Krista Tippett: Hello, again, and for the last time in this course.

I hope you feel like you’re a little more able to traverse the ground beneath your feet with some tools, some strategies, some gentle muscles perhaps strengthened toward balance and tenderness: a sense of homecoming to your mind and body; joy when you’re able; an embrace of wintering from cyclical time to time; and kindness, including kindness to yourself.

As we close, I want to add one final offering to that list, one gentle set of muscles to traverse the ground beneath our feet. And that is with a practice of prayer.

I began this course by reflecting on the force and the wisdom that Buddhist psychology and meditation and mindfulness have brought to modern people. It’s strangely a very sensitive thing, and a less common move, to introduce the contemplative practice of prayer — to talk about prayer, even, in anything but a firmly religious context.

And yet in any given opinion poll, all over the world — certainly in the United States — over 90 percent of people, when asked, will say that, yes, they sometimes pray. I think we imagine this, in contexts like that, as a kind of personal utterance — prayers of request or of desperation; prayer as asking for something. But prayer in religious and human tradition is complex. It is a rich, rich spectrum. And there is a world of forms of prayer that is as complex and varied as we are as human beings.

As with meditation, there is deep psychological and practical intelligence, and an ancient acuity in the practice of prayer, the ritual of prayer, that holds things we are just now learning on our scientific frontiers: intelligence about connections between bodily postures and the nature of vitality; the importance and the quality of grieving; the possibility of deep personal growth; and the possibility of all of those things as communal. As much as individual and private, prayer is often communal as much as it is personal, amidst pain and rupture and rebirth.

All of these impulses and a discipline of bringing them together with creativity — all of them come together in Pádraig Ó Tuama. He is a social healer, a conflict resolution and transformation practitioner. He’s a poet, and he is a pray-er. He brings sensitivity and wisdom and creativity and scholarship to both exploring and also teaching about what prayer is.

A couple of years ago, some of us from On Being went to the Corrymeela Community, which literally helped bring about peace through human relationship and human refuge in Northern Ireland. For some years, Pádraig was the community leader there. I spoke with him, in the interview we had, about his wonderful book called In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World. It is a prose work, but it is also, like everything Pádraig does, equal measures contemplative and poetic. And, I would say, pragmatic: aimed at how we, each of us, can be agents in our own lives and agents of healing for the world around us.

It hinges around a simple ritual of saying hello: hello to days, to experiences, to stories, to memories, to grief, to hope; saying hello in a spirit of curiosity and tenderness and honesty. And I would say that this saying hello that Pádraig takes us through is a really beautiful manifestation and expression of what you’ve heard me call my definition of spirituality at its best: a practice of befriending reality. So in this part of our conversation you’re going to hear, I had asked him to read the final sentences of In the Shelter.

Pádraig Ó Tuama: “Neither I nor the poets I love found the keys to the kingdom of prayer and we cannot force God to stumble over us where we sit. But I know that it’s a good idea to sit anyway. So every morning I sit, I kneel, waiting, making friends with the habit of listening, hoping that I’m being listened to. There, I greet God in my own disorder. I say hello to my chaos, my unmade decisions, my unmade bed, my desire and my trouble. I say hello to distraction and privilege, I greet the day and I greet my beloved and bewildering Jesus. I recognize and greet my burdens, my luck, my controlled and uncontrollable story. I greet my untold stories, my unfolding story, my unloved body, my own love, my own body. I greet the things I think will happen and I say hello to everything I do not know about the day. I greet my own small world and I hope that I can meet the bigger world that day. I greet my story and hope that I can forget my story during the day, and hope that I can hear some stories, and greet some surprising stories during the long day ahead. I greet God, and I greet the God who is more God than the God I greet. Hello to you all, I say, as the sun rises above the chimneys of North Belfast. Hello.”

Tippett: I don’t know if we need a question. I just love those pages. I loved — I love that image of you praying, and how you pray.

Ó Tuama: Yeah. I do love praying — prier from French: to ask. And what I love about that word is it doesn’t require belief. It just requires a recognition of need. And I think the recognition of need is something that brings us to a deep, common language about what it means to be human. And if you’re not in a situation where you know need, well, then you’re lucky. But you will be; that won’t last for too long. Need is happening in so many ways, in so many levels, in people and in societies and in communities.

And I suppose I really think that prayer is also not only naming or asking, but just saying hello to what is and trying to be brave, trying to be courageous in that situation, and trying to be generous to your own self, also — to go, Here’s a day when I feel intimidated, or, Here’s a day I’m just waiting for the end of it, or, Here’s a day when I have huge expectations of delight, do you know, because those can also be troubling.

And Ignatius cautions people to have an active detachment, recognizing the things that will cause you great distress, as well as things that can cause you great delight, can be things that distract you from what he calls your principle and foundation, which I suppose I ultimately understand as love, and that that is the principle and foundation of the human project, of the human story, of the human encounter, is to move toward each other in love.

In Corrymeela we talk about living well together; that that is the vision we have, to live well together. That doesn’t mean to agree. That doesn’t mean that everything will be perfect. It means to say that in the context of imperfection and difficulty, we can find the capacity and the skill, as well as the generosity and courtesy, to live well together.
And I think in the morning times I say hello to all those things, and then I try to say hello a little bit to what I know won’t happen.

And in that sense, prayer becomes a way within which you cultivate curiosity and the sense of wonder so that you know, I’ll be returning back to this and can say hello, tomorrow, to something that I wouldn’t have even known about today.

And that’s how I understand prayer — in that way. Every now and then, Jesus shows up and says something interesting.

[music]

Tippett: I love the way Pádraig uses language and, just as importantly, the vividness and power that his words carry. The mystery of that word “God” — the insufficiency of it, and yet we need it. I love when he speaks of prayer as not only naming or asking, but saying hello to what is and trying to be brave, trying to be courageous in that situation, trying to be generous to your own self, also — very much echoing some of our other teachers for this course and making that connection between contemplative practice and life as it is lived.

So the invitation, here, is to explore the contemplative practice that is prayer, this deep spiritual and human impulse and ritual. Maybe for you this is a familiar, lifelong practice. Even if it is, I want to invite you, as we end this course and then just continue living our lives, to give yourself a time of discovery here. And as a beginning, a starting point, ponder in your journal: what is the mother tongue and the spiritual homeland of prayer as you know it, as you’ve experienced it, if it is part of your experience, part of your culture that formed you?

I want to also point at what Pádraig said about need. Part of the impulse to pray often has to do with need, and is sometimes very present in moments of crisis, urgency, immediacy. I think this is honored in prayer in a distinctive way. And I love what he says — that the recognition of need is something that brings us to a deep, common language about what it means to be human.

Something that I have learned to treasure in adulthood as I explored more ancient traditions of prayer is that in the Bible, and in all sacred texts, there are passages — actually, in the Psalms, which is the prayer book of the Bible, there’s a lot of praise, there’s a lot of beauty, and there’s a lot of anger. There is rage. There is being on the end of injustice. In my younger life, I felt like I couldn’t pray something that I couldn’t identify with. How I’ve learned to come at that, and value that, is that at any given moment in this world, there are people suffering, and there is rage emerging with great dignity and necessity, and there is despair; that I can pray with other people even if it doesn’t describe my life right now.

I’m going into a lot of detail here, but the final thing I want to say is that what this is about is awakening spiritual imagination. And by that, I don’t mean making things up; I mean really cultivating this intellectual, intuitive, creative, ritual orientation toward the formation in ourselves of courage and generosity and love, this inner/outer move that is always interwoven in spiritual life. In my mind, that is meaningful, that is worth pursuing.

I might mention that Ignatius, Pádraig’s mentor, has this incredible tradition of prayer that is about visualization. This is a fantastic way, for some, into spiritual imagination and refreshment and breakthrough. Perhaps that’s something that you might want to explore in the weeks beyond this course.

In part two, we’re going to take a poem of Pádraig’s as our daily Pause, as a focus of prayer. Don’t overthink this. Remember Pádraig’s words, “that neither I nor the poets I love found the keys to the kingdom of prayer, and we cannot force God to stumble over us where we sit.” But, he says, “I know that it’s a good idea to sit anyway.”

We circle back to where we began. We’ve taken in these different offerings of wisdom that echo each other and yet create these beautiful layers of nuance and texture, of possibility and practice, toward living well inside ourselves, making a home inside ourselves, and also, living better together.

You can, of course, return to any of the sessions in this course any time, and let these teachers be companions in the weeks, months, years ahead.
Thank you for being here. I hope that you do indeed feel replenished in a new way, but more than that you’ve acquired some tools you can integrate into your life moving forward, to keep nurturing this capacity in your being.

And when you’re ready to keep learning and walking in the community of accompaniment of this Wisdom experience, consider next turning to our series on Hope — three 6-7 week adventures in cultivating Hope as a muscle that can ground, enliven, and propel the callings we’ve all been given in this time.

I’m going to end with a prayer that is also a blessing, a line of the meditation that we will take in the Pause; words of Pádraig. He says, “So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars.”