Seeing Nature as a Poet with Drew Jackson and Pádraig Ó Tuama

Learning How to See with Brian McLaren

Center for Action and Contemplation

Christianity, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 748 Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2024

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What is it about poetry that allows it to hold both beauty and disruption, and even inspire change? In this episode, Brian McLaren explores the power of poetry to help us understand and grieve for the natural world while also appreciating its beauty. He talks with poets Pádraig Ó Tuama and Drew Jackson about the importance of seeing nature holistically, and how poetry can help us grapple with the tension between destruction and renewal. The episode explores how poems can inspire action and change and encourages you, the listener, to write your own poems, especially haiku, to practice seeing nature differently. About the guests: Drew Jackson is a poet, speaker, and public theologian. He is author of God Speaks Through Wombs: Poems on God’s Unexpected Coming and Touch the Earth: Poems on The Way. His work has appeared in Oneing from the Center for Action and Contemplation, The Isolation Journals with Suleika Jaouad, Made for Pax, The Journal from the Centre for Public Christianity, Fathom Magazine, and other publications. Drew received his B.A. in Political Science from the Univ. of Chicago and his M.A. in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary. He currently works as the Director of Mission Integration for the Center for Action and Contemplation, and lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife and daughters. Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet and a theologian from Ireland whose poetry and prose centre around themes of language, power, conflict and religion. His work has won acclaim in circles of poetry, politics, psychotherapy and conflict analysis. His formal qualifications (PhD, MTh and BA) cover creative writing, literary criticism and theology. Alongside this, he pursued vocational training in conflict analysis, specialising in groupwork. His published work is in the fields of poetry, anthology, essay, memoir, theology and conflict. A new volume of poetry — Kitchen Hymns — is forthcoming from CHEERIO in mid 2024. Resources: The transcript for this episode can be found here. Brian referenced two of his books, Life After Doom and The Galapagos Islands. Pádraig referenced A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, you can find that here. Pádraig referenced Thinking With Trees by Jason Allen-Paisant, you can find that here. Drew referenced How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This by Hanif Abdurraqib, you can find that here. To learn more about Pádraig, visit his website here. To learn more about Drew, visit his website here. Find out more about musician April Stace here. For instructions on how to compose Haiku, visit here. Connect with us: Have a response to Brian's call to action at the end of this episode, or a question in general? Email us: podcasts@cac.org Send us a voicemail: cac.org/voicemail We'll be accepting questions for our Listener Questions episode until November 20th, 2024.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I was an English major in college, yeah, one of those guys.
0:05.1	And I remember three times when one of my professors got choked up and shed a tear,
0:11.6	both through my undergraduate and graduate years.
0:15.3	Once was when a history professor told the story of the dissolution of the British Empire.
0:21.6	All of us students, I think, were too young and uninformed to feel the intensity of what he felt,
0:28.6	that the largest empire in human history would think of itself as so great, and yet have to come to terms of the fact that it had caused great harm on its road to
0:40.4	greatness. And then that that empire would have to grow through the process of letting go of its
0:46.8	holdings and seeking a new beginning. And I remember as our professor lectured, he was overcome by that emotion, and we just didn't really
0:57.4	understand it. A second episode of Professor choking up involved one who had had a bit too much
1:04.9	to drink before class. That's all I'll say about that one. The third was a professor who read
1:10.8	us the beginning of a long poem by William
1:13.5	Wordsworth, a poem often known as Tinturn Abbey. Just about anybody who's had a British literature
1:19.1	class or a basic poetry class will have been exposed to this poem. The actual title is lines
1:26.5	composed a few miles above Tinturn Abbey on
1:29.4	revisiting the Banks of the Why during a tour July 13, 1798. And I'd like to just try reading the first
1:39.4	few sections of this poem to you right now. And I'll make a few comments as we go along five years have
1:46.9	passed five summers with the length of five long winters and again i hear these waters rolling from
1:54.6	their mountain springs with a soft inland murmur once again do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs that on a wild
2:05.5	secluded scene impress thoughts of more deep seclusion and connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky.
2:15.7	And so their Wordsworth invites us into this place that he's visiting, that he's
2:21.0	remembered for five years and now sees it again. And there's the sound of water on rocks. There's
2:27.8	the sense of seclusion and perhaps a quiet of the sky that reflects the internal quiet that he is feeling as he
	...

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