A New Imagination of Prayer

Pádraig Ó Tuama and Marilyn Nelson are beloved teachers to many; to bring them together was a delight and a balm. Nelson is a poet and professor and contemplative, an excavator of stories that would rather stay hidden yet lead us into new life. Ó Tuama is a poet, theologian, conflict mediator, and the host of our new podcast, Poetry Unbound. Together, they venture unexpectedly into the hospitable — and intriguingly universal — form of poetry that is prayer.

You can listen to the audio or read the transcript here:

https://onbeing.org/programs/padraig-o-tuama-and-marilyn-nelson-a-new-imagination-of-prayer

A couple of excerpts:

Pádraig Ó Tuama: “So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars. Let us listen to the sound of breath in our bodies. Let us listen to the sounds of our own voices, of our own names, of our own fears. Let’s claw ourselves out from the graves we’ve dug. Let’s lick the earth from our fingers. Let us look up and out and around. The world is big and wide and wild and wonderful and wicked, and our lives are murky, magnificent, malleable, and full of meaning. Oremus. Let us pray."

Marilyn Nelson: In my intuition, prayer is less speaking than it is listening. And I feel that my deepest experiences of prayer have been experiences of shutting up and listening. A friend of mine who is a minister was at a retreat once. The whole time during the retreat, they would talk, and then they would go to their rooms and pray. He was always talking to God. And at one point, during his long talks to God, he heard a voice say, “Shut up and let me love you.”  

And that, for me, is what it is to be quiet enough to feel held, to feel the embrace of the divine, to realize that I am a part of something vaster than vast; and to feel that, to recognize that, to feel thankful for it, and to hope that by opening myself to that awareness, that I am allowing some of that to come through me.