As a Jesuit priest, I’ve lived an adventurous life—from teaching at Boston College to working in Jordan and Jerusalem. Now, at 88 years of age, the adventure continues in writing poetry and poetic prose.
I have always been poetic—captured by beauty, nature and the good in people. I have felt very close to Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins. In journals I have kept for over 60 years, there are many poetic jottings. But I was well into my 80s, as a retired Jesuit living at the Campion Center in Weston, Mass., when I began to write poetry in earnest. The experiences related in my journals served first as the content of my poems, and out of this creativity, new creativity was born. In my contemplative style of life now, it seems a poem is always brewing in my mind.
My writing during these past five years is filled with memories of my long journey with God over a lifetime; but very significantly, it is the expression of my prayer at this later time of my life. In the search for a heartfelt language, I have discovered imagery and metaphor in the concrete details of everyday life: a sunrise over the trees where turkeys rest, or the kindness of a man in an elevator delivering food to the bedridden.
My poem “Murmuration” uses metaphor and analogy to suggest the interconnectedness of human consciousness with all of creation:
It is dusk over the open fields and scattered trees. Thousands upon thousands perhaps even hundreds of thousands—of starlings fly in a murmuration. The shape of the murmuration constantly and seamlessly shifts from a globe to a peanut, a cigar, a pear. Waves move from one end of the murmuration to the other. The edges—never in straight lines—are clearly defined in a steady pulsing motion against the bright, dusky sky.
From very early on, I have enjoyed a rich prayer life. I was a budding contemplative when I was 4 years old. But at this stage of my life, I am living a conscious, steady and contemplative existence. In this contemplative mode, I have been producing much writing. In the struggle for words to express the content of my contemplation, I have felt that I enjoy a clarity about my life, my journey with God, that I have not enjoyed in any other previous phase of my life.
With my immersion into poetry came the grace—the touch of God—to give public readings. I have read my materials publicly over 60 times at universities, elderly homes, religious communities, homeless shelters, private homes. I started by making contacts myself; news of my readings spread from place to place. After time invitations came to return to places where I had already given a reading.
The responses have been affirming: “I love not only your poems but also your reading of them,” said one Jesuit. “You helped me to sense, more than ever before, how much God loves me and others.”
Another attendee at one of my readings said, “Fr. Tom writes love poems—love poems to God, love poems to people, love poems to all creation.”
Although not every prayerful experience is a poem, a poem is always an event of prayer. Inspiration happens in an instant. To use a spatial anthology, it is like an infinitesimally small point which expands at a very great speed, a singularity—the Big Bang. The point is the touch of God’s finger. The point seems initially to be an undifferentiated glob of God’s beauty, truth, peace and love. Then almost instantaneously, like matter after the very first instant of the Big Bang, content begins to take shape.
An early poem of mine, “Come, Let’s Go,” uses simple, direct and concrete language to capture the activities of a typical morning. What makes the morning special is the awareness that the activities take place under God’s loving eye. The poem is an invitation to love all creation.
We have had our oatmeal,
we have washed the dishes,
sponged the counter. Let’s go.
We’ll go out and love the trees,
touch the flowers moist with dew.
We’ll love the little birds in happy
flight. Our feet will press the grass;
we’ll love the sky-blue.
We have done much;
but most of all we loved.
Come, we’ve swept the floor.
Let’s go, let’s go out.
We are not finished loving.
Living and working for a long time as a Jesuit amid the tragedy of pain and suffering in the Middle East, in Jordan and Jerusalem, I did not lose my faith or my education, but I did lose my theology. I needed a simpler, more heartfelt language for my talk about God. My conversations with people about God were the stimulus for my expressing my own faith, my own prayer in poetry. After returning from the Middle East at 77, I began a new career at Fairfield University, guiding people in the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. Through countless conversations with people about their journey with God, I gained greater clarity about my own spiritual journey. That helped shape my poetry.
I often ask myself if I will still be writing poetry as I enter my 90s. I have concluded that as long as I am conscious, as long as I am sensitive to the beauty of nature, people and God, I will continue my faith adventure in the struggle for words.
