Being Here
Prayers for Curiosity, Justice, and Love
Author P#225;draig #211; Tuama ISBN 9780802883476 Binding Trade Cloth Publisher WM B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Publication Date January 23, 2024 Size 127 x 203 mm
“What is prayer? It’s not a passport to heaven. If anything, it’s a way of seeing here, a way of being here.” , acclaimed poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama
“What is prayer? It’s not a passport to heaven. If anything, it’s a way of seeing here, a way of being here.”
In Being Here, acclaimed poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama offers a thoughtful collection of prayers and essays to focus attention in a world full of distractions. Featuring thirty-one collects—an ancient five-fold form of prayer—this unconventional devotional invites readers into a daily rhythm of connection and creativity.
“The hope is that you can turn to a prayer with the story of your life, and in the little emptiness you create there, hear something, discern something, feel something that’s connecting you to other things seeking out connection with you.”
Each day’s prayers are presented alongside Scripture and illuminating literary texts. The book concludes with four incisive essays on politics, community, and the contours of contemporary life as seen through biblical literature. Pádraig also teaches readers how they can embrace poetic form to expand their practice of prayer. In these pages, spiritual wayfarers will find a place both to rest and to grow their capacity for curiosity, justice, and love.
This is a way of living / That’s worth living daily.
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In Being Here, acclaimed poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama offers a thoughtful collection of prayers and essays to focus attention in a world full of distractions. Featuring thirty-one collects—an ancient five-fold form of prayer—this unconventional devotional invites readers into a daily rhythm of connection and creativity.
“The hope is that you can turn to a prayer with the story of your life, and in the little emptiness you create there, hear something, discern something, feel something that’s connecting you to other things seeking out connection with you.”
Each day’s prayers are presented alongside Scripture and illuminating literary texts. The book concludes with four incisive essays on politics, community, and the contours of contemporary life as seen through biblical literature. Pádraig also teaches readers how they can embrace poetic form to expand their practice of prayer. In these pages, spiritual wayfarers will find a place both to rest and to grow their capacity for curiosity, justice, and love.
This is a way of living / That’s worth living daily.
“Being Here teaches us not just where poetry, prayer, and the history of literature intersect. It shows us how to get to that intersection, how to dwell in a place of ambiguities with the certainty of our souls, and how to use these ambiguities to thrive daily. No reader of Pádraig Ó Tuama will be surprised by this as his work—his poems that dare and surprise us—is always the work of spiritual reckoning through well-crafted language.”
—Jericho Brown, The Tradition
“I described Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World as ‘the only devotional book I can embrace at the moment.’ And now, here is a devotional book that is pure poetry. Pádraig’s prayers balance precision, spaciousness, heart, humor, doubt, and devotion in a way that feels at once impossible and also desperately needed. I am in love with his unsentimental orientation to the holy.”
—Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accidental Saints
“These daily readings and prayers took root in my soul and stayed there. Ó Tuama recalibrates the language of liturgy in a way that both contains and reenergizes ancient spiritual practices. Never have I been so grateful for—and enchanted with—the collect as a poetic form. I predict Being Here will become a classic of devotional literature.”
—Jamie Quatro, Fire Sermon
“Ó Tuama’s brilliant collection opens doors that welcome us, challenge us. Most of all, these pages keep us tethered and whole.”
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, World of Wonders
“With its invitation to read these prayers as given or ‘scratch them out, replace words, write your own,’ Being Here both opens and sharpens our attention. This conversation between prayer, poetry, Scripture, and essay demonstrates how nothing occurs in isolation, how every part of our lives might talk to one another. As flocks of praise-birds lift from these pages, Ó Tuama’s devotional becomes ‘a place of encounter, a place of yearning, a place of reckoning, of discerning . . . ways to choose / what keeps us living.’”
—Jessica Jacobs, Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going; founder of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry
“Pádraig Ó Tuama casts devotion as an art form that belongs to all of us, and art itself as an engine of devotion, a way to be present in the messy, complicated, divine fabric of our world. Welcome daily companions, his small, immaculate collects possess both discipline and wild beating hearts.”
—Molly McCully Brown, Places I’ve Taken My Body
“Pádraig Ó Tuama offers us a month of prayers that brim with the warmth, insight, and lush description that listeners to Poetry Unbound have come to expect. The faithful will find themselves refreshed and renewed in these pages, and those estranged from religion will find balm and blessing. ‘What happens over years,’ Ó Tuama notes in one prayer, ‘stays inside our bodies / waiting for a touch, / a story, a tenderness of healing.’ I intend to carry this book with me over years and turn to it whenever I am in need of a little tenderness.”
—The Rev. Jason Myers, Maker of Heaven &; editor in chief of EcoTheo Review
“Great poets reveal the unexpected in the everyday, the remarkable in the mundane, a never-seen truth in an old, old story. In this slim collection of daily devotions and essays, Ó Tuama shows once again that he is not just a great poet—he is a singular theologian.”
—Jessica Goudeau, After the Last Border
“Pádraig Ó Tuama is a believer in words, in God, and in us. The latter is an especially radical act, and the loving curation of Being Here demonstrates a poet and theologian who invites us not only to pray, but to trust our instincts and needs. “You’re the one who’ll bless these prayers by praying them,” he writes, and makes us believe that claim through gorgeous and poetic prayers, revelatory readings, and finely chosen excerpts from Scripture. Being Here is a gentle, generous, and compelling spiritual companion; a book that engages the head, the heart, the whole seeking self. ‘Turn our tables over,’ Ó Tuama writes, ‘so we can see the / spirit in the places / we are rejecting.’ Because Ó Tuama believes in us, we can believe in prayer anew.”
—Nick Ripatrazone, The Habit of Poetry; culture editor for Image Journal View Review quote
—Jericho Brown, The Tradition
“I described Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World as ‘the only devotional book I can embrace at the moment.’ And now, here is a devotional book that is pure poetry. Pádraig’s prayers balance precision, spaciousness, heart, humor, doubt, and devotion in a way that feels at once impossible and also desperately needed. I am in love with his unsentimental orientation to the holy.”
—Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accidental Saints
“These daily readings and prayers took root in my soul and stayed there. Ó Tuama recalibrates the language of liturgy in a way that both contains and reenergizes ancient spiritual practices. Never have I been so grateful for—and enchanted with—the collect as a poetic form. I predict Being Here will become a classic of devotional literature.”
—Jamie Quatro, Fire Sermon
“Ó Tuama’s brilliant collection opens doors that welcome us, challenge us. Most of all, these pages keep us tethered and whole.”
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, World of Wonders
“With its invitation to read these prayers as given or ‘scratch them out, replace words, write your own,’ Being Here both opens and sharpens our attention. This conversation between prayer, poetry, Scripture, and essay demonstrates how nothing occurs in isolation, how every part of our lives might talk to one another. As flocks of praise-birds lift from these pages, Ó Tuama’s devotional becomes ‘a place of encounter, a place of yearning, a place of reckoning, of discerning . . . ways to choose / what keeps us living.’”
—Jessica Jacobs, Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going; founder of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry
“Pádraig Ó Tuama casts devotion as an art form that belongs to all of us, and art itself as an engine of devotion, a way to be present in the messy, complicated, divine fabric of our world. Welcome daily companions, his small, immaculate collects possess both discipline and wild beating hearts.”
—Molly McCully Brown, Places I’ve Taken My Body
“Pádraig Ó Tuama offers us a month of prayers that brim with the warmth, insight, and lush description that listeners to Poetry Unbound have come to expect. The faithful will find themselves refreshed and renewed in these pages, and those estranged from religion will find balm and blessing. ‘What happens over years,’ Ó Tuama notes in one prayer, ‘stays inside our bodies / waiting for a touch, / a story, a tenderness of healing.’ I intend to carry this book with me over years and turn to it whenever I am in need of a little tenderness.”
—The Rev. Jason Myers, Maker of Heaven &; editor in chief of EcoTheo Review
“Great poets reveal the unexpected in the everyday, the remarkable in the mundane, a never-seen truth in an old, old story. In this slim collection of daily devotions and essays, Ó Tuama shows once again that he is not just a great poet—he is a singular theologian.”
—Jessica Goudeau, After the Last Border
“Pádraig Ó Tuama is a believer in words, in God, and in us. The latter is an especially radical act, and the loving curation of Being Here demonstrates a poet and theologian who invites us not only to pray, but to trust our instincts and needs. “You’re the one who’ll bless these prayers by praying them,” he writes, and makes us believe that claim through gorgeous and poetic prayers, revelatory readings, and finely chosen excerpts from Scripture. Being Here is a gentle, generous, and compelling spiritual companion; a book that engages the head, the heart, the whole seeking self. ‘Turn our tables over,’ Ó Tuama writes, ‘so we can see the / spirit in the places / we are rejecting.’ Because Ó Tuama believes in us, we can believe in prayer anew.”
—Nick Ripatrazone, The Habit of Poetry; culture editor for Image Journal View Review quote
Pádraig Ó Tuama is an Irish poet and theologian, best known for hosting the Poetry Unbound podcast from On Being. His recent books include Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World and Feed the Beast.
Table of Contents
Being Here: What Is Prayer?
How to Use This Book
The Art and Form of the Collect: A Craft Essay
Daily Prayers
Occasional Essays and Poems
Acknowledgments