Poetry and Spirituality A Reflection for Quaker Universalists 16/9/26
Padraic Murray Member of Monkstown Meeting
Good evening, Friends
I am delighted to have the opportunity to talk to you tonight about poetry and spirituality and how my life was informed before and after becoming a Quaker
My thanks for the invitation. I have enjoyed spending many hours over the past two months learning more about poetry, spirituality and myself. I have gone down more rabbit holes than Watership Down. And it’s been glorious!
I am slightly nervous about being described ‘a poet’. It seems to overstate my modest works. I am a poet in the sense that one can play golf every week in a local club and be termed a ‘golfer.’
This paper carries the burden of having been rewritten a dozen times.
My talk follows my spiritual journey encompassing my first fifty years as a Catholic and my past fifteen years as a Quaker and the middle ten years in a spiritual wilderness.
I have introduced poems where I thought appropriate. I have to confess that the poems changed every time I rewrote this paper. In the course of my talk I will only quote the first two lines of any poem. Friends are free to read the balance whenever they wish. I also include YouTube links to various poems that have been covered in music. Unattributed poems belong to me.
Before I introduce myself, may I share a recent article from the Guardian newspaper. It reads
"POETRY IS BOOMING BECAUSE IT IS THE ONLY LANGUAGE FOR THESE TIMES OF VIOLENCE AND CHAOS."
"In the midst of a cataclysm, poems survive, often stripped back to their most essential forms, which are surely universal and primordial human forms of expression: the lament for the dead, the lullaby for the child, the curse. In the end, humans need those things: those songs, those poems. They are proof of life. They may not be remembered; but poetry has a better chance at survival than much else that humans do or make. They may become memorials more lasting than bronze.
I would go further and suggest our spiritual and poetic lives include fun and joy, growing and retiring, war and peace. We should exclude nothing.
Poets should retain humility and accept that at times words are not enough or perhaps even too much. Not all music needs words. There are times when silence is the most eloquent of all.
I was born in Mayo on the Atlantic Coast of Western Ireland in 1951 under the shadow of the Holy Mountain, Croagh Patrick. In my teens I spent four summers in Connemara with a family of Irish speakers. Celtic Christianity provided my spiritual basis. I am attracted by the verses of John O’Donohue, ex Priest and poet who died all too young
From Connemara Blues, John O’Donohue
Before the Beginning
At school I was exposed to Anglo Irish writers like Joyce and Wilde, Kavanagh and Heaney, Yeats . They are the ones I turn to now. Sixty years later.
I was a child of the sixties, enchanted by the poetry of Paul Simon, camouflaged in music
Old Friends
I left school in 1969, intending to study architecture, only to change my mind. I decided to become a missionary abroad. I studied for over eight years in seminaries, seven years with a missionary order in Ireland abroad and just over a year for the Dublin Diocese.
Sacred Music became important to me. Much of it still speaks to my soul.
Even after I left the seminary the poetry and music of Taizè enchanted me. A favourite is the prayer of St. Teresa of Avila, whose remains I visited during my time in Salamanca
Nada te turbe, nada te espante
Quien a Dios tiene, nada le falta
Let nothing disturb you, let nothing cause you fear
He who holds God, lacks for nothing.
https://youtu.be/go1-BoDD7CI?si=5qfbij2ep4COtpu_
During the hour of daily meditation in the seminary, the reading of the psalms became important to me.
The Psalms are early poems were written over a thousand years from approx. 1,300 BCE. They cross generations and civilizations and cultural divides. For many raised in the Christian faith they form a spiritual scaffolding. For me they haven’t aged. I spent many hours in the chapel reflecting on them. Occasionally I remember to open the Jerusalem Bible I received in 1971 from my parents in the seminary.
Psalm 91
You can say to Yahweh ‘My refuge, my fortress, my God in whom I trust.’
Psalm 23
The Lord is my shepherd, there is nothing I shall want
Psalm 34
I will bless Yahweh at all times,
His praise shall be on my lips continually
Life in the seminary wasn’t all mystical chants. I ran a number of youth clubs and was introduced by the young club members to Leonard Cohen whose poetry and music astonished me
My life changed radically at 26 when I returned to civilian life. I studied Accountancy, Tax and Banking as I tried to carve out a career in banking a decade later than my school friends. Work and family occupied my life for the next thirty years.
My life changed again in my mid-fifties when I took early retirement. I had the first real opportunity to cool my heels and reflect. Pilgrimage became part of my search for direction and meaning. I wrote this poem, in honour of a friend who accompanied me various times on the Camino De Santiago
Pilgrim brother on the journey
Pilgrim brother on the journey
Through the dusty roads of Spain
Along the path that winds from France
Through the woods and through the trees
To the plains of wide Castile.
Here we are a decade later
Needing hope to fill our soul
But we look with faith and love
To a time when we greet the morn
Walking westward, faith reborn.
It was while descending the Pyrenees on the Spanish side I had a four hours long discussion with American Unitarian pilgrims and I shared with them a growing interest in Quakers. They encouraged me.
I started attending Meeting for Worship in Monkstown in Spring 2010 and became a member two years later.
The year 2010 coincided with a period of Spiritual awakening and a renewed interest in poetry .
I signed up for a diploma in Spirituality and rediscovered the joy of Patrick Kavanaghs poetry. At the end of the first term I wrote my first poem. It took me another two years to write a second.
In the meantime I started a blog to attempt to explain to myself my changing views of the world – Window over Dublin Bay – www.padraicmurray.blogspot.com
Patrick Kavanagh was the catalyst. He was not particularly religious but was very spiritual. I was captivated by the poem he wrote on recovering from a lung operation in ‘Hospital’
Irish schoolchildren delighted in his depiction of a rural Christmas
A Christmas Childhood by Patrick Kavanagh
Around 2013 I started writing small poems on my iPhone wherever I happened to be. I could never remember more than a verse or a line. I saw no point in lengthy poems. This writing continued until 2019 when I decided to herd together the poems from the various obsolete iPhones. I published a book entitled “Pilgrim Verses” I was nervous about exposing my poems to two hundred readers, forgetting that my blogs garnered tens of thousands of views, 125,000 at last count. The book raised money for AVP a charity I was involved with that runs weekend workshops in prisons to help inmate solve problems in a non-violent way. The poems are available on Quaker Voice, www.dublinpeace.blogspot.com
I hung up my poet’s boots in late 2019 happy I could retire from poetry only for Covid to arrive in Spring 2020 and another book saw light a year later “Faith, hope and covid diaries” – also available online Blig, blag, blog www.padraicmurraypoetry.blogspot.com
My favourite poem on Covid is written by an English Friend Harvey Gilman
Still
This earth is the same earth, is it not,
which we traversed with determination,
where, in former times, we ventured forth,
when travel was permitted, and choice was ours
over time and destination? This earth
now proclaims a different dominion.
My mobile phone was never far away. And so I scribbled when the mood took me. Which could be three in the morning or enjoying nature. I was fortunate to spend time in Carne, Co Wexford. Beside the sea.
January 1st 2019. Evening.
Windmill turbines whirring winter air
Giving light to Wexford
Against a pastel grey
And whites and pinks and blues
As the sun settles west beyond
The Saltee isles and Kilmore Quay.
Poetry is like listening to the radio and prose is like watching television
Poetry leaves things to your own imagination. It sets you on a trail of thought and leaves you to decide if you want to continue and if so in which direction.
Creativity
A sudden concentration of attention on a rainy August morning. Clusters of bright red berries, some wrinkled, some blemished, others perfect, hanging among green leaves.
The experience could not have lasted more than a few seconds, but that was a moment out of time. I was caught up in what I saw: I became a part of it: the berries, the leaves, the raindrops and I, we were all of a piece. A moment of beauty and harmony and meaning. A moment of understanding.
Ralph Hetherington, 1975
Lazy September noon at Our Lady's Lake
The early autumn breeze rinses the rushes
That guard the isle to Our Lady's crown
The Sunday faithful have melted
And the silence enters again
At Ireland Yearly Meeting I heard of a poetry group who met during Covid on Zoom in 2021. Like all good Quaker initiatives the names changed and I found myself the secretary for the past four years. We meet on Zoom on the last Thursday of the Month courtesy of Eustace Street Meeting.
One of our Quaker Poetry group, Lysana Robinson, a Friend living on the Isle of Skye took on the task of writing a poem every Sunday until the war Russia waged upon Ukraine was finished. Little did she think she would be still writing four and a half years later. Here is the first stanza of her poem of 29th March 2026
Two Hundred and Fourteenth Sunday
of War and Peace Pilgrimage
Gazing through my window I see
a host of yellow and white daffodils,
some bravely upright in the storm,
some bowing, heads on the ground,
like fallen soldiers in wars
they did not ask for.
The Quaker poetry meetings have introduced me to many more interesting poets. It’s like a book club in that respect..
Quakers have traditionally been attracted by queries rather than statements - typically poetry whispers and suggests.
It is not surprising that we find many Quakers writing poetry. In Monkstown alone about ten Friends out of forty have had poems published albeit in modest numbers.
Poetry seems to appeal to our heightened sensibilities. That was my case.
Poetry allowed me make the journey from a career of hard-nosed merchant banking to something marginally better. To rediscover the sensibilities of my younger days.
I feel poetry may be helpful to Quakers who can be reluctant to be extravagant in speech. Poetry has few rules. Many of my poems were written as dawn broke.
Land of luscious light
Where early mornings
Steal from yielding night
An hour before the dawn
It's hardly five o'clock
And yet the garden
Appears in limpid hue
Late April morning painted
Poetry is an invitation rather than a command
Poetry can be ambiguous as life often is.
Poetry can be written while waiting for a bus
In my case poetry was an attempt just to express my feelings to myself. Sharing them with others was incidental.
Poetry kept me sane, but you can be judge of that. It was cheaper than therapy.
Poetry can help us confront difficult things; death included.
WB Yeats wrote in his final year
Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid,
An ancestor was rector there
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
The wayfarer by Padraic Pearse written in prison on the eve of his execution
The beauty of the world hath made me sad,
This beauty that will pass;
Sometimes my heart hath shaken with great joy
To see a leaping squirrel in a tree,
Things young and happy.
And then my heart hath told me:
These will pass,
Will pass and change, will die and be no more,
Things bright and green, things young and happy;
And I have gone upon my way
Crossing the Bar by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Sunset and the evening star
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar
When I put out to sea.
Poetry helped me develop the sensitivities that Friends share - Care for mother earth and seas, for the landscape and the seasons, for animals and humans.
Poetry can try and find the divine in nature. Joseph Mary Plunkett
I SEE his blood upon the rose
And in the stars the glory of his eyes,
His body gleams amid eternal snows,
His tears fall from the skies.
I see his face in every flower;
The thunder and the singing of the birds
Are but his voice—and carven by his power
Rocks are his written words.
All pathways by his feet are worn,
His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,
His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn,
His face is every tree.
Poetry seemed to best express the height and the core of spirituality – Love.
William Shakespeare (Sonnet 18)
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Poetry can help deepen and enrich our spiritual life. Poetry like alcohol should be taken in small quantities
Poetry has become important in my life. Some people take up squash or hill walking. Poetry now suits my bad knees and limited ambitions.
I hope this reflection encourages you to find a line or two that speaks to you.
