeminent 101 Teachings of Kabbalah is that it's for humankind, it's for humanity, it's for everybody.
The thing about Kabbalah also is that when people want to take it for themselves, to utilize it for their own interests, it ain't good because Kabbalah uses them. But if you come with a pure heart to Kabbalah, then the secrets of the universe reveal themselves at your feet.
In Torah, in the Hebrew, when they say God formed a soul, God breathed and left a soul. And they said male and female, he created them, right? And so people take this as like there should be a man and a woman. But that's that. That is talking about a time when it was a soul before form, right? And so what, what does God talk about? He's talking about the energies of the consciousness of that soul.
So there may be feminine energies which are necessary, vital for the spiritual realm, and there are masculine energies which kind of guide and direct in a more yang way. But like the word is shalem in Hebrew, which means completion.
So soul is complete shalem when it finds itself or one soul finds its other complement. In Judaism, there's a very beautiful teaching that as a single person. In Judaism, in the Jewish frame, we say I am half a human being.
I'm not a whole human being until I find my, my other half. When I'm in union and marriage, then I'm shalom, then I'm complete.
And so each of us have a complement, the great divestment of the initial spirit of what was offered in Torah is that the male and female are energies, they're not bodies.
So two males.
The way that the soul was separated, there's no cookie cutter way that that was done.
Yeah, really, the choice of how we incarnate is, was given to us by God before this. To choose I want this or that. God gave us everything that we're getting everything we wanted. We just can't see it because the veils hide it from us. You know, existence is a cosmic game of hide and seek, seek with God. God is concealed right now, present and concealed. He's waiting for us to look for him.
Marriage is a man and woman is not correct. It is such a misinterpretation of the initial spirit of the Bible that those are energies and those energies were separated. Either the soul itself could decide how it wanted to be separated, or it could give it to God and ask God, will you separate us? But the Platonic teaching of that is the soul with two faces. Are you familiar with the soul?
[00:32:17] Speaker A: I am, yeah.
[00:32:19] Speaker B: So that is found in Plato, divested of Torah Judaism. It's Kabbalah, right? It's the same thing.
[00:32:24] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I, I have been shaped so much by studying theology and then looking at, within Judaism the capacity to ask good questions of text and the recognition that, you know, these texts are ancient and powerful and rich and political and, and have internal disagreement and, and, and the recognition of therefore taking them at that value rather than thinking, well, no, the, the first and plainest reading is, is clearly the obvious one. So I, for, I haven't read much Kabbalah at all, but I've read a lot of, a lot of Midrash, you know, the kind of what, what seems like psychoanalysis before psychoanalysis, literally. And the questions that are posed through Jewish midrash move me enormously. And the capacity to try to find a way into a text, you know, to ask the question, to bring their own intellect in relationship with the text. And I find that very helpful. I mean, I came across people in all religions who demonstrate the freedom and capacity to do that.
And also probably in all religions there's people who would want to show, shut that down for the purpose of control.
But I, I remember once being in London, I was taking a course by the brilliant organization facing history in ourselves called. The course was called Holocaust and Human Behavior. And it was looking at human propensity toward Holocaust and looking at history, trying to put together history curricula for schools, for moral reckoning. Anyway, there was a bunch of us went out for A meal one night and I was talking to this great Israeli guy, and we were talking about religion, and I was asking him questions about Hebrew because I have. I have biblical Hebrew. So I was. There was certain words that I was wanting to discuss.
He was the curator of a museum.
And halfway through the conversation, when I was just talking probably too much about God while we were having wine and food, he said, patrick, when is the last time you got laid?
[00:34:25] Speaker B: What?
[00:34:28] Speaker A: You're talking far too much about this, like, holy God. And then I told him, and he went, oh, darling.
So he was such a funny guy. And two was an indication of. Of having the capacity to ask a question, an interrupting question that was nonetheless one about the body. Because I suppose I was probably giving the energy that I was trying to. Trying to just think outside of the body in my questions about God. And he was interested in bringing me back down to earth.
[00:35:00] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a beautiful story.
You know, the Star of David, actually, you may be familiar, but the Star of David is all about, you know, if we look at the center point of the star David, as is a line, a horizon above and below to right, it's a mirror. If you look at that as a mirror, and the top point of the Star of David is heaven, the bottom point is earth. And really what Judaism. The Torah is heaven descending. As man observes mitzvot, he ascends earth into heaven, literally bringing heaven down to earth. This is the great point. And the body itself is God given and meant to be in marriage, not, you know, in Jude. This is the Judas frame, that, that we're meant to be in marriage and meant to be in, you know, partnership. That is ethical and bound. And. And Judaism, the frame is that we are half a human being, that we should seek to find partnership, to build a family. One of the mystical teachings is that that union between two souls, the masculine, feminine souls, could be two men or two women, or a man and woman is actually a spiritual block in the third temple, the beit hat McDash, that will be built in the time to come.
So your formation of your. Your union with your other half and your actions, thought. And, you know, the garments of the soul in Judaism are known as intention, thought, action and speech. These are the. How you clothe your soul.
So you can't hide that, you can't.
[00:36:30] Speaker A: Full framing of it as garments of the soul.
[00:36:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And. But why is it beautiful? It's also true. And so people may say this, but the garments of the soul speak of who you are, your character.
The Zohar Are you familiar with the Zohar?
[00:36:44] Speaker A: A little. Yeah. I, I don't. I don't have enough.
You and you might be able to give me instructions, Joel, I, I don't have enough knowledge to know where to begin.
[00:36:53] Speaker B: So, two, we are beginners. Honestly, nakedly, I will tell you I'm a beginner, but I have a deep, as you, a deep thirst for these dimensions of reality.
And the book of.
The Book of Zohar. Zohar is the Book of Splendor. And it's. It's the primary Jewish Kabbalistic.
[00:37:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:12] Speaker B: Mystical text. When was it founded or formed? At the time of Dogen, who we read from earlier. At the time of Rumi, who many of us know. In the time of Maimonides, the preeminent Jewish thinker. Maimonides. Together, a portal of dimension opened in the 13th century, which is very fascinating.
But more than Rumi or Dogen or Maimonides, Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai.
The Zohar, which is considered the preeminent work of Jewish mysticism. Part of what Kabbalah addresses is like, what. What is the point of creation? And it's. It's stated in Jewish mysticism that it was for God to have a dwelling place, to live, to have a dwelling place in the lower worlds. So God wants to go with us, but it's hide and seek. He's hidden here.
How do we reveal God's presence? Through our actions, through the garments of our soul, through the goodness that we offer to our community that draws down heaven. And eventually it would. God's presence will be palpable in this lowest world, Earth being the lowest world, God's presence will be palpable, and it will be because we've done it.
What are your plans? What are your plans for? I mean, first of all, some people, you know, I'm very much. I'm a Sufi of the moment. Right. I don't. I'm not. I'm not thinking about tomorrow, but some people do. And I'm wondering, is that more in alignment that you're a spontaneous in the moment person, or have you mapped out ideas about what 2026 in the future will hold for you?
[00:38:39] Speaker A: I'll continue living in the States.
Yeah. And I'm very interested in what does it mean to put shape to the language of prayer.
I did a PhD a few years ago, looking at the question of poetry and prayer. And not every poem is a prayer. Not every prayer is a poem. You know, I'm not interested in trying to make an automatic correlation between these Things, but there is certainly a conversation between these things. When the word you occurs in a poem, it's a very interesting occurrence when the word.
And most.
I wouldn't want to say all, but most prayers also include the word you. I know in a very sophisticated way. I think of Paul Celan, who has a poem called Sam. Blessed art thou no one, he says. Extraordinary line. Blessed art thou no one. You know, the possibility of what's created with the you as well as then trying to push past it.
And so, yeah, I've traveled a lot for the last 20 years, and I was interested in finding a way where I wouldn't have to travel quite so much, because now that I'm 50, Joel, I am getting a little bit more tired, more easily. I'll read a poem with the word you in it. I mean, so Kitchen Hymns probably has.
Probably every poem in it is. Has the word you in it. And I, like, I. I wanted these poems, some of them, to seem like they were turning toward the question of prayer. Some of them are erotic poetry. And I especially wanted to find poems where erotic erotics and devotion could seem like you're unsure as to which one was going in what way.
Poems to death, poems about death, poems to friends.
All of those things were important to me. So here is one called.
There are 16 poems called do you believe in God? And here's one of them.
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 mate, manifest in address.
You, silent. You, what my friends saw as they died. You contain what's not containable. You, shape of my desire.
[00:41:29] Speaker B: Hafiz says your heart and my heart are very old friends.
[00:41:32] Speaker A: Patrick, that's a lovely line.
[00:41:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
You know, one of the names for God is ain. Sofia.
Literally ain.
There's Yesh, which means there is.
Ain means there is not.
So soph is limit. So ain sof is there's no limit. That's one of the names of God. Yeah.
[00:41:54] Speaker A: Gorgeous God, beyond God. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I. I love it. Aviva Zornberg is a huge influence on my thinking and writing about. About text. She's a midrashic scholar based in Jerusalem, and I. I love what she says and how close attention to a text leads you into infinity, I think. And if. If a text is good enough, that's what it will do is it'll be of the particular and of the more than particular all at the same time. Yeah.
[00:42:25] Speaker B: You know, in halacha, in Jewish law, one is Jewish if their mother is Jewish. It doesn't matter. Not determined by the the Father come to this deep through this deep investigation, meditation, contemplation, reflection and prayer. That within the plan of the Divine, within the plan of Adono, within the plan of Allah, within the plan of the Dao or the Dharma, whatever you want to call that, it does not matter within that plan for its own strategies. It's placed in Jewish community, non Jewish souls, and the inverse, that there are Jewish souls in non Jewish bodies.
And when you're a Jewish soul, you know it.
You know it. And you may question it in your mind, but meditate on it and God will reveal the truth to you.
[00:43:19] Speaker A: Yeah, there's a lovely hospitality in that imagination of kind of knowing that there's neighbors and kin way outside the question of the borders that you might define.
[00:43:30] Speaker B: It brings me to tears to think about, you know, the sensitivity to which this plan has been crafted for us.
I don't know that a swimmer knows how to swim until he finds water. You know what I mean?
I wonder if that would be you and Zohar. I think that that will be you.
You and Kabbalah. Yeah. Well, not to mention that you haven't dabbled in it, but boy, when, when you get into your swim trunks and jump into that ocean, it's over. It's over.
I, I only lately Gary center, came to read at the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo in the late 90s, and I saw him speak. My karmas drew me to see him speak. And he was wonderful. I did not understand the significance of seeing him speak because he's really like a patriarch of American Zen. Yeah, understanding is super mature and exquisite and traceless, really traceless.
But my favorite poem of all of Gary Snyder's work here is this wonderful poem called why Log Truck drivers rise earlier than students of Zen in the high seat before dawn dark Polish hubs gleam in the shiny diesel stack Warms and flutters up the Tyler road grade to the logging on Pullman Creek 30 miles of dust There is no other life.
[00:45:05] Speaker A: Beautiful dawn dark. What lovely alliteration. And also, you know, as soon as he says that I'm there, I've never of dreamed driven a truck. But in the way that he describes it, I'm there. And the intimate stillness of that time, as well as the movement, there's something still and accelerating, occurring in that poem. Beautiful.
[00:45:27] Speaker B: Yeah. I love it. And I love that ability of stepping into a poem and it becomes a kind of time machine to transport you to that time and place. Right?
[00:45:35] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, totally. By the evocative nature of it. And it's in the particular of that that something beyond the particular is evoked. And that's what I like.
I'm around certain environments sometimes where people try to describe the effervescent with effervescent language, and I always get lost in that.
I'm much more concrete. So that's why for me, I'm interested in describing something of transcendence through an erotic poem or describing something, something of.
Of wrestling again, through a poem of deep, concrete imagination. Because I. All I have is the body. And somehow, whatever the relationship with the soul and the body, it's occurring in this moment, in this body, with these bones, with this tongue, with these eyes, with the limitation of my body.
And within the context of that, that's what I can bring to the question of eternity. And I, I, I got a bit tired with spiritual or religious terminology that seems to ignore the body. And I am not in any way a revolutionary in this. There have been people who've been doing this for millennia in, in speaking of the body as the vehicle of the soul, speaking of the soul as the vehicle of the body, in this strange conversation between the two. And I, I wanted to accept the limitations of the body and to rejoice, therefore, in the vocabulary that comes by sticking with the body in order to speak of that which is beyond the body.
[00:47:08] Speaker B: Why isn't that the point of the perspective of being in the body?
[00:47:11] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Here's one of the. Here's one of the poems.
This is another do you believe in God? Poem.
Do you believe in God?
It'll hurt. He said.
I said, I know.
You're sure? He said, I'm sure.
His weight on me, pushing into me, placing himself in me, making me with agony and please.
It was abandonment and yes and no. And more and more manly than I thought anything could be. It was. Take everything that I'd been begging to experience.
It was sweet fury. It was deliverance.
I, I wanted to write about an erotic encounter as well as somehow in the space of that.
See what something like prayer or praise or response to the question of do you believe in God? Could be by staying absolutely with the physicality of trusted risk in the context of an erotic encounter.
[00:48:31] Speaker B: I love that. Yeah. The, the little death that's referred to sometimes.
[00:48:36] Speaker A: Exactly.
Totally. Yes.
Yeah. Sweet fury, deliverance.
[00:48:44] Speaker B: It reminds me of another Rainer Maria Roko poem. Go to the limits of your longing.
[00:48:50] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. It's beautiful. Yeah.
[00:48:58] Speaker B: God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear.
You sent out beyond your recall.
Go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like flame and make big shadow. I can move in.
Let everything happen to you.
Beauty and terror just keep going.
No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
[00:49:49] Speaker A: That's so beautiful, isn't it? Give me your hand.
Each unfolding clause of that poem is just richer and richer and richer.
Nearby is the country.
[00:50:05] Speaker B: And so, just in winding down Padraig, I've so enjoyed this time. I feel so honor like I don't know whether it's karmic forces or the divine or some stupid accident that leads us to this conversation.
But as my heart is so grateful, I just want to share and say thank you.
[00:50:22] Speaker A: I'm very pleased to have this conversation.
[00:50:24] Speaker B: Joel, is there something that arises in your mind and heart for a poem to close us out with?
[00:50:32] Speaker A: There probably is. Let me think.
Well, I'll go back to where we started with Land and Place. Kitchen Hymns finishes with a poem called Untitled, but it has a second title, also called misse, which is the Latin word from which we get the word mission, from which we get the word mass. When you think of that, it means to go.
And this the whole way. Throughout Kitchen Hymns, there's a lot of animals mentioned, me being one of them. But in all the animals that I mentioned, I wanted to make sure that it was only animals that I could see. I was living in the northwest of Ireland when most of this was written anyway. There's.
There's the sound of an owl as the last sound of the last poem of this book. And I wanted to make sure it's a little reference to Nietzsche. Nietzsche asked the question of who. But I wanted the last word in this to sound like an owl.
Untitled, Missy.
I bless myself in the name of the deer and ox, the heron and the hare, evangelists of land and wood and air, the fox as well, that red predator of chickens, prey of cars and the salmon and the trout sleeping in the reeds.
When the wren wakes, I'll ask her blessing, and if she comes out, she'll bring it.
The squirrel buries when she thinks no one else can see. I bless myself in her secrecy.
There's a field mouse I've seen scampering at dusk, picking up the seeds dropped by the finches and the tits. Throughout the day, some nest of frenzy waits. 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 untamed natures, their ignorance of why or how or who.
