Pádraig Ó Tuama > Quotes

“It has taken years to continue to live into the truth that if I believe we are from God and for God, then we are from Goodness and for Goodness. To greet sorrow today does not mean that sorrow will be there tomorrow. Happiness comes too, and grief, and tiredness, disappointment, surprise and energy. Chaos and fulfilment will be named as well as delight and despair. This is the truth of being here, wherever here is today. It may not be permanent but it is here. I will probably leave here, and I will probably return. To deny here is to harrow the heart. Hello to here.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World

“Prayer is a small fire lit to keep cold hands warm. Prayer is a practice that flourishes both with faith and doubt. Prayer is asking, and prayer is sitting. Prayer is the breath. Prayer is not an answer, always, because not all questions can be answered.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community

“May we find our foundation in the work of Love; demanding, tiring, true and human and holy.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community

“The Christian story of incarnation in the body of a boy- a boy whose ancestors were both famous and infamous – is one that can spur us towards living with the courage that is indigenous to us. To be human is to be in the image of something good, and image comes from imagination. To be human is to be in the imagination of God, and the imagination is the source of integrity as well as cracks. To be born is to be born into a story of possibility, a story of failure, a story of imagination and the failure of imagination. To be born is to be born with the possibility of courage. Hello to courage.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World

“The only place to begin is where I am, and whether by desire or disaster, I am here. My being here is not dependent on my recognition of the fact. I am here anyway. But it might help if I could learn to look around.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World

“When we are in a moment of courage – whether we call that God’s voice, or indigenous bravery – it is the body that tells us a deep truth; it is the body that speaks to us, and it is from the body that the courage comes. I have a friend, Kellie, and when she speaks courageously – and she speaks courageously often – you can read the truth from her body. Her fingers shake a little bit, and her mouth, while it is shaping strong words, is also shaking with the fear that demonstrates the depth of her courage. Hello to fear. Hello to the courage that comes from the same place as fear. Hello to the truth of the body.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World

“God of the ground, whose body was − like ours − from dust, and who fell − like we fall − to the ground.  May we find you on the ground when we fall. Oh, our falling fallen brother, may we find you, so that we may inhabit our stories, our selves.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community

“The man here tells us a truth that is awful - we baptise ourselves with names that are far from the only truth about ourselves.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World

“It occurs to me that courage comes from the same place as fear, and where there is fear, there is the possibility of courage.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World

“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 someday. 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.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World

“you can find the courage to name “here”—especially in the place where you do not wish to be—it can help you be there.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World

“To name a place requires us to be in a place. It requires us to resist dreaming of where we should be and look around where we are.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World

“When we are towards the end of ourselves, we begin to believe that we are only what we struggle with. The man here tells us a truth that is awful - we baptize ourselves with names that are far from the only truth about ourselves.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World

“But testimony, if told or heard unwisely, can be a colonization of a single experience into a universal requirement.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World

“What I do know is that it can help to find the words to tell the truth of where you are now. If you can find the courage to name “here”—especially in the place where you do not wish to be—it can help you be there. Instead of resenting another’s words of gladness or pain, it may be possible to hear it as simply another location. They are there and I am here. At another point, we will be in different locations, and everybody will pass by many locations in their life. The pain is only deepened when the location is resented or, even worse, unnamed. Hello to here.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World

“is convenient, particularly convenient, to tell stories of the past lives—especially our own past lives—that create a strong distinction between good and evil. The genealogy of Matthew’s Gospel shows us that what may have once been considered scandalous is, with the greater wisdom of hindsight, demonstrated to have been motivated by courage.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World

“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.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. Annie Dillard”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World

“Hello to the courage that comes from the same place as fear.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World

“We need to mourn what we’ve lost before we can see what we still have’,”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, Borders and Belonging: The Book of Ruth: A Story for Our Times

“At Corrymeela, we do not seek to undo differences, merely we hope and pray that we can learn to hold our differences differently.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community

“The practice of courage is needed most in situations where it is most threatened, and it is often those who have the most to lose who are the ones from whom the most courage is needed.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World

“If it’s true that it helped, does it finally matter how it happened?”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World

“Gods of Pilate, you are loud and lazy, following the fashions of the day making lies out of love and making mockeries of meaning. And − so often − we follow you. May we instead, follow that small whisper, even when we barely hear it, even when we barely believe it, even when it hurts. Because this is what love is. This is what love is.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community

“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 wind 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.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama

“Recently I was working with a group of LGBTI people where the majority of the group were trans or intersex. I had been asked to lead the Bible study. We looked at the text where Jesus of Nazareth is twelve years old and is among religious leaders. He is astounding them with his insight. But they do not know how to believe that the truth can exist in this kind of human package. We, LGBTI people at a Bible study, asked a question: 'What truths have we known about ourselves since we were young?' People knew what it was to know themselves. They also knew what it was like for their insight to be denied. For decades. The Bible study lasted for hours. People spoke about the indigenous understanding they'd had about themselves since they could think. 'I didn't know the Bible could help us read our own lives,' someone said.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, The Book of Queer Prophets: 21 Writers on Sexuality and Religion

“knew that somehow, if I could only settle into a different reading of truth, I could find in prayer words both generous and fierce.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World

“indeed, it is an acknowledgement that new stories are always possible. And these new stories are not told on the level of nation states or whole people groups but through personal and human encounter.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, Borders and Belonging: The Book of Ruth: A Story for Our Times

“To be forgotten is one thing. To be remembered with disgrace is another.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World

“Do You Believe in God?

I turn to you,
not because I trust you,
or believe in you,
but because I need a direction for my need. You—
the space between me and death; you—
the hum at the heart of an atom; you—
nothing; you—my favorite emptiness; you—
what I turned away from and will turn to; you—
my ache made manifest in address; you,
silent you, what my friends saw as they died; you
contain what’s not containable; you
are the shape of my desire—
-- Pádraig Ó Tuama, Kitchen Hymns”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, Kitchen Hymns