Krista Tippett: You’ve also talked about this, Marilyn: that poetry is also about silence. I think you said poetry emerges from silence. And something enlightened, it feels to me, about this church, this institution asking a poet to look at their history and to tell it in words that leave room for silence, for what can’t be said.

Marilyn Nelson: One of the poems in my little book about this church history is about a time when the church, the meeting house, was burned down. And in the poem, it’s my imagination; I hope this happened. But in the poem, everybody in town, the free people, the enslaved people, everybody is rushing around with a bucket brigade, trying to put the fire out. And I have a couple of lines in which people look into each other’s eyes and see their own fear in each other’s eyes. And I think that experience of sharing a crisis beyond expression, beyond words, of looking at each other and seeing one’s own experience, is probably — I hope it’s true, anyway.

Tippett: And Pádraig, you’ve been writing, you’ve written this daily prayer book for the Corrymeela community. Just want to talk a little bit about prayer as a form of words.

Pádraig Ó Tuama: Well …

Tippett: Let me read something beautiful you wrote. “Prayer can be a rhythm that helps us make sense in times of senselessness, not offering solutions but speaking to and from the mystery of humanity. Prayer is rhythm. Prayer is comfort. Prayer is disappointment. Prayer is words and shape and art around desperation and delight and disappointment and desire.”

Ó Tuama: I clearly was in an alliterative mood, the day that I wrote that.

Tippett: Yes, you were.

Ó Tuama: I mean, “prayer,” in English, comes from French, “prier”; to ask. And I think, sometimes, if it’s understood that prayer is only held by those who have a devotion to a religious understanding, we have limited prayer. That’s a limited imagination about what prayer is, because we all ask, and we all come in contact with deep desire. And that in itself is an experience of prayer. And I think one of the benefits of being part of a tradition where you can find form to put your prayer in is that you can feel like there’s a container for the things that it can be difficult to contain.

So that book builds on a form of prayer that you find in the English-language liturgical traditions. The form is called “collect,” which is just the same word as “collect.” It’s just a posher, more prayerful way to say “collect.”

And the idea is that you’re collecting your intention and arranging them. In this form, you’re only allowed to ask one thing. And I think the form of collect is, in the English-language written tradition, as robust as sonnet, because it’s really clear. There’s five steps to it. They don’t have to follow a particular pentameter or any kind of rhythm, but they follow a progress. You name the God that you’re speaking to. And then you say something more, a little bit like some character development. And then you name your request. And then you give a reason for your request, which folds back into the top. And then you finish with a little bird of praise.

And so it makes you ask, what do I want? — one thing. And how do I wrap that into a form that holds it, that reveals something back to me, rather than just a list of demands? I mean, not that you have to pray like this. I mean, half the time, prayer is, Oh God… or something without any words; the deep groans of our experience.

That’s why I like the Stations of the Cross, too, because you move with your body around, and there’s a little repeated piece that you can say — if you want; you don’t have to. But there is form to it. And I think, in poetry, form can hold the things in us that feel formless. And we can find space within form that, if we were to just say that we exist in space, for instance, we would never find that space. And I think we have ways within which we seek to name the things about us.

I remember once being part of a group, and somebody — we were speaking about prayer, and somebody said, “My prayer is, I’d like to laugh again.” And there was such vulnerability, to say that to a roomful of people, “I’d like to laugh again.” I’d like to laugh again — five words. But there’s an entire life wrapped into those small five words. And the compassion and kindness in that room, that was prayer. And if we can treat it as if God’s listening, well, then, we might find a way within which God is listening, because of what we’re creating in the room.

And that goes beyond how you articulate a devotion. That goes into the ways within which you say, well, even if there isn’t a God, well, I’ll make one up in order to respond kindly into this room, in a way that works well.

And that’s what I think prayer can be. It can be a deeply dignifying thing for the desires that we wish to name.

Tippett: And Marilyn, you’ve taught contemplative practice to college students, and when you and I spoke before, you talked about doing contemplative practice with West Point cadets. And you often write about Abba Jacob, who, I think — did you go to college with him? Is that right? You went to college with him, and then he grew up to be Abba Jacob.

I just wonder, what are you thinking about with this idea of prayer, words and prayer?

Nelson: I think, 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. He said, and the whole time during the retreat, they would talk, and then they would go to their rooms and pray. And 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.

I remember once, during a meditation, I had the image of being in a dark universe in which the only light was coming through people who allowed themselves to be open to the divine. “We are the way light” — wow, whose poem is that? Kay Ryan’s poem. “We are the way light enters the universe.” We are the way light enters the universe.

And when we allow the love of the divine to enter us and come through us, we are offering something not only to ourselves, not only the answer to our own little prayers, but also, we are lighting the way.