Dear friends,
I was so moved by your stories of volta — ultimately, stories of turnabout and change — last weekend. I also learnt new ways to think of volta, as dance and dressage applications were raised by you. The generosity with which you respond to the prompts, together with the engagements that occur between people over the responses, always makes for delicious reading.
In the Western Christian calendar, Holy Week has just finished, and today is Easter Sunday. For other calendars, we are in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and the Jewish feast of Pesach will come in three weeks. The punctuation of a year into times of celebration, fasting, ritual, reflection, and action is an old technology, predating all those religions and — most likely — evolving as a way to mark out predictable cycles of a year in order to understand when to plant, harvest, plan, wait, hope. It is a way of both being in time, as well as stepping outside of time, a way of paying obeisance to a season, and at the same time, lifting the heart to something else.
Growing up an Irish Catholic, the word “resurrection” was everywhere — “… the resurrection of the body” we recited in the Creed at mass. These days I don’t believe much in resurrection, but yesterday I watched a video of a beloved friend Glenn reading a children’s story. He died a few years ago, but yesterday I heard his voice, alive and engaging, filled with his own music.
Much poetry seeks to bend time, to animate the past with the present (as if there’s such a thing as the present without the past). In her brilliant poem “Magdalene — The Seven Devils,” Marie Howe says that “… the dead seemed more alive to me than the living” (you can hear her recite it here from an extraordinary conversation between Marie and Krista)
I’ve been thinking about my friend Glenn a lot lately, missing his advice. There’s a part of me that was evoked by him that’s still alive, waiting for him. Hearing his voice yesterday (narrating a story about a little pig too frightened to take a swim in the farm pond), I connected with the me that he drew out of me. It wasn’t enough, but it was enough. A temporary resurrection, perhaps.
“… the dead seemed more alive to me than the living” has a different tone to it when doing awful arithmetic: 33,000 dead, 1,200 dead, hundreds kidnapped, thousands detained, millions unsafe. To think of the dead is to think, too, of death, and the unnecessary deaths that war brings. Poetry can commemorate those who’ve passed away, but language may also be the thing that can prevent deaths. “Let’s negotiate,” for instance. I listen to the news from Gaza with horror every day, hoping that some act of speech — from the UN, from a population, from a confession, a protest, from someone with influence enough to prompt any damned volta that’ll affect ceasefire — can be the key to behaviour change.
Another story. Years ago, I was on a work exchange in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Together with peaceworkers from Belfast, we met Israeli and Palestinian peace activists, often lamenting that the conditions for peace seemed so remote. It happened to be Holy Week, and I decided to walk the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. But I was totally distracted.
Later that day, we met the Palestinian activist and speaker Ali Abu Awwad. He had suffered terribly — imprisonment and bereavement — because of the occupation of the West Bank, and had committed his life to non-violent resistance. He said that the dead do have a message, “Stop killing,” but the question is, Who is listening? Hearing him speak around a small table in the corner of a café, chain-smoking on Good Friday, was the religious experience that I was looking for. Later, waiting for taxis back to Bethlehem from Beit Sahur, I said to him that the day was a religious one for Catholics and that I’d felt distant from the day until I’d heard him speak. I don’t know why, but I cried as I said it. He put his arm around me and said, “I’m not a very good Muslim.” I laughed and said, “I’m a pretty mediocre Catholic.” We were standing on a hill, looking at a land that held olive groves, checkpoints, homes, schools, camps, a separation barrier, places of prayer, buses, taxis, life.
That’s what I hope for today, Easter Sunday, as a mediocre Catholic: that the dead’s voices can speak to the living, telling us to exhaust ourselves to find ways to keep the still living alive. I use “exhaust” deliberately — it’s not easy, there are many ways to try, and it’s demanding (there are great resources to affirm exhaustion but also spur motivation here).
If you have a story about listening to the voices of the dead in order to change the way you live, I’d love to read it. I’d love to know more about how to act on those voices in order to prevent more dead from having to bear that message.
Thanks, friends.
PS. The man I mentioned above, Ali Abu Awwad, together with Robi Damelin (both former guests of Krista’s), were recently featured on Brené Brown’s podcast.
Poetry in the World
April 15 at 6pm, Cleveland, Ohio, US
I’m giving a poetry reading in the Donahue Auditorium at John Carroll University. No registration needed; just show up.
April 19–21, Round Top, Texas, US
I’m delighted to be one of the featured poets at the Round Top Poetry festival. Information and tickets here.
April 25 at 6-7:30pm, New York City, NY, US
I’ll be exploring conflict and change through poetry at an in-person event in partnership with the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Columbia University. You can register for free here. It is currently sold out, but we are working to find a new venue that can take more participants.
April 27, Little Rock, AR, USA
I’ll be offering both an afternoon workshop and an evening talk at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. Details aren’t available yet, but I’ll post them here when they are.
May 14, Pittsburgh, PA, US
For you theologically interested folks, I’ll be speaking at the Festival of Homiletics. Info here.
May 17 at 2–4pm, Camden, Maine, US
I’ll be talking about the word “you” in poetry at the Camden Public Library. You can attend in person or over Zoom. The entire two-day festival is free; information here.
May 24–26, Boone, North Carolina, US
I’m leading a a 48-hour Poetry Unbound retreat, where there will be poetry readings, responding to prompts, and sharing. Information and registration here.
June 27–July 7, Patmos, Greece
I’m one of the speakers at the 10-night “Journeying into Common Good” salon, together with Krista Tippett, Allison Russell, JT Nero, and Joe Henry. More details here.
Aug 7th at 6-7:30pm ET, online
I’ll be exploring conflict and change through poetry at an online event in partnership with the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Columbia University. You can register for free here.
August 23–25, Northamptonshire, England
I’ll be at the Greenbelt Festival, and, among other events, I will be interviewing the brilliant Jenny Mitchell whose poem “A Man in Love with Plants” we featured on a Season 7 episode of Poetry Unbound. You can go here to learn about the festival.
Thank you for your lovely and heartfelt sharings Pádraig!!!
I never knew my paternal grandmother personally. She passed on from a sudden relapse of cancer when I was very young.
The only impression I have of her is a picture of her beaming with joy while standing by my grandfather’s side.
I like to think I inherited some of her joyfulness. It’s entirely possible that her sunny disposition was where my father got his from. Perhaps it was then gifted to me.
For me, this nicely illustrates how the people we love never really leave us, although they may die.
“A part of us dies with them; a part of them lives on in us.” That’s one of my favourite sayings.
So while I may have never gotten to really know my grandmother, in a sense, I do know her.
She lives on in my father, in her pictures, in my uncle and my aunt and in me.
I believe lives are like songs. They arise from silence and end in silence, but those who have heard them can sing them again.
Both of my parents are dead—my mother when I was a child, and my father in the middle of 2020 (one of the quiet non-COVID deaths that year). The message I get from them is a basic one, to not let fear devour my time and instead to live in it. Sometimes I’m able to, sometimes not. In this world, there are days when even getting out of bed can feel like a resurrection.
As a cultural and former Catholic, I’m sending you a good and peaceful Easter, and gratitude for everyone’s generosity. This weekly message certainly helps me see a world and time I want to live in.