“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.
Continue reading for an inside look at Being Here , and learn more about how Ó Tuama intentionally crafted this prayer book for the reader’s unique spiritual journey.
Praise for Being Here
“ 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
What is a Collect?
In liturgical circles it’s pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable—COLLect— rather than the ordinary usage of going to collect a message, where the emphasis is on the second—collECT. There’s no magic about this. It’s tradition, or distinction, or dialect, or snobbery, or something else. Call it what you want. Either way it’s collecting something; namely, your intention and desire, your reflection and attention, your gratitude, and your need for containment.
The collect has five folds:
Name the one you’re praying to
Unfold the name of the one you’re praying to
Name one desire
Unfold the desire you’ve named
Finish with a bird of praise
***
God,
unto whom alle hertes ben open, and unto whom alle wille spekith, and unto whom no privé thing is hid:
I beseche thee so for to clense the entent of myn heart with the unspekable gift of thi grace
that I may parfiteliche love thee, and worthilich preise thee.
Amen.
Basically, it’s:
Address
Say more
Ask one thing
Say more
End
As a form, it’s elegant, asking for attention to the second and fourth folds, “Say more.” Why are you praying to the one you’re praying to? Who are they anyway? Why are you asking for the single thing you’re asking for? What’s the heart of that desire?
How to Use This Book
Image of the 14th daily prayer featured in Being Here by Pádraig Ó Tuama.
The prayers in this book are numbered: one, two, three, up until thirty-one. The idea is that you might pray one prayer every day of the month. You can scratch them out, replace words, write your own. They’re all collects, a little fivefold form of prayer that is—for me—as important as the form of sonnet.
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. What is prayer? It’s not a passport to heaven. If anything, it’s a way of seeing here, a way of being here.
If you’re not sure what to do with this book, then perhaps reading the opening prayer followed by the small texts for the day (one from a gospel tradition, the other from something more contemporary), then some silence before the collect on the day, and then the final remembering prayer might be a good shape. Certainly, it’s not a bad shape for now.
But you might have tried all of that and want to try something new. Perhaps you want to start at the end and begin with remembering. Perhaps you want to write your own prayers in the margins. Perhaps you want to edit or amend mine. Maybe they need to be wilder. Maybe you want to scribble your own readings into the corners or write the dates on which you used a particular prayer in the margins.
Perhaps you want to read the gospel and reading before you take a walk and read the prayer of the day when you get back. Lovely. Perhaps you want to read the gospel text in the morning and the prayer at night. Also lovely. Perhaps you want to copy them into your phone and have them pop up as a reminder every day. Also magnificent.
Perhaps you want to read the gospel text for the day, then take ten deep breaths, read the reading for the day, followed by another ten breaths, and then the collect, finishing off with more deep breaths. I’m delighted.
Or maybe you keep it by the kettle and skim through the thoughts while you’ve got that sixty seconds to yourself.
If you know what you’re doing, you’re blessed. If you don’t know what you’re doing, then try it one way for a month, and another way for another month, and then go with what works. You’re the one who’ll bless these prayers by praying them. This is how to use this book. Make it yours.
Excerpt from Day 18
OPENING PRAYER
Turning to the day
and to each other
We open ourselves to the day
and each other.
This is the day that the Lord has made
and a day we’ll have to make our way through.
Whether with ease or pain
with patience or joy
May we find opportunities for generosity
toward others and ourselves.
May we find moments of encounter
even in isolation.
May we find stories and memories
even in the most complicated corners.
May we start again
where we have failed again.
May we confess
and be confessed to.
Because this is a way of living
That’s worth living daily.
READING
But wholly, at last, I wakened, opened wide
The window and my soul, and let the airs
And out-door
sights sweep gradual gospels in,
Regenerating what I was. O Life,
How oft we throw it off and think,—‘Enough,
Enough of life in so much!—here’s a cause
For rupture;—herein we must break with Life,
Or be ourselves unworthy; here we are wronged,
Maimed, spoiled for aspiration: farewell Life!’
—And so, as froward babes, we hide our eyes
And think all ended.—Then, Life calls to us
In some transformed, apocryphal, new voice,
Above us, or below us, or around. . . .
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh
SCRIPTURE
Jesus stood still and called them, saying, “What do you
want me to do for you?”
—Matthew 20:32
SILENCE
COLLECT OF THE DAY
Questioning Jesus,
we do not always know what we want.
Yet what we want
can drive us
even when we do not know it.
Help us find the moments to come into contact
with those deep drives
so that we can be moved
toward what will
create
and not destroy.
Amen.
A REMEMBERING PRAYER
God of day and night,
In the great poem of creation
we read that we
were considered very good,
and that you
find glory
in us.
We look around our city:
the birds finding home
the name of it
the shape of it
the bustle and magnificence of it
the poverty of it
the complicity of it
the repressed stories of it
the generosity of it
the corners of kindness
on every corner
the future of it
the past it hides from
greed and goodness
violence and visions
burdens and bodies
everywhere.
We pray for our city
and for the cities we are.
Breathe in us
just like you always do
and renew us
with every twilight
with every morning
with every encounter
with every opportunity.
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