Religion isn’t cool. That’s not new news. Consult any recent Pew Research poll or Gallup survey, and the evidence is overwhelming: each year fewer Americans regularly attend religious services, and each year more Americans report feeling that participation in organized religion is “nonessential.” Christianity, in particular, perennially gets bad press. Whether due to a hangover from collective Puritan guilt or our unconscious bondage to the Protestant work ethic, many Americans feel a strong ambivalence toward our “national religion.” Many churches’ implicit or explicit insistence that believers ascribe to certain dogmatic propositions or practices in order to secure their “salvation” (a word that, in its etymological essence, the Latin salvus, only means “health”) breeds an in-group / out-group mentality that leaves many feeling resistant or resentful.
Social scientist Brené Brown, whose viral 2013 TED Talk is still among the five most viewed, reframes the issue, diagnosing the way in which many of us succumb to the delusion that our self-worth is tethered to productivity and exhaustion is a status symbol. Helpfully, Brown differentiates between guilt (the feeling, “I did something wrong”) and shame (the feeling, “I am something wrong”). The pain we’ve sustained from the off-key theologies of out-of-touch preachers who told us we needed to do more, or be more, to experience what Brown says we all crave most deeply, a sense that we are “worthy of love and belonging,” has a simple name: shame.
Religion isn’t popular. Yet, there persists in our culture a hunger for meaning and connection—what one might call a yearning for transcendence. The proliferation of music festivals and yoga classes and mindfulness retreats and self-help modalities (especially, in recent years, those involving psychedelics) witnesses to the abiding appetite we have always felt, as humans, to be in communion—or even union—with one another, and perhaps with something larger. For Americans living in a quasi-theocracy, however, where politicians on both sides of the aisle weaponize religion to win votes, the cultural water we swim in contains a matrix of floaty, and often toxic, theological propositions that we unwittingly ingest. (Christian Wiman, former Editor of Poetry and a current professor at Yale Divinity School, wrote memorably, “I don’t know what it means to say that Christ ‘died for my sins’ (who wants that? who invented that perverse calculus?)”).
Even so, despite the offensiveness of so much that passes for Christian practice and belief, there remains a “faithful remnant” of “true believers” who credit religion as a viable, and valuable, way of “re-ligamenting” individuals to one another, and the soul to the divine. Indeed, there are Holy Ghost haunted poets: artists who not only utilize the tropes and archetypes of Christianity as modes of exploring the complexities of human existence, but who also reimagine them—often in fresh, and refreshingly heterodoxic, ways—in order to transform them: to revive them, resurrect them. Two such poets are Pádraig Ó Tuama and Spencer Reece.
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Kitchen Hymns is Pádraig Ó Tuama’s fourth collection of poetry. From 2014-2019, Ó Tuama led the Corrymeela Community, Northern Ireland’s longest established peace and reconciliation organization; and since 2019, he has served as the Theologian in Residence at The OnBeing Project. In his popular podcast Poetry Unbound, Ó Tuama reads a poem and then critically “exegetes” its lines in a manner reminiscent of the way a preacher might uncover the “good news” embedded in a sacred text. His reflections—lyrical, wise, exuberant—modulate from revery to rhapsody. A descriptor often employed for superlative critical appraisal is, “delicious.”
As both commentator and creator, Ó Tuama possesses an appetite for savoring experience in all its lavishness: a taste for both the pleasurable and painful that animates an ecstatic engagement with the word. The imagery of feasting—at any common table, at the table of the altar, or within an eliding of the two—is folded into much of Kitchen Hymns. The collection’s second section, “Do You Believe in God?” consists of thirteen poems bearing that same title. The fifth of these, a sort of ludic reprisal of the biblical account of creation, is a psalm of praise to the miracle of materiality, in all of its mess and blessedness. Contemplating the inverted journey that bread makes from excrement to grain of wheat to nebula or molecules, the speaker savors the mystery of how the physical—viscerally, subatomically—sustains us:
Before it became my blood,
my muscle, fat and shit,
I masticated it with spit.
Before that, it was in heat
– I used juice to make it rise –
and before that, it was wheat and milk,
soda, oats, salt and seeds,
unpacked from bags, car home, basket, shop
and truck, factory and farm.
It was whatever makes up life,
rot, manure, and us.
I cut and butter it, swallow it,
lick my lips, want more.
There is a sort of quaintness created in the chiming of the rhymes—“shit, spit, it,” “heat, seeds, wheat”—that brings to mind traditional English verse. However, rather than hymning the eternal themes of love, loss, or longing, Ó Tuama looks more closely, wonders more widely, and contemplates the beguiling ways in which biology and ontology intertwine. In his essays, Wiman laments the poetic cliché of the extraordinary hidden in the ordinary, and says, rather, that if you look hard enough at the material world with the right instrument, you will see within it a beguiling, and beautiful, reality: a flux of wave and particle and space. For Wiman, the weirdness of the material world, deep down, is analogous to that of the divine. Ó Tuama’s lines work through a similar logic. They both reach for, and refute, regularity and tidiness and order. Like life in all its chaos, these poems reveal themselves as beautiful and beguiling, but ultimately evade any limiting analysis.
In lieu of a traditional table of contents, the author gives us an “ordo missae”: an order of the Mass. As readers we are meant to take in these poems liturgically, according to a sacred patterning; yet, the manner of devotion we are invited into unsettles all tradition. The poet celebrates not the purity and polish of some transcending theology, but the unruliness and marvelousness of life lived fully. The fourth poem in the “Do You Believe in God?” section recollects a different kind of sacramental moment: that of initiation into one of the four words found in the Greek New Testament that we translate into English as “love”: eros. Formally, the poem is utterly uninhibited. Its words are spread across the page, as a lover’s body and thoughts are spread in the act of lovemaking:
It’ll hurt he said I said I know
You’re sure? he said I’m sure
His weight on me
pushing into me
placing himself in me Making me
with Agony and
Please
These poems ask their title question, “Do You Believe in God?” thirteen times (and once more in the section preceding them) because that’s what theologians do. They turn and turn the query, look at it from every possible angle, letting the ineffable reflect and refract, the way a prism rainbows light. The first century CE Rabbi Ben Bag-Bag said of the Torah, “Turn it, turn it, for everything is in it.” The speakers of these poems rotate experience in every available way—to sing, and savor existence as the painful, pleasurable paradox it is.
Throughout the book, Ó Tuama shuttles from the domestic to the mythic, from the conversational to the cosmological (there is a section entitled “in a garden by a gate” in which Persephone and Jesus are figured in the Underworld like children falling in love—a proper appreciation of which would demand an essay of its own). The collection is chiastic in its structure. The book opens, closes, and includes at its center sections entitled “Kitchen Hymns.” The involuted architecture of the volume seems to suggest that if we would try to wrap our heads or hearts around the nature of who or what god is, we would have to do so in an iterative process. Like chewing food, like making love, we must put forth our questions again, and again. But these poems intimate the truth that peace is only finally found when we toss off our insistence on questioning, and become simply present to the world in all its astonishing commonness, in a posture of uncommon astonishment. As the speaker—who sounds very much like the poet—says in one of the “Kitchen Hymns”:
I believe I’m in the room next to belief. I hear
the sounds of prayers coming through the walls. I like
the smell of incense. And the sound of fabric rustling fabric
as the people stand or kneel.
It’s in the smells and sounds, in the sensual intensities and intimacies that accompany any act of prayer, that true devotion happens. Enfolded in the unremarkable efforts that attend our practices of piety, as well as our performances of violence, the devastating deliciousness of life breaks in, and meaning in all its mystery gets made.
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Acts is Spencer Reece’s third collection of poetry. An ordained Episcopal priest, for a decade Reece served as assistant to the Episcopal Bishop in Madrid, Spain. Imagery from that season of priesting suffuses the collection. These poems charmingly catalogue the quotidian ambivalences that mark the workaday rhythms of ministry—and are also shot through with sudden instances of epiphanic clarity. Most occupations have a cyclical nature, and can be tedious; but the work of congregational ministry is unique in its relentless repetitiveness (here come Advent and Christmas once again; time to prepare once more for Lent and Easter…). The priest has the choice of whether to despair under the clock’s unceasing tyranny—or find ways to relax into its rhythm, and connect more deeply with what early Christian mystics called kairos, vertical time: an eternal now that intersects chronos’ unremitting horizontality.
Reece’s method for getting at the kairotic is to look as hard as possible into the present moment: that is, to life and see incarnationally. The word incarnation, from the Latin (in + carnis), literally means “to become flesh.” In hymning life in its corporeal complexity, Reece’s lines flesh out our everyday experience, with all its corpuscles and pimples. The collection’s title refers to the biblical “Acts of the Apostles.” Yet it also evokes the homophone that ghosts it. These poems cut through and into our habitual ways of imagining our lives, and imagining divinity—by virtue of their formal dexterity, their linguistic richness, and their capacity to surprise.
Philosopher and mystic Simone Weil wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” and, “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” These poems pay generous attention to the work of describing the places and things that populate their scenescapes and instill in us a simultaneous sense of wonder and recognition. Reece arrives at revelation not so much by extrapolating insight from the contextures of life described; rather, life is shown and savored with such reverence as to be disclosed as wholly humming with the holy. As here, in the poem, “La Santa Cena”:
I say mass
hold my box that snaps
soiled by the palms
of our priest shot dead
under that squat fat
teeny-weeny dictator
corrugated nicked cover
inside the host molds
the wine turpentine
they don’t listen much
my accent is off
[…]
I lay my old head
on the foldout bed
where a mattress coil
pokes my backbone
Oh, to be loved like this
In Reece’s descriptive visioning, even what could be construed as failure is lifted, as a natural component of life lived fully: of the world embodied. Throughout Acts, Reece often favors a short line; and the pacing becomes almost liturgical. Like a well-known prayer, like stones worn smooth in a stream, the lines organize with a sense of inevitability. Taken one by one, as the thumb and forefinger might work beads upon a rosary, the phrases progress as measured meditation. As, for example, in the poem “Stillenacht,” where the lines are shortened almost entirely to single-words:
Moon
your nipple
hardens
over
Vienna
[…]
the cuckoo
clock
jabs
a muscle
of music
Hamlet
dismantling
his anguish
The lines run on—both acute in their precision, and lavish in their extravagance. Just as the moon is imaged in sensuous terms, so is the church’s primary sacrament—piquantly and scandalously:
the church
chews
Jesus
the Danube
slaps
the buttocks
of Europe
One of Reece’s brilliances is his ability to reimagine traditional tropes in idiosyncratic and illuminative ways: in ways that are illuminative because they are idiosyncratic. It is a common notion to profess, that in the sacrament of the Eucharist, one consumes the body of God (an act theologians call “theosis” or “divinization”: the practice of becoming God). To describe the way “the church / chews / Jesus,” however, gives the action a tongue-in-cheek dimension (note, too, how the single-word lines “chew” and “Jesus” enact the physical, deliberate movement of chewing). To follow these lines with an assertion of how “the Danube / slaps / the buttocks / of Europe” reinforces the sense in which the sacred ought legitimately be celebrated right alongside the profane (if there is any real distinction between them). This consonance between sacred and secular is carried to a further pitch in the single-stanza poem’s conclusion:
Lo
a man
spits
on a man
splits
him
open
like a Bible
sex
is
an ax
Spitting as a form of baptism, the opening of orifice as an effort of faithful reading, and of piety: in Reece’s vision, every action becomes a type of consecration. Desire and sensuality are sacralized as feast; salvation must be kin or cousin to satisfaction.
At the center of the collection is an epistolary sequence, “Letters from Spain,” which offers a piecemeal account of the poet’s sojourn in Madrid during his first cure as a priest (Reece reminds us: “Letters started in the Book of Acts / Luke wrote to Theophilus in his dusty office” … “much like mine,” and a proper account of the ways in which the biblical is fetchingly, outrageously elided into the personal, and the celestial is collapsed with the corporeal, alas, is beyond the scope of this essay). When asked why she incorporated so much purportedly profane material into her fiction, Flannery O’Connor answered, in effect: everything that is, is under God’s eye, is part of God’s creation—and thus cannot be excluded from any artist’s vision that purports to explore, celebrate and interrogate the world in all its obfuscating splendor. Like Brother Lawrence, the seventeenth century French monk who entered the monastery, and when assigned to the kitchen as a cook found God in the pots and pans, Reece is able to see everything as lit a little. Saying Mass and sleeping on a dilapidated mattress are sacrificial actions—in the deep etymological sense of that word, from the Latin sacra (“sacred”) + facio (“to do, make”): a “making sacred.”
Reece’s use of sincerity is refreshing. In a culture in which we’ve indulged enough of cynicism, and had enough of sarcasm (which, etymologically, means “flesh-eating,” and shares a root word with “sarcophagus”) we are in need of a return to earnestness. Reece is now a priest with his own church in Rhode Island. The book closes by bringing us from Spain back to the priest’s nearer, more familiar coast. The question of home haunts the poet. It is a common trope to say that humans, in a Christian worldview, are on an earthly pilgrimage, this side of the veil or vale of tears and years, and en route to their heavenly home. Yet, Reece’s rendering of the topos of this waystation and journey is singular and memorable in its lyric exactitude. He declares in “Little Compton Psalm”:
Whatever
the crisis
the answer
is love.
Where is
my home?
Vagabond,
I drip
with Easter.
“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful,” wrote O’Connor. The painful change of grace is the record of this book: Reece’s love-letter to God, the church, and the community it fosters. It is his answer to desolation, dripping with resurrection.
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I was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 2018; and still, most days I vacillate between feeling a deep love for aspects of the church’s theology—“here, God’s body; take it, eat it: God’s body that you can take into your body, God that becomes a part of you …”—and thinking, as I reckon with the harm and injustice the institution has perpetuated over the centuries, “burn it down.”
Which is why I need poetry like this. Poetry that is unapologetically religious—not in a doctrinal sense, but in a human sense. Poetry that serves me like the church, at its best, can serve me: as a way of re-ligamenting myself to others, and back to the divine. Church, in a sense, is counter-cultural. Church is one of the few places where people gather each week and sit alongside others who don’t think like them or vote like them, out of a common commitment to the conviction that there is something bigger that unites them, and that what unites them is greater than what divides them. The more one engages in such communities, the more one feels fed and nourished; and the more one feels fed and nourished, the more likely one will feel compelled to feed and nourish others.
Which is why we so need poets who can “queer” our experience of what or who God is—in order to strip the institution of whatever in it is harmful, and surprise us into insight: into an experience of wonder at what in the tradition still is life-giving, is worth saving. Reece’s and Ó Tuama’s poems furnish such spaces of sustenance and nurture. We need more spaces like the ones these poets cultivate: spaces to revise and scandalize our notion of what God is, and what the good is. Feasting, stinking, sweating, excreting life in all its sanctity, these are poems that teach us to reverence divinity as it’s thrust into the world around us. To sing, to weep, to fall upon our knees, be opened and be broken—like a bell, a spell, a heart: like hope, all radiantly broken open.
