Wild Card with Rachel Martin - Pádraig Ó Tuama

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

“I think joy and melancholy have a lot to say to each other,” Pádraig Ó Tuama tells Rachel. In his poetry, he allows that conversation between joy and melancholy to play out as he explores love, grief, and faith. Pádraig's latest poetry collection is called “Love Between Men.” He tells Rachel about why the Irish language is of the earth, and the fear and relief that comes with admitting the truth.To listen sponsor-free and support the show, sign up for Wild Card+ at plus.npr.org/wildcard See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

I woke up on the morning of my 40th birthday with absolute clarity that I do not believe in heaven. And the comfort that I'd gotten from a kind of a light belief in God was gone. It was a February day and I remember walking in bright cold sunshine in Dublin, feeling the world is open and frightened and frightening and I am alive and I am gay. I just kept on saying it to myself over and over again. The relief of the truth felt like terrifying, and terrific all at the same time. Wow.

Yeah. I told one person who said, you're going on a dangerous path, and I thought, I pity you. And you're right, but I also pity you because I thought, who should be frightened at danger? I'm Rachel Martin, and this is Wildcard, the show where cards control the conversation.

My guest this week is poet Padrig O'Tuma. Padraig O'Tuma's poetry explores deeply spiritual questions about faith and culture, and how to find personal liberation within both. Padrig has a new collection out. It is called Love Between Men, and in it he explores his Catholic faith, his experience with gay conversion therapy,

and what real love looks like. I'm so happy to welcome Padrig Otuma to Wildcard. Hi. Hi. Nice to be with you. It's so nice to have you here. I'm very excited about this. Congratulations on the collection. It is lovely, and we'll get a chance to talk about it.

Round one, memories, you pick, One, two, or three. Let's go with one. One. When was a moment you felt proud of yourself as a kid? Oh. It was when I realized that I spoke Irish and that not everybody else did. Of course, we were learning it in school.

But my mother had been sick when I was younger. And so a kind woman, a couple of doors down, looked after me for a few hours a day and she didn't speak any English. She only spoke Irish. And so I didn't kind of understand that I spoke to languages. I just spoke to languages, you know. That's what I spoke with her. And we had plenty of Irish at home, but English was the predominant language. But with her, it was all Irish. And there was some time in school where the teacher said something like, no, let me tell you how we'd say this in Irish. And I just said it without even, because it just seemed obvious. And the teacher went, how did you know that? I thought, I didn't know. I knew it.

What has that meant to you being able to speak Irish? Well, I mean, it's everything to me to speak the language that is from the earth, the ground, where I'm from, to know the etymology of the place names, to have a feeling for expressing emotion, you know, to have learned something. I was about two, almost three, when that kind woman looked after me. Bannati is what I called her, which means woman of the house. I thought it was her name, of course. but I was outraged when somebody else was called banity and was like, no, that's the wrong vanity. It's this banity.

And I thought she was 200 years old. That was my absolute convincing that she was 200. Because she was just wise? No, no, no, she was a little bit grumpy. No, she wasn't this kind of extraordinary character. She was a little bit grumpy, but she wasn't ill. And so, yeah, she was about 60. Do you remember one of the first Irish poems?

that you memorize, like a poem in Irish? Oh, yeah. I mean, we were learning poems off by heart in Irish and English from the age of five to 17. It was mandatory in school. I remember at the age of 11, we learned one by Martino Dijon, who was an Aron Islands poet

from the west of Ireland, and he has this poem called Beid Crown, Be like a tree. And it's a strange, lonely poem. And in the middle of it, there's a stanza. I read it once, and I have remembered it ever since.

It says, Uignok Chown, Leorne, Mechrella, Uignok-Fila, as lonely as the tree is in the middle of the wood, so was the poet among the people. And I loved the melody and the music of it. And even at 11, I thought, I'm not sure that's true, but I like it. And even at 11, there was something you connected with about that melancholy? Yes, there was. There totally was a deep sense of melancholy that I had all my life and have, I suppose,

and informs a lot of my work. I feel like a joyous person too, but I think joy and melancholy have a lot to say to each other. Yeah. Yeah. But knowing that poem early on was really helpful. You mentioned Irish as being, maybe it was just off the cuff, but you said it was the language of the earth.

Yeah. Say more about that. What about it feels earthen? Any country that's had an imposed language like English was as part of the colonial project where families were forced or threatened or incentivised to abandon their own language and to learn a foreign language, which English is. There is a lamentation, I think,

for the way we all would have spoken had that not occurred. And a lamentation for the lack of language. And it's not my first language. I'm not a native speaker, but I was learning it from very young. And whenever I speak to an animal or to a baby or when I'm alone in the countryside,

I speak in Irish. And it's almost not a choice. It feels like an intuitive thing to just go to something elemental for me. Yeah, it's funny. This is a random thought to have entered my mind. But, you know, Matthew Reese is like all in the news right now. He's Welsh, of course. And he won all these awards and Emmys.

And people go crazy for him speaking Welsh. And it's something, and he does it with such love. And it's so clear and he makes a big point of it. And I've not talked to him about it, but there is, I imagine he shares that kind of sentiment. Yes. That language and people, especially performers, stage people, writers, language is everything.

And so to be able to speak the language of your land is hugely important, I imagine. So necessary, yeah. I know him and Kerry a little bit. We met at a party and I've kept in touch. And so, yeah, we talk a little bit about poetry from the place where you're from. the exile of language. And I think, I mean, I experienced the same with indigenous people in the states who are, or what is called the states, who are doing language reclamation work, language, advocacy work, language, policy work, that there is something to say, this is who we are. It isn't just something at the side.

This is where the names came from. And that there is something of knowing who you are that comes from language. I met a woman from the Isle of Man, which is another one of the Gaelic. language places and Manx is the Gaelic language there. And she has a deep interest in science fiction and she was writing science fiction. And she realized that if time travel becomes possible, she would not be able to speak to her grandparents because they only spoke Manx and she only spoke English. So she taught herself Manx so that she could speak to her grandparents when time travel becomes possible. Yeah. Because it would feel like such a grief, such a loss to not be able to do that.

It's just kind of wild that you wouldn't be able to communicate with. Your people that way. We have a proverb in Irish, Tirgan Tonga, Tirgan Onum. A land without a language is a land without a soul. And that is deep in all of us, I think. Thank you for that. Three more cards.

Memories? Round two. One, two, or three. Let's go with three this time. Three. What's an ordinary place that feels extraordinary to you because of what happened there? Hmm. Writing emails.

I know. I have to remind myself that it's extraordinary. A few years ago, there was a woman who I knew a little bit, Georgie. This was during COVID. She had gotten a terrible diagnosis and knew that she was about to die imminently. And I had met her four or five times. She was a good friend of a good friend. And I'd heard that she was ill.

And then I got a message from a stranger, her husband, who said, Georgie urgently wants to speak with you and I said sure whatever time works and he said tomorrow night 8 o'clock and I said grand and Georgie phoned and the first thing she said was

what have you been doing today and kind of as a cast off the way I have done thousands of times I said oh you know admin email boring and she said how wonderful I wish I was busy

and it was so moving And she wanted to say something to me. There was something about my writing that had moved her and she said, I want to say this to you. It was profoundly moving. But ultimately what she was saying was something of the quality of attention. And I kind of hate email. And I think about her pretty much every time I sit at the front of the computer

and think to Georgie. And she died by Friday. This was Saturday night when she phoned. Oh, my gosh. And I thought how extraordinary that somebody's saying email, boring would be so thrilling to somebody else to go, oh. Email. If I only had things to do, to sit and administrative tasks to accomplish and the time and health to do it.

Exactly. And the luxury of thinking there's a bit of time because email is going, okay, I'll do the thing next month, fine. And that implies I'll have a next month and she knew she wouldn't. That's right. To plan to be able to project into the future. It just reminds me in general. about the idea of what becomes important and imbueing meaning when you were in that space between the living and the dying. We used to joke with my mom all the time. When my mom got sick, my mom had

cancer for years, and she just would imbue everything with meaning, right? Like, you could, my siblings and I would joke. Like, it's Christmas, what are you giving mom? And someone would be like, we could just give her a stick. And she'd be like, this is the most beautiful stick I've ever seen. That's lovely. And that led me to like the luxury of taking things for granted too. Because when you are in that space like Georgia or my mom, you don't even have that. You can't take anything for granted. So when someone complains about email, you know, you can't just dismiss it because you would give anything to be able to send an email.

And so it's like a flip side of the same coin, you know? Yeah. It's very true. And it's almost hard to bear trying to look at everything like that all at once. I know. I used to think of that. It becomes hard. It's kind of exhausting.

Yeah. It is. Yeah. And exhausting because it's so fulfilling. You think I can't carry all of this meaning all at once. Yeah. But there's moments in life where it touches into you. I mean, I think that's what Buddhists are doing by speaking about enlightenment.

You know, it's not about distance from the earth. It's the capacity for presence right here. And I find that so beautiful. Okay. last one in this round. One, two or three. Okay, let's go with two. Two. Yeah.

What did you think adulthood would look like as a kid? Oh. I mean, I remember as a child thinking, I can do whatever I want with my hair when I'm an adult. I was so excited. My mother used to cut my hair, and she has skills, but that is not one of them. I turned up in school once when I was 14, and my friend went, God almighty, what happened to you? And I was like, my mother cut my hair. Come on, how bad could it be?

There are only so many things to do with hair. And it was a short haircut, just kind of combed over. But no, no, parts of it were too long and parts of it were stubble. But they weren't corresponding stubble on different sides. Right. It was, I mean, I suppose in a certain sense you could do it now and somebody would go, wow, what an avant-garde look. But that was the late 80s. I love that as a childhood dream.

When I grew up, I can just go crazy or not. So what happened? I can't really quite... I mean, your hair looks lovely. It's under the headphones. I can't quite see. But apparently, this is your dream hair that you've gotten to create yourself.

I just stopped combing it. I've got very curly hair. And so, you know, they're loose curls. So... But I think for me, it was like most children. It was independence. It was the idea of being able to make a decision and not have to ask permission for it.

And a decision as silly as, you know, how are you going to wear your hair. There were some boys in my class whose parents would let them style their hair wherever they wanted, and I was so jealous. Oh, yeah. Do you buy product, now we're really getting into the deepest of truths? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So curly hair product is an enormous industry. You can spend a lot of time on the internet.

And there's a lot of people with opinions on the internet about all kinds of things, but curly hair is one of them. Oh, yeah. So I've gone through kind of all the. project ones. There used to be the stuff that I used

for a long time. It looked like liquefied whale brain. It was called kinky, curly styling cream. I don't

understand how you know what that looks like. If you can imagine what it looks like, that's what it looked like.

Yeah, it was mildly green and translucent, kinky curly hair cream. And it kind of worked.

But then I thought, I wonder what's in it. It said something like 90% natural. And I thought,

what's the 10%? Right, right, right, right. Yeah. Yeah, glue. So, anyway. So let me ask off of this, were there experiences you had when you were an adolescent where you could see that independence just over the hill? Like what did you, was it writing?

Did you have hobbies? Were there things where you found yourself pushing the boundary and digging it and being like, a few more years I get to do this? Oh, yes, a countdown. writing was definitely one of them. We had to write a poem in school when I was 11 and I just wrote about a big dog. I just made it up. And my older sister found it and gave it some edits

and said, this is good. I made it a bit better. And she was right, she had. And I love being edited because it means somebody has read your stuff closely. And I began writing poetry from then. It just opened something in me. And of course, we had hundreds of poems off by heart at that stage

because we've been learning two a week since the age of five or six and it just opened a door for me and poetry was a way where I thought gradually. I mean I knew around the age of 11 or 12 that I was gay and I knew I had to keep a secret the two things came at the same time. It was 1987 in Ireland

and I thought I've got to find a way to say something of this and nobody can understand it. So I'd write in all kinds of terrible metaphors or sometimes code that I forgot how to decipher but there was a sense of I need this. It never occurred to me that I would write as a profession because I didn't understand that that could be a profession.

There wasn't a lot of money at home. My parents worked so hard and six kids and they really wanted us to get education and a job. But it was understood that we'd all have artistic lives. We all played instruments and poetry was part of the everyday at school. But poetry somehow, with each successive year, became an avenue for something where I realized, I think I'll do this for the rest of my life.

Did your sister know you were gay? Your sister who edited that poem? No. I don't think so. I mean, I'm guessing by the time I came out to them in my late 20s, they probably were beginning to guess at some point or another. But no, I don't think they did. At what point did you realize that poetry was, I mean, you said you eventually, obviously could map it out for yourself as a career,

but when did it stop just being the place that you could work out your own sexuality and how you were belonging in your culture? Because it sounds like it was that for a while. It was, yeah, but it was also expression. I remember writing what I now know was an arts poetics once after having watched a film. I can't even remember what the film was, but I wrote a poem about a lover that was teasing and where there was joy in the teasing, but there was never any culmination.

And I think I was 16, for beautiful your words ring joyously in me. I mean, it's kind of a terrible poem. I was probably reading Hopkins at the time, but there was something about it where I thought this is true, and I knew that this was true. And that was part of the joy of it,

is that poetry was not just for expression of things that were profound secrets. I also would be drawn to poetry in times of deep happiness. There was a place I used to go to nothing. It's just an estuary where the water would come in and then there was some mudflats when it would go out. When the water was in, there'd be a few waves and saltwater.

And I loved that place. I'd go every single day. And one time I was sitting there in a grey November day and a car drove by CZ680 was its registration plate. And I, because I wrote a poem about it and I thought, that car does not know how beautiful this place is. and there was something about the passing nature of the car in that November day and the absolute joy of solitude and being there and knowing

I've come here every day for a few years at that stage, which is a significant part of your life when you're 16 and loving it. And so there was something of flourishing in poetry as well as an exorcism. Wow, flourishing and exorcism are two big words. We all need both. Yeah, right, right. Okay, before we start round two, we're going to pull out of the game for a few minutes and talk about your new collection. It is a beautiful thing.

This book, it is called Love Between Men, and some of the themes we were just discussing are explored here. The poems, I mean, there's a big chunk of time that you're covering through this, we should say, Padraig. You're starting in the Garden of Eden. Yeah, even before it. Even before the Garden of Eden, the ultimate beginning. for many people? Before the before. Before the before. Why? Why was that the beginning?

I mean, it is the beginning for most people, but what did you have to say there? Well, I think so much of love between men, like the center part of the book is these poems, these sonnets, which is often a love form, sonnets about going through exorcisms for being gay and reparative therapies. And so much of the ideology that came from telling somebody, where you've got a devil in you because you're gay, comes from people's misreadings of ancient texts. And I love these texts. I think they are so wild and strange. And the least interesting thing to do with them

is to turn it into an ideology of saying, oh, you've got your sexual orientation wrong. You know, you are a mistaken heterosexual. What a boring conclusion to take from this magnificent myth. You wanted to be a priest. I wanted to be a priest. I did. I did a Vatican degree.

Not just like working in administration or HR. Like you wanted to get, you know, into the center of it. Yeah. I've always liked people. And I thought, I think I'd be good with people when they're in a moment of shock or surprise. I like the verb of priest. You like the verb of priest. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, don't we all, when something terrible happens, isn't it a comfort to think? I can fund somebody who'll say, I know what to do. I know the number of the person in the funeral home. I know the people in the hospital. I know the this. I know the that.

It's okay. I know what to do. What a containment. I think it's a great public service. And there are priests, you know, your sister's a priest, your cousin's a priest. I mean, I think in that way we turn to priests who are way beyond the question of ordination. But people who can do that verb, I think it's a great gift to a community. And I feel like I would have loved that.

but it wasn't to be and it wasn't to be because as I understand it Pope Benedict said a thing which is essentially homosexuals you know you are humans

I love you but you can't support gay culture and lifestyle you can't be priests I'm not sure if he said the I love you part that's a very generous imagination I had read his policy when I was studying theology where he'd said something like homosexual men are incapable of

psychologically healthy relationships with either men or women. And I remember reading that. This is before he became Pope thinking, who does he think he is? And how can you make a scientific statement like that with no backing? Because the Catholic Church says it has deep respect for sciences. And I thought you've just made a sociological and psychological statement here, which is fundamentally impossible to prove. And then he became Pope.

And in the August of the first year of him becoming Pope, it was leaked in the Guardian that that was going to become policy and it became policy by the end of the year and the bishop came to me because I was in the kind of parallel track for priesthood and the bishop came to me and said, you're out. And I called him a coward.

I know him still and said, you know full well that plenty of the priests are gay and that this is going to make it closet in a closet in a closet. And he said, it's a fight I won't win. And I thought, well, you should be courageous anyway. You shouldn't just pick your courage in a moment when you think you might win. You should just do it for the sake of integrity.

I was glad I could say it to him, but it felt like in exile for a few years. Yeah. How long was that grief? I'd say three years. It's a deep grief, too, because it's not just the priesthood. Obviously then, that it is entwined with... The future. Yeah.

It's entwined with your whole view of the world, the things that are most fundamental to you, and the church and what it means. Yeah. I mean, it propelled me out of working full-time for religious groups. I'd trained as a conflict mediator already in Belfast and I thought, okay, I need to... I was freelance and I thought I need to say no to most religious contracts and yes to most conflict and reconciliation-based ones. So, yeah, it was a pivot, a shocking one.

As you know, in the book, there are explicit poems about your experience in conversion therapy. Yeah. May I ask how you ended up there? Well, the religious group I joined had a belief that homosexuality was caused by something, either the devil or some kind of flaw in your family. And so they'd begin with exorcisms. And if they were successful, whatever success means, that's great. But if they were unsuccessful, they'd say, well, that means that you're psychologically flawed.

And so you need to go to a Christian counsellor, which would be somebody who would believe also that you could be cured in order for that to happen. And I was living where I was working, and I didn't feel like I had many options. And I mean, this was in the early 1990s. And so the world wasn't particularly friendly to LGBT people, never mind this organization. And so, yeah, I went along with it. I liked some of the work I was doing, and I didn't want to be kicked out. And I didn't know what I'd do. And so it was, I mean, the exorcisms were mercifully fast, although frightening, of course,

you know, to have crowds of people standing around at you screaming at the devil in you is a kind of a strange thing. It's not a private experience. Oh, no, no, no. By design, it's supposed to be a community, a public kind of thing. Well, these are, yeah. And I mean, I should say, this was not the formal Catholic Church. These were, the first one was conducted by an American evangelical woman who gathered everybody around and was screaming at the devil. And so, and most of these were interesting people.

You know, they were funny. They thought they were cool. They were probably 40, you know. They were young. And so I look at this strange combination of an interesting, they probably thought that they were edgy and that they were the new face of the church. And they were doing something very old,

which is to demonize somebody who doesn't have a demon in them, which creates a demon in you, you know, a demon of shame or a rage or all of these strong feelings. It was years later I was at, I was giving a poetry reading at a very queer bookshop in Melbourne in Australia and I was about to start reading poetry and I looked up and in the front row was one of the people who'd been involved in reparative therapy

and he was sitting holding the hand of another man and I thought, oh my God, there you are. No. And I thought the first thing that came to my mind was a line from Dante's Inferno because having been told that I had a devil in me, it gave me a deep interest in the poetry of hell so I read Dante's Inferno many times.

If I'm going here, I should at least know like what the food's like, is there air conditioning. And which level I'll be at. the seventh level. That's where the homosexuals are, according. But on the

ninth level of hell, finally you see the devil. And the devil is huge, it's got enormous wings that cause frigid wings. Frid winds to go as the devil is batting

those wings. But the devil is frozen in a lake of his own tears. And when Dante sees that, he says, oh, what a marvel it appeared to me. And that's what I thought.

It was the first thing that came to mind when I saw that guy. Oh, what a marvel had appeared to me. That he had been powerful. And now he was powerless.

And I wished him well, but I had zero interest in any kind of dialogue with him. You know, he was a victim too. That could have been me if I'd stuck around, you know. So I thought this predatory nature of these kinds of pyramid schemes of recruitment of vulnerable people operate like that, you know. So I did not wish him harm, but I also did not wish any connection. And I thought I've got some writing to do as a result of that. So that's where those sonnets in the middle of Love Between Men started. I wrote about 100 of them, knowing that I'd only ever publish seven.

Yeah. Knowing that you would only publish seven. You knew the ones that you... Well, seven deadly sonnets is such a good title. Oh, read seven deadly sonnets. How can you? Yeah. Seven deadly sins. Seven is half of a crown. Yeah. Yeah. It's too good. Too good to resist.

And also, who needs to read 100 sonnets about exorcisms? Yeah. That's true. That's a real commitment. There's something good about precision. Spare the people. How did you, Padrig, not buy what they were selling? How did you come to believe that you were not, in fact, the devil's spawn, that there was not something fundamentally broken in you? Because I imagine that when you are in something like that, there are all these people around who you like in some way and that it would start to seep into you. Of course.

That kind of shame and self-hate. How in the world did you free yourself from those? shackles? I mean, it wasn't just those people. It was the entire society. You'd turn on the radio. You turn on the television. It was the 90s.

Homosexuality was decriminalized in the Republic of Ireland in 1993, the year I turned 18. But also, you think of the World Cup just this past summer. Not a single out player. And so it's a nice idea to think that the world is better,

but the world is only better for people for whom it's better. There's plenty of people at all kinds of levels of the world for whom it is still a fundamentally homophobic place. What worked for me, strangely, was language because I was being taught over and over to say,

and this is exactly what I was being taught, is to say I am not a homosexual, I'm a defective heterosexual, or I'm a heterosexual with some homosexual temptations. And I remember just thinking, this is terrible language. Like, there's something beautiful about being able to say something plainly.

Because I've been writing poetry in code for 10 years at that stage. And I just thought, this is clunky. Oh, my God, this is amazing. Like, you found your truth in like a very... Because they were just really poorly constructed sentences. And when you read a poorly constructed sentence, you realize if you change this, you change this,

you get to something far more active and true. And the trueness of you was, I am gay. Gay. That was it. And that's, I mean, one of the reparative therapists said to me, do you have any friends who are girls? And I was like, all of my friends are girls. And he said, look at them all and come back to me next week and tell me who's the prettiest and who do you want to learn to fantasize about.

And I went back the next week and said, no, I won't do that. Because I felt in myself, I couldn't have articulated it, but I felt you're asking me to do something that's wrong. I do not want to do that. And I said to him, I don't want to have the kind of sex you seem to want me to have. And he said, you know what your problem is? This is a 100% quote. He goes, your problem is language, Podrick. because you shouldn't want to have sex,

because have is a selfish verb, you should want to give sex. And the first thing that came to my mind was in Irish. Ni feather-lati she-in-a-a-l-l-lga. You could not say that in Irish because you don't conjugate sex with the verb have or give. You don't even have these verbs, especially have in Irish like that.

And I thought, if you're making up this language, you're making up everything else. And I had no confidence in psychology, no confidence in theology. but I had a kind of a quiet native confidence in two languages to go, you are making it up and it cannot be true. Wow. And I got up and left.

And I walked, it was a February day. And I remember walking in bright cold sunshine in Dublin, feeling the world is open and frightened and frightening. And I am alive and I am gay. I just kept on saying it to myself over and over again. The relief of the truth felt like terrifying, and terrific all at the same time. How old were you?

19, 20. Wow. Yeah. I told one person who said, you're going on a dangerous path, and I thought, I pity you. And you're right,

but I also pity you because I thought, who should be frightened of danger? Round two. You ready? I'm going to take some nurturing tea in order to prep me for round two. Take some tea.

three new cards one, two or three this is insights Patrick Insights Let us go with three Three How do you see your parents

showing up in you? Hmm My mom loves a big crowd of people and my dad loves an individual conversation and I like both Do you really? You're blowing my whole life

theory because I think people are divided into those A or B camps. A or B. I love both. I love both. I really do. Yeah. Why?

I don't know. I mean, my absolute imagination of the perfect evening is a whole bunch of friends around for soup and homemade bread and wine and music. Everybody around the table and people who don't know each other and do know each other talking. And then I also love, you know, if somebody stays around and goes, oh, I'll help you tidy up. the quiet conversation that happens after that. Both of them are bliss to me. No, both those sound good to me. It's the third.

It's like the big, like rager, mm, mm, mm, and there's a bunch of people and you have to somehow like small talk your way through it and say just enough and know when to leave. No, no, no, no. I just don't go to those places. Yeah, you just don't go. Yeah, no, I get that.

I get that. Okay, let that lie. Three new cards. one, two or three. Let's go two. Two. What have you found surprising about getting older? Hmm.

The changing relationship with time, that time means something different as you go through different decades. I woke up on the morning of my 40th birthday with absolute clarity that I do not believe in heaven. And the comfort that I'd gotten from a kind of a light belief in God was gone. and I also thought I'm 40 today I'll be 50 tomorrow 60 then the day after 70 80 and I hope I get to 90

and then I'll die and all of that will happen this week and time just collapsed it went one way and the other and you know previous to that I think I almost had this slight moral judgment for anybody who was a bit older

how dare you choose to be born you know in the 1950s and suddenly I thought well you're my sibling you're my sibling I was reading Yates or Gilgamesh and going, you're my sibling, you know, that the idea of people who lived in less evolved time,

who the hell am I to say that, it was a less evolved time, just because they didn't have a phone, you know. These are, time moved. This is a hell of an epiphany to have had in one morning. And one morning. Really? Yeah, literally, it was all there that morning. And it was devastating.

I couldn't write a poem for a year. Yeah, not a full year. I was in shock. And I kept on trying to summon a poem and they would not come. I mean, basically, you just woke up one day and realized that you were going to die, you were going to die, and that is going to be the end of it. There is no afterlife. And the dying could happen at any point. Correct. And so I'm going to stop writing poetry? No, I wish. I mean, I really wanted to write poetry. I just didn't have a vocabulary for it. I needed to, essentially, I needed to learn how to write poetry again. It was a complete rehabilitation into a new sense of being myself. And I was like, of course, I was in the, I had a big job. I was leading things.

I was, you know, I was a lot of work going on. And there was this enormous fundamental shift and change. And I mean, I'm not sure I like the term midlife crisis because it was deeper than that. You know, it was a metamorphosis. Something fundamentally got turned on the inside out. and I needed to find a new way of writing. Okay, so I want to go back and ask more questions about this because the underpinning, the thing you opened with

was that you no longer believed in a heaven. And so had that idea been, it had been nurturing you for years, even after you'd had this quite dramatic break with your dreams of being in the priesthood and with the church capital C. I mean, I went on and completed a Vatican degree and did a master's degree in the gospel, so I still loved the texts.

That's the thing. And I was far from a kind of a clear believer. I used to say, look, heaven is a pleasant fiction, which helps me live today. But I like the idea of the fiction of that because it helps me think about something today. And so that's what I used to say, but even that was gone.

The morning I turned 40. Yeah, it was such an arresting, shocking experience. Precipitated by what? The birthday? It was. It was. And I used to judge people previously who'd say,

oh my God, I've just turned 30, you know, my life has changed. And I think, what? Are you surprised? Like you were 29 yesterday. Of course you turned 30 today. Yeah. And there was just something about it. I think it was the threshold into a new decade to go,

well, I've just had two decades. Wow. And some things have changed and I'm still me. And so presumably when I'm 90, some things will change and I'll still be me and it just all felt like something was compressed there was opportunity and power in it you know it wasn't hellish

but it just felt like an awakening to a certain kind of responsibility too I'd published two books of poems 2012 2013 and then I didn't publish another one until early 2020 and so and eventually when the poems came back they came back in a tidal wave

in a flood in an outburst of rage and meaning, and that's where the reparative therapy, exorcism sonnets were all written after that period of time. But I think I needed to feel the urgency and the rage and the impotence altogether. But I think I do have to reconcile your love of the Bible as text without believing in God. Yeah. Make sense of that. Because people will hear them and be like, I don't get it.

Like, you can just love it just because it's like nice poetry. But it was still giving you some kind of spiritual nourishment. Totally. And it still does. I mean, spirit comes from the word spirari, meaning to breathe. The question for me is what helps me breathe rather than suffocate me? And I love these ancient texts. They've survived a long time.

And they have been interpreted and read through and they have influenced so many things for good and for ill. And I feel like when you read the saints, when you read the, when you read midrash, when you read, when you, if you go to. any congregation, half the people there will go, I don't know, but this creates meaning in a life. We show up for each other. It nurtures the courage we have for each other. It nurtures the love. We get to know each other where we wouldn't

previously. And that's enough for me. I don't need a proof of anything else. The proof is demonstrated in the acts of togetherness that occur where togetherness may not occur outside of that community and outside of the ritual. I met a Swiss Reformed clergy man

a few years ago and he's in a a romance part over in the eastern part of Switzerland where they speak that minority Swiss language. And he was in charge of six parishes. And he said that in one of the parishes, when somebody dies, you know, the body, the coffin is brought by the community to the chapel. And the people who open the doors of the chapel from the inside are the members of the parish who were most recently bereaved before that bereavement. What an extraordinary containment. And he said it's only in one of his parishes. And I thought, like, if it takes us to believe in God to make that possibility of bearing witness to each other a reality,

well, it's worthwhile believing in God in order to have the reality of this happening. I think of God like the square root of minus one, an imaginary number. Now, we can't prove, but that somehow changes something within the context of how it is the deep space teloscopy occurs. John Polkinghorne is great on this regarding imaginary number. and their job in the mathematics for things that otherwise would be impossible. So an imaginary number makes a previously impossible thing possible. And perhaps you could say something similar about belief in God. I love that. I have to call myself out when you said that I like nodded my head like I knew what that was and I totally didn't know what that was.

I was like, yes. Yeah. But that is an incredibly powerful idea. Do you still go to church then? I do actually, yes. For because of that, because of the ancillary effects of what God, the idea of the idea. of God creates. Yeah.

And sacrament. I mean, I mean, if you caught me, I bleed Irish Catholic. I have no choice in that. I have been affected and infected in this way. And at 50, I think,

I'm glad for that. But it took a long time to be glad for it and for it to settle in me. I love the stations of the cross. I mean, my prayer life looks very traditional. I read some Master Eckhart

in the morning. I sit with rosary beads and silence and then I write a bit. You know, I look like a monk. It's just that I don't feel like there's anything required of me when it comes to doctrine or dogma. Huh. That feels very not Catholic of you. But I guess it doesn't matter.

It is whatever you want it to be. Myster Eckhart is an old friend of mine. He died 700 years ago. And he has this great thing where he says, none of us know what God is. We know a few things that God's not. I think, sit down. Let's talk. Yeah, right.

So I feel, I don't think in any way that I'm doing something unusual. I feel like I'm absolutely part of an enormous sway, perhaps the majority of people who participate in the action of religion and who say this helps a spirituality of being alive. I do not know what comes after, if anything. But I do know about this moment. And if I can find a narrative that gives me presence to this moment, not by saying it's superior to anything else that is, that's violent,

but by saying, well, it's the one that I've grown up with and it's rich in me and I know it and I've turned to it at times of terror and times of consolation throughout my life, well then that can give a sense of accompaniment and that's enough. I need nothing else. I love that. That's very helpful for me personally, actually, that idea. Have you made your peace with time then at 50 now? No. No. I think I'd be thinking about time all the time.

I love what happens. I mean, I met a six-year-old once, one of my friends' kids who said, when I was younger, I used to think the following. And I thought, how glorious a six-year-old saying when I was younger. And I also thought, you're telling me something true. It's not just cute,

and I don't want to patronize the six-year-old because the six-year-old understands. I have changed. And they're correct. At six, you can know things that you didn't know for. And I believe the six-year-old. and I also believe an 86 year old who says I've still got things I want to do

and time there's a theory or a language in physics that talks about the weight of time or the gravity of time you know time can go backwards and forwards in space but here I can say what time is it and one person might say 930

and the other person might say oh it's the anniversary I've been dreading both of those things are true so the register of time the emotionality of it and the weight of it to speak in the form of a physics sense is being, we all know what that theory looks like in a room.

Well, we have walked all over all the wild card questions, and I don't care. We'll just move on and one, two, or three. You choose. Oh, I love that. Oh, this is a random one. I'm going to ask this one, because it's weird. What's your favorite room in your home? I just moved.

Oh. Yeah, I'm still kind of wandering around going, where am I? Tell me about your move. Where do you move from? So I got a job teaching spirituality and poetry at Yale Divinity School, so I've just moved to the New Haven area. Congratulations. And what does the new place look like?

So it's an old converted barn, which is pretty exciting. And why did you pick it? We'll work up to the room, but are you someone who pays attention to your physical space? Oh, God, yeah. Yeah, tell me. Friends of mine talk about the podrification of place. Okay, what does that mean? Well, just kind of, you know, an icon here, something from Wicca there, you know, a postcard from somebody else.

Nobody would look at my house and go, there's no personality on the wall. Somebody else might say there's a lot of stuff on the wall. Although everything has a memory. Yeah, yeah. And I like that. I think what a nice way to populate a place. Okay, so what are you going to do with this barn? I've been writing a lot there.

I've spent an enormous amount of time prepping lectures at the table. Has it been poddricified? Podricified? It has, indeed. Did I get it right? You did perfectly. Rachel. Yeah, it has.

I mean, there's more space to come. There's walls that do not have personality on them yet. But I think my favorite place to sit is where the sunlight comes in in the morning. I wake early, so I'm usually up at about five, and I sit with Meister Eckhart

and a cup of tea and something to write in and those beads. And at some point, the sun will come in and shine on the table. and it's beautiful because it's a relationship to the outside. I lived in New York for most of the last five years,

New York City, bounced around the place. But the place I was in most recently for the last two years, I loved it, but it had very little natural light. And I realized kind of with every passing year that I have been more and more in need of something where I can look out at something. And I miss New York, but I do not miss the lack of,

of the lack of being able to see out. Right. Perspective. I spent a lot of time walking up the Hudson because I just felt like whatever the weather, it wasn't just if the site was beautiful. It was what the water did. It was being able to see, it was being able to feel being part of all of that. What do you look out on then? What is outside your window when the sun comes in? You know, it's extraordinary. There's marshland on the other side of the road. So there are six pairs of nesting eagles and I've seen them a few times and heard that

heard them regularly enough, these eagles, it's extraordinary. Isn't that amazing? I was driving down from the road the other day, and one of the eagles just swooped about 10 feet in front of me and then landed on a branch. Amazing. All happening in a little passing second. That's amazing. Yeah, that's not going to happen in Manhattan or New York.

We're at round three. Beliefs. We've already talked about many, but we'll see what these cards generate. Let's see what it brings up. Yeah. One, two or three. Let's go with one. Hmm.

Are you more preoccupied with the past or the future? Hmm. I think both of those are distractions. Of course they need to be thought about. They're not worthless distractions. But I really think that it's the power of the present that's important. I worked in conflict resolution for a long time. and in the north of Ireland

there would be commissions on the past. How do you remember the past? Do you blame the British or do you blame Irish republicanism for murders that happened over the course of 30 years? Or do you say, okay, things got bad in 1968

or things got bad in 1921 at partition or things got bad 800 years ago when the British began to come to Ireland and began to try to establish their presence there? And those are significant questions about which I have strong, opinions, but to ultimately the question of how can we stay with each other is all about acts of courage in the present. And for me, the orientation of knowing that the past is in conversation

with the now is the really important thing. And so I find the absolute necessity of talking about the past. And I also want to think, what can I do right now that's going to make the future less predictable? Less predictable? Yeah. In that you're not reliving the same cycles of the past. Yeah. You know that famous book from the, I think the 80s, Leon Euris Trinity, he quotes a line from Eugene O'Neill at the start that says, the Irish will never have a future, just an endless repetition of the past. And that is, that's a powerful curse. And I recognize it. You know, there's a phrase that John Hume, the Nobel Prize winner, said, it's said that

the English don't know how to remember and the Irish don't know how to forget. And when when it comes to the history of our near nations and the influence of empire in Ireland. And the fact that Ireland does know the history, whereas when I began to have English friends in my late teens, one English friend said to me, why don't you people like the English? And I was like, because of history.

And he said, oh, were we here? Like, why are we speaking in your language? So the maxim does prove true. It does, totally, yeah. The British can't remember. I mean, I think empire luxuriates in history, but doesn't know it. And places that have been colonized have, you do not have the luxury of not knowing history because you have to know it.

How do you, especially in work in conflict resolution, in place like Ireland, obviously we see this playing out in different pockets of the world and Israel. Paul Stein, how do you get people to privilege the present? How do you get them to... You can't release because the past is everything. The past is who you are and how you see the world. But how do you actually do it? How do you get people to think about who they are now? Like, just freeze this moment now.

And these are your neighbors today. And these are these people, how do you do it? What are the mechanisms of that? Sure. There's an idea in deconstructionist philosophy, which is to say, take a singular and make it plural. And that can really help in language, which is to say, you know, you might say,

okay, we don't agree on the past. What would it be like to make the past plural? We don't agree on the pasts. What are the pasts we don't agree on? And how to recognize the pasts are plural. Sometimes in conflict, you might have somebody saying, look, something happened last week that's caused conflict for me, between me and that person or my group and that group. And to say, you've given us a register of time. What's the register of time that the other group is using?

And they might say, this same thing has been happening for the last 100 years, weekly. And for us, we have a register of 100 years. And you have a register of something that happened last week. And then to go, okay, we have multiple things to talk about then. And I think sometimes just creating a kind of a chronological map where time is registered differently can allow you to agree on what you disagree about and to talk about the things that you're disagreeing about in a way that can be helpful to go, well, right now we are going to talk about what happened last week. Because it might be that the group who has been systematically undermined actually did do something wrong last week. But if that group can trust, we are also going to talk about the systematic oppression of you every week for the last hundred years. Well, then we will get to that too.

And there can be the possibility of something like accountability and like integrity and dignity all happening at the same time. That takes time and for people to stay in the room. And the most atrocious thing for people with privilege and power is to recognize their privilege and power and to name it. And that can be very, very difficult. But I think that's my hope. I think one of the most interesting things that can happen in the present

is when a group of people with power begin to say, We have power. Yeah. And our power has caused suffering for you. And we have called your suffering our safety. And that is a petrifying place. But it is so creative. There is so much possibility.

And nobody can force another person to do that. I can't shame another group into doing it, you know. I can't manipulate. I can't threaten another group into it. You look at the history. So many places have tried that. I am not neutral. I have zero independence and neutrality.

But I have an interest in trustability and saying difficult things to each other rather than only about each other. I love the idea of framing the present as like a creative space. The present is where change happens. The present is so interesting. It is so full. Yeah. Yeah. One, two, or three.

Let's go with three. When do you feel most at peace? Oh, I'm so lucky. I feel at peace in the morning with a piece of writing and silence. I feel at peace when I hear harmonies being sung, especially unaccompanied harmonies. I love listening to unaccompanied music. And I feel at peace around a friend's table or with friends around my table. There was a memory that there's a memory that comes to mind once I was sitting in a church

and there was a bunch of monks singing evening prayer. And it was me and one other person who she was sitting on the other side. Me, you know, lay people apart from the monks. And I didn't know the plain chant that they were singing. It was beautiful. She knew it and was harmonizing to the monks. And her voice, which was not loud,

but it carried perfectly and was so distinct from the chants of the monks. And I can go back to that moment. And that happened when I lived in Australia, so about the year 2000. and I can go back to that moment still and be caught up in the harmony of it all. Last one?

One, two or three. Let's go with two. Is there inherent goodness in every person? I want to believe. Turning to X-Files. I want to believe. But that is a deliberate distance that I have from that, from having known that there's, and seen in myself and in other people,

the capacity where some people will just engage in self-profit, I don't just mean financially, against the goodness and against the dignity and against the lives of other people. And understanding why somebody else does evil is not always of interest to me. to think it. Oh, let's understand, let's understand, let's understand, let's understand.

And part of me thinks, like, I've met people who've done terrible things and they have luxuriated and the attention they've got by people trying to analyze them. And I think, how about we just stop you? And I'm enough of a pragmatist that I think, even if there is inherent goodness in everybody, that doesn't mean that I always do good and how is it that it can be stopped and how can accountability be brought in and how can language be used? to wake us to the possibility of a different kind of acting. And that the inherent good, even in its existing,

does not nearly outweigh the consequences of an evil action. No, my God. And, I mean, there's a lot of statues of Frederick Douglass going up around Ireland at the moment, because in 1845 the beginning of that awful so-called famine. We call it the start. Orvation or the hunger, he visited Ireland. He gave a talk in Dublin, 1845, where he says, I've never felt more at home than I do here.

And lots of Irish people go, see, Frederick Douglass felt at home here? And essentially it's saying we're good white people. Right, right. But in 1853, after there had been hundreds of thousands of Irish people landing on the shores of the states, he wrote, this diaspora, he wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper. and he said, the Irish at home are the friends of the oppressed everywhere. But when they get here, they believe that the hand that gives out should be given to them. And he said that the Irish have been oppressing African Americans and that in time we would discover our fault. And it is a, that's what I, I'm delighted with the statues of Frederick Douglass in various places in Ireland.

I think he's extraordinary. But I'd love that quote to be there. We don't need to be told we're charming. We believe that anyway. But I do think we need to know the consequences of the Irish diaspora and that having suffered as a community isn't enough. Suffering does not make you inherently good in the future. You can suffer and cause suffering.

That is the planet we live on, unfortunately. And that is an awful, awful virus. Let's repeat it over and over again. And in the consequence of that, I think sometimes there can be the idea of impunity. Look, we suffered, so therefore we have impunity. That does not happen. suffering does not create innocence in the future. And that is, to my mind, is caught up in the question of inherent goodness.

And sometimes people will go, well, we have inherent goodness or we have a past card because the following thing happened. And that's not true. We end the show the same way every time, Patrick, with a trip at our memory time machine. In the memory time machine, you revisit one moment from your past. It's not a moment you want to change anything about. It is a moment you would like to linger in a little longer. What moment do you choose? I know that you've been asking this question,

so I have been going through so many on the train yesterday and this morning too. But one that I didn't think about is the one that comes to mind immediately. Oh, I love that. I was at a church youth festival when I was 16, and I left a seminar that was about how to cure homosexual. and walked to another seminar. And there was a poet there, Stuart Henderson, and he was reading poems that were filled with rage and doubt

and surprising things and beauty and the invention of language. And I was mesmerized. And I didn't catch the whole thing, of course, because I'd gone to the other terrible seminar first. I caught maybe half an hour of it. And I left when the question, and answered started because I thought

I don't want that to be interrupted and I wrote to him last year and told him I have been reading you for many years and I made a poetry and bound episode

about one of his poems how to speak love in his storm and I owe him so much because I was writing poems already but there was a way

within which he showed me you can enter with rage and integrity and love these texts and this faith that we have

and find some kind of independence of voice. Find a republic of yourself that is in conversation with others. And that was thrilling to me. And I didn't know then that I would be 50 still talking about

having left that terrible seminar and caught the tail end of something. And I think had I only caught five minutes that would have been enough, one minute would have been enough but I caught 30. And what a fire. What a glorious thing.

Padra go to, Ma. It has been such a pleasure to talk with you. His newest collection is called Love Between Men. Thank you so much for doing this, Patrick. Thank you, Rachel. Hey, before we close today, I want to take a moment and pay tribute to a very important person. His name is Lee Hale, and maybe you've heard his name in the credits. Lee created this show.

I mean, sure, there were several of us who worked over many, many months to bring you what is now wildcard. But the idea of the cards with these deep propoportes, questions, that came from Lee's wild and wonderful brain. Whenever we have brainstorming sessions where we come up with new questions for our deck, Lee's list is always the longest. He is a deeply thoughtful human, preoccupied with all things spiritual and philosophical and meaningful. When we started working together, we always said we didn't want to talk with people who were certain. Certainty in this space is so uninteresting. We wanted to talk with people who were swimming around in the same existential muck as we were.

Answers can be illuminating, but questions. Questions. Questions are exhilarating. Lee is wrapping up his time on Wildcard and moving on to ask different kinds of questions in service of a new project. Our show is losing its heart center and the most hilarious person in our editorial Zoom meetings. And I am losing one of my closest collaborators. But I'm so very proud of what we made together, and I know I speak for all of us on the Wildcars. team when I say that you, Lee Hale, are going to be so, so missed.