Poetry and spirituality with Pádraig Ó Tuama

When I was in college, I, like every other undergrad, met regularly with my faculty advisor. Since I was studying at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, those meetings mainly meant trying to make sure that I had fulfilled the many Wharton requirements (courses in accounting, finance, marketing, economics and so on) for the bachelor’s degree in economics.

Every year, I also had to take an elective in areas like science and English to fulfill the overall requirements for Penn. My faculty advisor encouraged me never to take anything challenging, since my main task was to excel in business. One semester, I spied an interesting-looking course: American Poetry, taught by Betsy Erkkila, a gifted scholar of Walt Whitman.  

“Poetry?” said my adviser. “Why would you want to take that?” I told him it sounded interesting and “Well, I, uh, like poems.”

He fixed his gaze on me. “Do you think anyone at Salomon Brothers or Lehman Brothers,” he said, naming two large investment banks, “will give a damn about how well you did in poetry?”Fortunately, I didn’t take his advice. I took the course, and I remember more from that course than from security analysis, corporate finance and real estate finance combined. It cemented my love of poetry and introduced me not only to Whitman but also Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, E.E. Cummings and Allen Ginsberg. Every winter, during the first big snowstorm, remembering that course, I read Whittier’s beautiful “Snow Bound: A Winter Idyl,” which begins by quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lines: “Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, / Arrives the snow…”

Our guest on this week’s episode of “The Spiritual Life” podcast is a man who looks at the world through the eyes of not only a poet but a believer. But Pádraig Ó Tuama’s life is even more varied than that: He is an openly gay man who underwent several “exorcisms” to “cure” him. He has worked in the difficult ministry of conflict resolution, leading the well-known Corrymeela Center in Northern Ireland. A podcaster in his own right, in a few weeks, he will take up his new position as a professor at the Yale Divinity School.

In this episode, Pádraig invites the listener to understand the intersection of poetry and faith, something that escaped me in my college days but which makes perfect sense to me now. Since entering the Jesuits, I’ve long used poetry to pray. Nothing quite lands like a poem on a retreat—or, likewise, a retreat while you’re reading a poem. After all, it was Emily Dickinson who said: “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” I think you could say the same thing about faith.