Lee Camp
[00:00:00] I'm Lee C. Camp and this is No Small Endeavor - exploring what it means to live a good life.
Padraig O'Tuama
Peace regularly doesn't look very peaceful. Peace looks like complex arguments that happen between people.
Lee Camp
That's Padraig O Tuama, theologian, poet, and peacemaker. And today we examine with Padraig what a collective good life could look like through his eyes as a poet, theologian, and peacemaker.
Padraig O'Tuama
Would I realize, actually I'm the enemy? Or can I realize, actually a fruitful outcome is where I will change my mind?
Lee Camp
Plus, readings from some of Padraig's poems.
Padraig O'Tuama
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.
Lee Camp
All coming right up.[00:01:00]
I'm Lee C. Camp. This is No Small Endeavor - exploring what it means to live a good life.
Our guest today is poet Padraig O Tuama. Padraig is the author of several compilations of poetry, including In the Shelter and Sorry for Your Troubles. He's also the host of the Poetry Unbound podcast from On Being Studios. But in addition to being a poet, Padraig is a theologian and peacemaker.
I first had the conversation you're about to hear in 2020. Padraig's work with a community in Northern Ireland called Corrymeela, and the lessons he learned from there were what took center stage in our conversation. Corrymeela was founded in 1965 on the precipice of what became known as "The Troubles," a sectarian conflict from the late '60s to the late '90s in Northern Ireland.
Corrymeela welcomed people from different sides of the conflict and provided a way for them to safely meet, engage difficult [00:02:00] conversations, and support one another in a hopeful move toward peace and reconciliation.
In this conversation, Padraig offers up perhaps an unexpected observation about the pursuit of good life - namely, that it must take account of particularity. Particular pain and particular joy. That every person and community lives in the midst of a particular context. That "The Troubles" in Ireland are not the same as the conflict in the Middle East, or Apartheid in South Africa, or the civil rights movement in Alabama. That every situation requires attention, nuance, and care. That to be a peacemaker, one might have to wade into trouble and stir the waters oneself.
So we invite you to pay attention to Padraig, because he's clearly been paying attention to the world around him and has a great deal to share. Grateful today to be interviewing Mr. Padraig O Tuama of the Northern of Ireland, a poet, theologian, and a [00:03:00] peacemaker.
Welcome, Padraig.
Padraig O'Tuama
Thanks very much, Lee. It's nice to be with you.
Lee Camp
You've been doing work there in various forms of peacemaking and healing of communities for quite some time. Would you tell us a little bit about Corrymeela and the work that you've done there through the years?
Padraig O'Tuama
Yeah, so Corrymeela is a reconciliation community that was set up in 1965 by a bunch of students and some older people as well.
The first leader was Reverend Ray Davey, who was a Presbyterian minister. He had been a prisoner of war during the second World War. And he had been a volunteer Padre with the YMCA. He was captured and imprisoned then, near Dresden, and his release from that prisoner of war camp came as a result of the bombing of Dresden.
And that was of course considered, is of course considered, a war crime, um, that bombing, because of the civilian casualties that was predicted. And it nonetheless went ahead. So he came back traumatized, and also saw an Ireland that had recently been partitioned by the British, and was seeing that [00:04:00] people's imagination about what freedom and peace could look like was usually an imagination that imagined that the other, whoever they were, would be annihilated.
And so he saw, I suppose, the writing on the wall, in terms of where Ireland was going. This is 1945. But already, I mean, partitioning a country is a terrible way to ever do anything, um, and partitioning a country just starts off new wars.
So, by '65, these things had gotten worse, so he started off this community of people-- not a residential community, a community of people in their ordinary jobs, but who gathered around volunteer work at a residential center. There were symposiums about politics and peace and how to argue in a way where you weren't seeking to murder each other. And that work's continued.
About 10,000 people a year go through the programs at Corrymeela, most of those people going through on site up on the very north coast of Ireland. Programs involving young people or people from different political points of view or religious points of view or community points of view or economic points of view. [00:05:00]
Lee Camp
Yeah. I hear in a lot of, a lot of your work and what I've read about Corrymeela, you're trying to get people to listen well?
Padraig O'Tuama
Well, yeah, trying to get people to listen well. You're trying to get multiple versions of the same story to live in a room. You're trying to expose fractures from within communities where we'd all-- sometimes in a conflicted society like this, you'd think, well, we all think the same and you all think the same.
Often what you're trying to do is to expose that actually the "we" is made up of all kinds of plurals. And actually, "we" don't all agree. We think very different things. Just on this particular topic, we think we all agree. And so, sometimes by realizing that the "we" isn't nearly as simple or as singular as that. And if I can begin to imagine that I can be in close, affiliate relationship with people who actually disagree very seriously on certain topics, just not this one, well then I'll begin to imagine that the "you," the "they," the "other," also has as much complexity within it.
And so therefore, I'm not thinking, [00:06:00] all of you people think all of the same thing about this. I'm beginning to think, oh, you know, maybe on this topic, that other group think very similarly, but on other topics, they think very differently. And so, alliances can become unexpected then, and you can perhaps to feel a little bit less loyal to the group belonging that you imagine forms the "us," and begin to become more curious about the group belonging that forms the "they."
And then suddenly all kinds of unexpected alliances can occur within the context of a group.
That's all done within the context of safety, of course. If there's the presence of threat in a room or an ongoing level of systemic threat, well then such conversations are probably preemptive.
Lee Camp
You've spoken at some length about agreement not being the basis of relationship.
Will you talk a little bit about that?
Padraig O'Tuama
Well, agreement and common ground, for me, are, they're not a bad place to start, you know? If you're bringing a group of people together who've had, you know, a long history of serious fallouts and [00:07:00] serious practiced misunderstandings with each other, having a little bit of agreement or a little bit of common ground at the start might help things get going.
So it's not like I think those are bad things, I just don't think that those are the things that will save us.
I think that curiosity and a capacity to not agree with each other is something that will really help. And to know, what do I do when I don't agree?
And agree to disagree isn't enough either. That's a pretty boring end point. I'm curious to think, how can I begin to examine, am I complicit? Am I part of the problem here? Were I stepping outside of the situation, would I realise, actually I'm the enemy, rather than thinking we're mutual enemies? Is the cause of justice against me? Can I ask myself critical questions in public? Can I disagree seriously, or can I realize, actually a fruitful outcome is where I will change my mind and agree with you that actually I have been on the wrong side of this and that I have benefited from something that I've denied.
So, those are [00:08:00] very serious and civic practices to happen in public, and so you have to create an environment where that can happen carefully.
It looks careful and calm, but also it is filled with anger and with pain and with lament and with fury. Peace regularly doesn't look very peaceful. Peace looks like complex arguments that happen between people. And so, that requires very careful facilitation and very careful boundaries and very focused ways of saying, we're going to stay on topic to this.
Lee Camp
And you're dealing, certainly in the history of Corrymeela, you're dealing with loss of family members, loss of loved ones...
Padraig O'Tuama
Yeah. Well, all kinds of losses. Loss of family members, loss of loved ones, loss of safety, loss of the imagination about what the future can be. Also loss of language, loss of a sense of territory, loss of a sense of historical connection with a history that you love, loss of the name for the place that you love and the introduction of somebody else's name for the place where you are.
There's all these various levels of losses [00:09:00] and each of those can manifest itself in different ways. So often we're speaking about different kinds of losses in groups of people with different kinds of experiences and different styles of a relationship with conflict.
It's a wonder we get anything done at all.
[Both laugh]
Lee Camp
Would you talk a bit about how so often the challenge of listening seems to be burdened with the notion of that simply to listen or to seek to understand somehow underwrites complicity?
Padraig O'Tuama
Yeah. So the words you mentioned there, listening and complicity and understand... they're all words that are gathered around this question of who's right and who's wrong.
Who do I believe who's right and who do I believe who's wrong, and do I have sympathy for somebody who believed something terrible? And if I do have sympathy for somebody who believed or did something terrible, am I on their side just because I have sympathy for them, or can I have sympathy for somebody who did the intolerable?[00:10:00]
In a certain sense, these are questions that the human condition has been gathered around for years. When you look at the questions at the heart of the, the Jewish book of Leviticus in the Hebrew Bible, that book is examining seriously the question of purity. And not just purity in the idea of a God, but purity in the sense of, who's going to infect me with something or who do I think has done something so serious that they need to be removed from us for a while before they're admitted back in?
So these are ancient questions and they're manifesting today. You know, you can see them occurring on Twitter, very definitely, in a small way, but that's got serious consequences. The questions around cancel culture are really the questions that the book of Leviticus is also holding. And the book of Leviticus has a number of different prescriptions as to what should happen in that-- the book of Leviticus doesn't have one simple prescription or solution.
Often in a situation like [00:11:00] here, like in Ireland-- and it's really important for me to say that I don't think the practices in Ireland transfer elsewhere. Every place needs to look at the question about how they do this there. So, I'll answer from the point of view of Ireland.
From our perspective here, to bring somebody into a room who has lost a member of their family who was killed by the British army, for instance, and then bringing somebody else into the room who has lost a member of their family who were killed by the IRA... you've got these questions of legitimate forces in the room. Who believes what is a legitimate force?
Some people in the room will say, yeah, here we are in Northern Ireland, which is the part of the United Kingdom. Somebody else will say, no, here we are in Ireland, which is occupied territory by the United Kingdom. And how do you have a conversation?
And if a person can find the way to listen to somebody else's point of view, they might feel like they're being disloyal to their loved one who was murdered. Or they might feel like they're going to have their own group belonging questioned if somebody said, "I heard that you were part of that dialogue program with people from the other side." [00:12:00] You know, for you to find anything of empathy with somebody from there is to be complicit in the very wrong that you're seeking to overcome through your advocacy for justice.
And so in, in any one engagement, whether that's friendship, whether that's becoming friends with your neighbor, whether that's engaging in a peace program, you've got all of these conflicting desires happening all at once.
And often the imagination is, is that there's going to be a single, simple solution to what the outcome of that's going to look like. And I think the work of peace is to recognize that even in every individual, there are so many plurals. And at the same time, you can feel like, I'm glad I met that person from the other side; as well as to feel like, God, it makes me feel a little bit complicit; as well as to think, I learned something; as well as to think, I had curiosity; as well as to think, that hurt; as well as to think, this is a compromise that I think is justifiable and in the name of peace, but God, I still wish I didn't have to make that compromise.
So all of those things can happen in the one person, [00:13:00] and I think part of the imagination that says, this is all for the good, and it's, you know, the outcome of this is always going to be good, and fully good... I think that puts people into conflict with the many intelligences and the many wisdoms that they're experiencing by being part of something.
There's always going to be pain, extra pain, by taking part in peace. And the question is, is this pain tolerable for me right now? And that's not something that you can dictate to a population of people. That's something that individual people have to ask themselves, and decide whether they will or won't.
For instance, I'll give you an example. There was-- sometimes we've done single community engagements. So working with a bunch of Catholics and a bunch of Protestants. Now, those are, I should say, those are shortcuts, really, to talking about working with a bunch of people who believe that Northern Ireland is a valid part of the United Kingdom and working with people who say, I don't even want to say the word Northern Ireland, I want to call it the North and it's a part of Ireland.
Catholic and [00:14:00] Protestant aren't-- here, they're markers for a political understanding, really. What you think about British-Irish relations and what you think about this jurisdiction that was created 100 years ago by the British Northern Ireland, "Catholic / Protestant" are shortcuts to talking about that.
So, we had a bunch of Catholic people, and we worked with them for 12, 13 weeks, single identity groups, really to talk about, how do you disagree with each other? How do you work out with the fact that you don't all agree with each other about what a peaceful solution in the future might look like?
And then, at the same time, we were working with a bunch of people, a bunch of Protestant people, asking the same kind of questions, so that it wasn't just an imagination of, oh, you people all think the following and you all disagree with us. It's kind of realizing, oh, we, we disagree with ourselves, like I mentioned earlier on.
And there was a Catholic woman in the group of Catholic people who was delighted and who was a very active part of the 12 weeks of meeting in the Catholic single identity group, and she benefited a lot from it. It was her own choice to participate. But when it came time to meet with the Protestant group, she said, "Um, I'm [00:15:00] going to step out of this process now," which was entirely her own choice.
You could think that that, therefore, is a failure or a reluctance of her to be part of a project of peace. But that's not the case at all. She had been bereaved three times. Three close members of her family had been murdered. She knew that Protestant people would probably feel embarrassed to have somebody like her in the room.
Now, whether that was accurate or not, that was her overriding concern. And she thought she didn't want to get in the way of a group having so much discussion when there was somebody who had been known to have carried so much grief in public. So she stepped out of that group.
With all her best wishes, wrote a letter for the Protestant folks, to say, "I've been part of this, I wish you all the best. But for reasons of my own, and here they are, this is the reason why I'm not taking part in that." That was her own individual choice to make, and it was filled with wisdom. And my opinion was irrelevant.[00:16:00]
And my job is not to say what the shape of that should look like. My job was to accompany people as they made their own informed decisions like that. And I think her, her participation, and then her choice to not continue to participate, was one that the group learned a huge amount from.
Lee Camp
I'm reminded of a story that is somewhat comedic and certainly not as serious in its consequences as the case you just indicated.
But your story about one of your 11-year-olds that you worked with as a school teacher that asked about God creating Protestants, I think was how her line went...
Padraig O'Tuama
Ya. I was a chaplain, and there was this magnificent 11-year-old who was fantastic at football. And she, I think she'll either grow up to be a footballer or a lawyer, because she had skills in abundance for both of these.
She loved to lay out a thesis when she was building something, so I knew her well. And so she said to me, "Padraig, answer me this," because I was a chaplain, they call me by my first name... "Answer me this: [00:17:00] God made us, right?"
And I knew she was just doing the lawyerly thing of establishing an argument. And I was like, okay, fine. I mean, I have questions about what God means and made and all that, but I knew that this was just the opening argument. So, "God made us, right?" And I said, "Yeah, yeah."
"And God loves us all, right?" And again, I have questions about what does that mean to conjugate a verb for the God? Anyway, but I knew that wasn't her final point. And I said, "Yeah, yeah, sure."
And she goes, "Answer me this: why did God make Protestants?"
And that's a serious question. She was born years after the peace agreements. And peace agreements are only the start of something, never the end of something.
But I wanted to know why she'd ask that. Because she was such a fair minded individual in her class. And she would not tolerate bullying from amongst her class, you know. But here she was.
And I said, "Tell me more about your question." And she said, "They hate Him and they hate us." As in us, Catholics, and Him, God.
And, I mean, she's 11, and I just heard that she had been educated very well by a [00:18:00] society that had built itself on an imagination of the "them," and an imagination that the "they" hate "us." And so therefore, because of that imagination, you begin to think that they were made by some other god.
And how do you begin to explain that to an 11-year-old? She was very intelligent. But really all she was doing was telling me that she's part of a society that she's part of.
And so I said, uh, "I know a lot of Protestants who'd love to have you on their football team." And she was like, "Really?" I was like, "Yeah, you're, you're brilliant."
And part of me wanted to think the interruption of this narrative is not going to be theoretical, it's going to be human based. That-- and that, I'm saying that within an Irish context. I'm not saying that's the same in the United States. But in an Irish context, for her, the interruption of that needed to be societal and needed to be policy based, yes, but from her point of view, I think she needed to play football with people who she really liked.
And then she said, because Ireland had been beaten by France in the football the week before and it had been a handball, had been [00:19:00] a last minute goal, and it was discovered later on that it was a handball, but only after the match had finished, you know.
So after, you know, when I told her that there was Protestants that I knew who'd love to play football with her, she said, um, "Answer me another question: what about French people? What God made them?"
[Both laugh]
And we were all united in our hatred of the French that week because of the Ireland loss. So I was like, "You're definitely right. Some other God made the French."
She was magnificent. She'd be in her twenties now, presumably fighting lots of law cases or scoring goals in football.
Lee Camp
Yes. Yeah.
You're listening to No Small Endeavor and our conversation with Padraig O Tuama from 2020.
I love hearing from you. Tell us what you're reading, who you're paying attention to, or send us feedback about today's episode. You can reach me at lee@nosmallendeavor.com.
You can get show notes for this episode in your podcast app or wherever you [00:20:00] listen. These notes include links to resources mentioned in the episode, as well as a PDF of my complete interview notes, and a full transcript.
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Coming up, the importance of recognizing every conflict is unique and in need of unique care, storytelling as a moral and spiritual practice, and how lessons learned from peacemaking can help one to make peace with oneself. Plus, Padraig reads some of his poems.
I've learned from you about this book, Moving Beyond Sectarianism, and, uh, their scale of sectarian danger. Would you talk a little bit about that? I find that just a remarkable sort of, uh, construct.
Padraig O'Tuama
So this book, Moving Beyond Sectarianism, published by Columbia Press in 2001, I think, is written by an American Mennonite and a Scottish [00:21:00] nun. Cecilia Clegg is from Scotland, had lived in Ireland for many years. She is a sociologist, extraordinary, and theologian. And Joe Liechty is an American Mennonite who had lived in Ireland for years too.
And so, they did a sociological study, really, of what is sectarianism? What does it look like? What's the shape? What motivates it? What are some of the underlying layers? If a person says they hate us and they hate our God, what's underneath that? How do you begin to ask those questions?
So it's a very systematic exploration of that. Absolutely particular to Ireland, and I don't believe in the universal, really. But there are some things about it that apply elsewhere.
And one of the things they do is to talk about, what is a scale, from, I think, 1 to 11 of a non-sectarian statement to a sectarian statement. And then they problematize that, too, because something that seems very non-sectarian can be full of sectarianism, um, and then something that seems very sectarian can actually just be being honest as well.
The first one they say is, we are [00:22:00] different, we believe differently. And the final one is, you are evil, or you are the devil. And what are the steps along the way?
And it's easy to think, oh yeah, you know, in my lifetime I definitely just want to be based here, you know, and the thing of tolerating all differences. But some differences shouldn't be tolerated, so along the way they have things to say, you know... "Because I disagree so seriously with what you think, I'm going to tell you what I think so that we can have an honest relationship with each other."
That's a totally reasonable thing to say. It's filled with, with possibilities of violences that have been enacted in the name of that kind of language. But that doesn't mean that that kind of language shouldn't be used, because we do have serious disagreements with each other.
One of the other steps is to say, "You are not who you say you are. We are who you say you are." That's a very serious thing. I'm a gay man and I've had people for years say to me, you're not a proper man. And from an analytical point of view, one of the things that they're doing is they're taking the possibility of empowered self determination [00:23:00] and self communication from me, and telling me that I fit into their category for me, not my category for me. And so, that's happening all the time. And when you can begin to look at the ways we speak to each other through their lens, there can be some really, really helpful wisdoms and analyses that they offer.
Lee Camp
I'm interested, you've already three or four times have said, "I'm only speaking for the case in Ireland."
Padraig O'Tuama
Lee Camp
Padraig O'Tuama
Because I've seen it so often. I mean, we've had people here, God almighty, we've been plagued with people from overseas here who've arrived here to say, "Oh yeah, you know, I've been in the Balkans, so I understand that, so therefore I understand everything here, and I--" God Almighty, go home, leave us alone.
Or people who think that the Irish situation can be understood through the lens of Israel and Palestine or through the lens of the Balkans or, further afield, through Korea or South Africa. And there are similar dynamics, but then there's also always going to be [00:24:00] particularities.
I've heard some people imagine that because I've worked in conflict resolution here, that therefore I'd have solutions for dialogue about race in the United States. God Almighty. I mean, the Irish witness in the United States has been one in, of complicity with slavery and maintaining that. Who the hell would I think I am that just because I've been working here in these dynamics that I would have anything other than repentance and learning to do, were I in the United States?
So, questions of power manifest themselves very differently. And I always want to be really careful not to assume that because I've been long practiced in making mistakes here, that that necessarily gives me much wisdom for application elsewhere.
I suppose I always want things to be a proposal for a conversation rather than an imposition for the idea that I have any imagination about what something should look like in the United States or in other countries.
Lee Camp
Speaking from the American context, one of the things that we're certainly dealing with, and have dealt with in [00:25:00] various waves since the founding of the United States, is, um, various forms of Christianity and nationalism... and obviously, Irish Catholicism a different species, or sort of Christianity and nationalism, I suppose.
But what are some of your basic observations that you've had there about the ways in which Christianity gets co-opted, that rightful love for place gets co-opted? What are things you're learning and seeing and things you're having to grapple with and struggle with in that regard?
Padraig O'Tuama
Well, I suppose I want to trouble the word nationalism, because I don't think there is such a single thing as nationalism.
I sometimes hear British people critique Irish nationalism, and I find that both insulting and narrow minded, as well as lack of information. British nationalism, over the course of 700 years in Ireland, has sought to impose a version of nationalism from Britain and Ireland. Irish partial independence came about 100 years ago.
And so, I'm [00:26:00] always curious as to what practice of colonization and war making that is currently condemning nationalism had over the course of 400 years. And how adequate are they in naming that, and dealing with that in their own historical lessons, in their own pedagogy of historical education and school, public commemorations.
So, I see lots of small countries around the world who have been yearning for national independence for centuries, suddenly begin to express something about nationalism. And then you have these erstwhile colonial forces, and I do consider the United States, in a certain sense, white America, to have had an American interests overseas imagination that has started wars in many places, as well as Britishness, as well as Frenchness, as well as Spanishness.
They are the ones saying, "Oh, nationalism's a dangerous thing." And part of me wants to go, "How the hell do you know? You've been going around making wars for 500 years." Um, not America, obviously. They've come more lately to the war making machine.
So therefore, the question [00:27:00] as to what do we mean by nationalism... When a small country just says, do you know what? We'd actually like a little bit of self determination. We'd like a constitution that we've written in our own language. That doesn't mean that we're going to be violent to people from other places that want to come in here. Not necessarily.
It's usually the places that have been the most violent are the ones who are being the most critical of their erstwhile colonies that are seeking to find a self sense of self determination and struggle into that articulation.
So, what we mean by nationalism is something that I think we probably need a variety of different words to refer to that. And I regularly hear people who live in countries that have had a strong public muscularity in the war making machine of colonialism be very, very public about their opinion about small independent countries that are seeking to have our own languages and seeking to have our own determinations.
And I think most of the job of empire and former empire is to [00:28:00] demonstrate how they know they have debts, not declarations, because of the wars they've started, and because of the languages they annihilated, and because of the self determination, because of the splitting up of communities, because of the famines that they orchestrated and then called natural and they weren't.
All of these things are the techniques and technologies of the last few hundred years of European expansion. A, into Europe, and then B, further beyond Europe. And I hear lots of countries deny that they have that and think, oh no, that's just the past. We're just talking about today. And I think that most people who have inherited a war affected past don't see that the past is so, um, close.
We're speaking in English, for God's sake. I wish to God that my English were much poorer than it is. And I wish to God my Irish were as fluent as my English were. And that's an ongoing way within which the past is very present today.
I [00:29:00] look to the United States and I hear the amount of Murphys and McCarthys and O'Tuamas and O'Sullivans all around the place, and I think about how did the Irish who suffered a lot here, nonetheless, turn those into the creation of suffering for people in the Trail of Tears, uh, in the Irish support for the ongoing support for enslavement in the 1800s in the United States.
I wish to God that Irish people had been more critical of imperial powers when Irish people left here because of the famine. But unfortunately, typically Irish people joined up with those very forces in oppressing local populations in Jamaica, Montserrat, New Zealand, Australia, the United States and Canada.
It's to our shame.
Lee Camp
As we mentioned earlier, Padraig is a poet. I asked him to [00:30:00] introduce and then read his poem, The Facts of Life.
Padraig O'Tuama
I wrote my master's on a narrative analysis of human encounter in the Gospel of Mark, particularly between Jesus of Nazareth and marginalized people. And I was reading a commentary on Greek. It was a great commentary, and I looked to the back of it to think, what other commentaries have this publishing house published in this series? Because it was so good, it was just magnificent.
And there was, you know, other Biblical books written on the, on the fly cover they had, you know, we've got other, in this series, there's a commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, a commentary on First and Second Peter. There's a commentary on the book of Revelation.
There's a commentary on the facts of life There's a commentary on the the Acts of the Apostles. So nestled in there was this term 'the facts of life,' in the midst of all these biblical commentary books.
And seeing that phrase, 'the facts of life,' just there like that shocked me. I didn't know what to make of it. And this poem [00:31:00] is, I'd say, 90 percent written in the 10 minutes after seeing that.
But I just couldn't get over, what are the facts of life? And seeing it there made me query.
In conflict resolution, you're always thinking about what are the facts and what are the perceptions. And the difference between facts and perception is a major element that you're always going to be involved with.
And it's not as simple as we think. Because we argue about facts and perceptions all the time. And then we can think that perceptions are demoted and facts are the things that we want. And who decides what a fact is, do you know? If somebody says, "I haven't slept a wink since my husband was murdered 30 years ago," you know, do you want to argue with that on a level of fact?
So here's a poem called The Facts of Life.
That you were born / and you will die.
That you will sometimes love enough / and sometimes not.
That you will lie / if only to yourself.
[00:32:00] That you will get tired.
That you will learn most from the situations / you did not choose.
That there will be some things that move you / more than you can say.
That you will live / that you must be loved.
That you will avoid questions most urgently in need of your attention.
That you began as the fusion of a sperm and an egg / of two people who once were strangers / and may well still be.
That life is fair. / That life is sometimes good / and sometimes even better than good.
That life is often not so good.
That life is real / and if you can survive it, well, / survive it well / with love / and art / and meaning given / where meaning's scarce.
That you will learn to live with [00:33:00] regret. / That you will learn to live with respect.
That the structures that constrict you / may not be permanently constricting.
That you will probably be okay.
That you must accept change / before you die / but you'll die anyway.
So you might as well live / and you might as well love. / You might as well love. / You might as well love.
The Pedagogy of Conflict is a poem that I wrote following a week long encounter with folks from all across Ireland of a whole variety of political and religious points of view, as well as folks from Israel and Palestine, from a whole variety of political and religious points of view.
And our aim wasn't to come to agreement in the room, but our aim was to practice in the room [00:34:00] something that might be beneficial for continuing to be in conversation with each other, to learn from each other, and to educate each other in terms of, um, the pasts that we didn't hear the other comprehend.
And in the room, at one point, somebody said that they'd murdered someone, and they'd served a sentence for that. And somebody else said, "Don't use the word murder," because they were part of the same political point of view. They said, "Lives were lost in the context of conflict. Don't use the word murder."
That person said, "I'll use whatever word I want." And somebody else said, "Oh, I killed somebody," and another person disagreed with that.
Somebody else said, "I only ever shot at legitimate targets." And then somebody else said, "Well, I suppose that made me a legitimate target then, when your organization shot at me when I was a child."
And so I found myself thinking about grammar and numbers and words as a result of that. And there's a, there's a poem, a longer poem called The Pedagogy of Conflict, and I'll read the third part of it here.
When I was a child, / I learned to [00:35:00] 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.
Lee Camp
We're going to take a short break, but coming right up, storytelling as moral and spiritual practice, lessons from peacemaking that may also apply to making peace with [00:36:00] oneself, and some moral exemplars for living a life full of honest question asking, justice seeking, and peace making.
I think for the last bit of conversation here, I would like to turn to one last question about peace with oneself.
I noted, especially in Readings from the Book of Exile, for example, 'Tis the Gift. You start, "'Tis the gift to be gentle / with yourself at the end / of a day when you've given / of a day when you're spent."
I've received that as a sort of, uh, sweet invitation to be gentle with oneself and to be peaceable with oneself. How does that work with you, and what are your own habits and practices of coming to be at peace with oneself?
Padraig O'Tuama
Partly, that poem is a somewhat presumptuous continuation of the well known [00:37:00] Shaker hymn, "'Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free."
So it can be sung to that tune if you're a singing person. And there's a brewing company in Belfast have taken that poem and put it on the side of one of their stouts, which is a great joy. I think that'd be one of my favorite publications.
Lee Camp
That would be a great joy to me as well.
Padraig O'Tuama
Yeah. To be on the side of a bottle of stout.
I suppose I have never seen a situation in conflict zones and in conflict dialogue where accusing somebody in a way that is built on the imagination of their total demise has ever worked. So if I want you to believe something, accusing you and insulting you, where I only think that I just want to see your ridicule in public, I have never seen that work.
Even when it's justified. And it often is, because we believe terrible things about each other and have done terrible things to each other. And I've been in rooms with people where one person would say, I'm a member of this organization, and another person would say, well, that [00:38:00] organization shot my father, and then deny that they shot him or call him a legitimate target.
So those are terrible rooms to be in. Um, we need to say difficult things to each other, but partly where I've seen that kind of dialogue work has been where somebody can speak very truthfully and very bluntly... but with an invitation to say, we can do this better with each other. We don't have to be friends, but I don't want you to have to face the kind of thing that you made us face. I want you to face what you did, and then we can participate in something civic together.
So I've seen that work, and I've seen it powerfully. It's painful. And I suppose I'm interested in, how can I start that with myself? How can I have a spiritual practice that can be blunt in naming wrongdoing of myself, but also have an imagination of the self that is an invitation to a better way of being human, a more moral way of being human.
And [00:39:00] that interests me. And I suppose I'm interested in an inner practice that locates me in the here and now and locates me also in the face of my pains and my privileges and asks me to do something interesting in the practice of those things as a person alive today. So I suppose, for me, a spiritual practice is to just greet everything, to say hello to it.
Every day has the possibility of seeing things that I've anticipated and things I haven't anticipated. Ignatius of Loyola is an old friend of mine, the founder of the Jesuits. Dead a long time, but I think about him every day. And he has helped me a huge amount to be present to life as it is. Hopefully, more and more of life as it is.
And I think by starting off the day by thinking, well, here's what I know is going to happen today, you know, there'll be an interview with Lee at some point later on today, or, and there'll be a phone call after that, and then there'll be some poems. And to think about the things that I'm thinking, oh, those will be lovely. To think about the things that I think, oh, that'll be the highlight of my day. And then to think about the thing that I'm [00:40:00] already imagining, oh, that's gonna be terrible.
And to find just a little bit of distance from my imagination of all those things, and to think, well, how do I want to be in the presence of all those things?
Whether what I'm anticipating to be beautiful is beautiful or not, whether what I'm anticipating to be terrible is terrible or not. That there might be a small practice of hospitality in that, that can help me be more present, be more honest and more truthful, to myself and to other people in those moments.
Um, to pay attention to the little things that annoy me, the little arguments I have in my head, a repetitioner of an argument or a fantasy argument with somebody. How can I pay attention to those and to go, what's happening? Why am I inventing an argument that's not even happening or continuing an argument that's been going on for 15 years in my head?
Why am I doing that? Who are these characters that I'm dragging up like an archetype in order to create some kind of visual manifestation of something else that's happening inside of me? How can I pay attention to those things?
Not by shouting at myself or saying that I'm a total failure as a human being. [00:41:00] But by asking myself to take something seriously, take something playfully, and to consider that to be the meat of spirituality.
Lee Camp
You mentioned Ignatius of Loyola being an old friend of yours. Who are other friends of yours, in that regard, that you enjoy friendship with?
Padraig O'Tuama
That's a lovely question.
Wangari Maathai is, uh, comes to my mind so regularly. She was the first East African woman to get a PhD. She got the Nobel Peace Prize for her Green Belt Movement. She only died a few years ago.
She had gone back to the place that she'd grown up and seen that the stream she'd played in was now barely a trickle. And so much of that was as a result of the Catholic missionaries having - plenty of whom were Irish, I'm sure - having come to her part of Kenya and ripped up the fig tree because the fig tree was seen to be a kind of a religious symbol for the local religion, Kikuyu religion I think it was. But the fig tree had deep roots, and so by killing these trees that were indigenous to the area, [00:42:00] a lot of erosion happened and so a lot of water shortage happened and a lot of conflict arose as a result of this water shortage.
So she started the Green Belt Movement. I might get the numbers wrong, but from what I remember, she said she planted seven trees as as a kind of a restorative process to this erosion, and five died. And so she planted 52 million, and she won the Nobel Peace Prize.
So, anytime I look at trees, and anytime I think of the relationship between place and conflict and place and the peoples who are living in that place, I turn to her, for her analysis as well as her joy.
So she's certainly one. Ignatius, absolutely.
Perhaps highest among all is Judas. I think Judas is an extraordinary character and he is a friend that I turn to as I think of my, how wrong my desires can be, and how I can get in the way of myself. And then also, how terrible people can be in the name of [00:43:00] treating somebody who's done wrong. I think Judas knows a lot about that.
I think of Ruth and Orpah and Naomi. I think those, a trinity of women, know a lot about each other and know a lot about the human condition and about borders and law. And I live in a place where borders and law are on my mind all the time, so I've spent a lot of time, um, in conversation with them.
Who else? I mean, there's-- if I start naming the poets who I consider to be friends, some of them are living, but I'd never be in touch with them, as well as all the dead poets, um, I'd be here a long time.
Emily Dickinson is one. I love Emily Dickinson's work, because it's so strange. It's like some other being wrote it.
And I love her letters, because they're so full of warmth and humor and birds and flowers and, um, compassion. Her letters of condolence to anybody who's recently been bereaved are a thing of great beauty.
This poem was written, Shaking Hands, for a time when, [00:44:00] um, the British queen, Queen Elizabeth II, and, um, Martin McGuinness, who was the deputy First Minister in Northern Ireland, um, met and shook hands.
Each of them considered each other an enemy. There's reasons why. Um, and they hadn't shaken hands in public before. And I was invited to this event, and I was thinking a lot about shaking hands and I suppose I wanted to think about what the impact of shaking hands could be and what it could look like. And its humble possibilities as well as its huge possibilities, altogether.
It's much longer than what I'll read. I'll only read a selection.
Shaking Hands.
Because what's the alternative? / Because of courage. / Because of loved ones lost. / Because it's a small thing; shaking hands; it happens every day. / Because I heard of one man whose hands [00:45:00] haven't stopped shaking since a market day in Omagh. / Because it takes a second to say hate, but it takes longer, much longer, to be a great leader. / Much, much longer.
Because shared space without human touching doesn't amount to much. / Because it's tough. / Because it's meant to be tough, and this is the stuff of memory, the stuff of hope, the stuff of gesture, and meaning and leading. / Because it has taken so, so long. / Because it has taken land and money and languages and barrels and barrels of blood.
Because lives have been lost. / Because lives have been taken.
Because to be bereaved is to be troubled by grief. / Because more than two troubled peoples live here. / Because I know a woman whose hand hasn't been shaken [00:46:00] since she was a man. / Because shaking a hand is only a part of the start. / Because I know a woman whose touch calmed a man whose heart was breaking. / Because privilege is not to be taken lightly.
Because this just might be good. / Because who said that this would be easy? / Because some people love what you stand for, and for some, if you can, they can. / Because solidarity means a common hand. / Because a hand is only a hand; so hang on to it.
So join your much discussed hands. / We need this; for one small second. / So touch. / So lead.
Lee Camp
It's been a privilege, uh, visiting with you, Padraig. Thank you.
Padraig O'Tuama
Lee Camp
And, uh, grateful for your work and, uh, grateful for your, your [00:47:00] witness in the world and the beauty of your words and the beauty of your work. We thank you.
Padraig O'Tuama
Lee Camp
You've been listening to No Small Endeavor and our interview with Padraig O Tuama, theologian, poet, and peacemaker.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of Lilly Endowment Incorporated, a private philanthropic foundation supporting the causes of community development, education, and religion.
And the support of the John Templeton Foundation, whose vision is to become a global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing.
Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show possible. Christie Bragg, Jakob Lewis, Sophie Byard, Tom [00:48:00] Anderson, Kate Hays, Mary Eveleen Brown, Cariad Harmon, Jason Sheesley, Ellis Osburn, and Tim Lauer.
Thanks for listening, and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life, together.
No Small Endeavor is a production of PRX, Tokens Media, LLC, and Great Feeling Studios.