Poetry and Prayer
For years I’ve appreciated Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound podcast, each episode “an immersive exploration of a single poem.” As friends and enemies will attest, I never tire of foisting this one on any- and everyone who will listen. (My most recent victim? An acclaimed novelist from Duluth, Minnesota, who exudes curiosity and grace, even when people push poetry podcasts on him. But I digress.)
When it comes to Ó Tuama’s two published anthologies of poems and essays drawn from the Poetry Unbound archive, I’ll admit I find more resonance with the first. But I sure love this passage from the introduction to the second volume—44 Poems on Being with Each Other (Norton), published earlier this year. It’s an expansive take on what poetry is capable of doing:
I’m hesitant to imagine that poets have special insight, or particular powers of perception. We don’t. We just work damned hard to see, remember, write, see again and write more. So a poem is an act of noticing. What does it see? It sees forward and backward. It sees the futures that probably won’t happen. A poem understands the past has a life of its own, and is both patient and impatient with lament. It can contain rage and hunger, it can protest at the state of the world, and plot the low plod toward resented compromise. Poems are recipes for happiness and prayers for when no other prayers will do. They record what’s unfolded, and also what’s been hidden in the folds. Poems confess, apologise, ask forgiveness, ask for mercy, ask for time, ask for space, ask to be read again, and ask for attention. A poem might be addressed to someone who’ll never read it—be they estranged, or uninterested, or dead—but the address is to you and you can be anyone.
A week ago I returned from a writing residency in Michigan, where we were invited to consider (among other things) the ways poetry might relate to prayer. For those formed in liturgical traditions, such connections may be fairly obvious. In my own tradition, who can spend time with the Book of Common Prayer and not develop affection for its poetic turns of phrase, its repetitions and rhymes, its intentional silences? Who hasn’t felt the uplift, the mysterious freedom from beyond ourselves, when saying well-written prayers?
There is, of course, a long tradition of “religious” poetry spanning traditions across space and time. But even so-called “secular” poetry can aid us in prayer. As Ó Tuama reminds us, “a poem is an act of noticing.” By cultivating the holy practice of paying attention, poets help us see our world and our lives in a whole new light. To put it negatively, we can’t pray about—or, for that matter, love—what we can’t be bothered to notice.
In the movie Lady Bird, the headmaster Sister Sarah Joan and our complicated teenage protagonist Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson have this wonderful exchange:
Sister Sarah Joan: You clearly love Sacramento.
Lady Bird: I do?
Sister Sarah Joan: You write about Sacramento so affectionately and with such care.
Lady Bird: I was just describing it.
Sister Sarah Joan: Well, it comes across as love.
Lady Bird: Sure, I guess I pay attention.
Sister Sarah Joan: Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?
The enigmatic teenaged character who takes Lady Bird as her chosen name isn’t a poet in the strict sense—as an artist she’s more likely to wield disturbing self-portraits on campaign posters—but in paying attention as a way of life, she’s unquestionably a poet at heart.
It was the French philosopher Simone Weil who said, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” Personally, I doubt I’ll ever come anywhere close to “unmixed attention.” My mind wanders. It’s a connection-making machine. Even in prayer, even at church, we all have Roman Empires with which to contend. But poetry is helping me slow down and notice. And maybe, just maybe, it’s helping me to love.
