"Be with me, Madam Jazz, I urge you now, / Riff in me so I can conjure how / You breathe in us more than we dare allow." (Micheal O'Siadhail, The Five Quintets) Irish poet Micheal O'Siadhail and theologian David Ford discuss the improvisational jazz that emerges in the interplay of poetry and theology, riffing on life and love, the meaning of covenant, retrieving wisdom from history, and imagining a future by letting go in communion with Madam Jazz. Interview by Drew Collins.
"Be with me, Madam Jazz, I urge you now, / Riff in me so I can conjure how / You breathe in us more than we dare allow." (Micheal O'Siadhail, The Five Quintets)
Irish poet Micheal O'Siadhail and theologian David Ford discuss the improvisational jazz that emerges in the interplay of poetry and theology, riffing on life and love, the meaning of covenant, retrieving wisdom from history, and imagining a future by letting go in communion with Madam Jazz. Interview by Drew Collins.
About Micheal O'Siadhail
Micheal O'Siadhail is a poet. His Collected Poems was published in 2013, One Crimson Thread in 2015 and The Five Quintets in 2018, which received Conference on Christianity and Literature Book of the Year 2018 and an Eric Hoffer Award in 2020. He holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Manitoba and Aberdeen. He lives in New York.
About David Ford
David F. Ford OBE is Regius Professor of Divinity Emeritus in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Selwyn College. He is a renowned theologian and leader in inter-faith relations and is author of Christian Wisdom: Desiring God and Learning in Love and the forthcomingThe Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary.
Show Notes
Production Notes
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Micheal O'Siadhail: I think that life consists of improvisation. Anybody living in family life will know that it's a perpetual improvisation. In a loving relation, it's always improvisation. But I love the whole image of jazz, basically, because the thing is you're given a tune, an old tune--just your lifetime: you're born, you die, and it ends. It's the same for all of us, but think of the endless riffs which we can manage in between. It seems to me to be a picture of how we live, how our lives evolved through this improvisation.
David Ford: I came more and more to think that the gospel is actually an encouragement to improvise in the Spirit on the life of Jesus. There's this lovely sense of being invited to be led into more truths, being invited to do more things and endlessly be imaginatively improvising on the sort of person and the sort of words and actions of Jesus.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. Poetry is hard to read, hard to define, hard to understand, hard to pin down, hard to evaluate, and that's what I love about it. Like life, it often defies simplistic description or interpretation. Jazz offers the same. The immediate improvised communal response to the shackles and strictures that dampen human flourishing. Jazz was born out of great pain and suffering and evils of slavery and oppression of black folks, but exalts as a free expression of human agency.
And here's where you get that connection between jazz and poetry. The Greek word poiesis, the word that gives birth to poetry means "to make." Philosophically, this is present in Plato and Aristotle, all the way up to Martin Heidegger. Life, like poetry and jazz, is perhaps at its most beautiful when it departs from the rigid cycle of birth and death, to improvise and bring something into being which wasn't there before. There is profound, ecstatic meaning in that poetic act of letting go, saying "yes," finding joy in being, and then bringing something new into the world. So, jazz, improvisation and a "syncopated peace" that exists in mutual, interwoven, historical dialogue between the individuals of our pluralized world. This is just one way of describing the magisterial poetry of Micheal O'Siadhail in his epic Five Qintets.
Today on the show, Drew Collins hosts Irish poet, Micheal O'Siadhail, and Cambridge theologian, David Ford. The two have been friends for over 50 years, each acts as the other's first reader. In their work, in their relationship depict the conversation between poetry and theology that can result in the kind of wisdom that riffs on life, imagines that syncopated peace with God and humanity, and revels in the glory of being.
Drew Collins: David Ford and Micheal O'Siadhail, thank you so much for joining us.
David Ford: Very good to be with you, Drew.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Hello and nice to be here too.
Drew Collins: It's so wonderful to be with you both. Micheal, I was hoping we could get started right away with a reading from your most recent book of poems, The Five Quintets.
Micheal O'Siadhail: I'm just going to read you the epigraph, which is pointing to the different directions the five quintets take, so we can talk about that afterwards. But let me just first read the epigraph:
Be with me, Madam jails. I urge you now refund me so I can conjure how you breathe on us more than we dare allow in words and shoes and tones, please. Madam blow, play and me the grace to know how in your complex glory, we let go.
Show how an open hand is worry free spark again, your loves the economy. You are generous. First words spoken, let there be. And Hans are trust in hard earned betterment humbler world. We may in turn augment in long, uh, dazzles of increment while marveling at your choreography stars and quarks. Be under our mastery.
We still explore to praise your mystery. Although we sacred books, uh, lip read, score, improvising. There is always more you jazz on what's our own and our rapport, each solo and ensemble of a piece grooves and tempos shifting without cease. We flourish in a syncopated piece. In all our imperfections, we advance trusting and creations.
Free-willed chance. Sweet. Madame Joe's in you. We are the dance.
Drew Collins: Wonderful. You mentioned that the epigraph anticipates the structure of the poem itself and the contents of the poem. But I was wondering before we get to that, if you might talk a little bit about this figure of Madam Jazz. Just say a little bit more about who she is or what she represents.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Clearly, Madam Jazz who has featured throughout all of my work is a kind of metaphor, which I wouldn't wish to tie absolutely down with any sort of easy equation. Madam jazz for me suggests the great force, the breath of life, the marvelous improvisation of living, which keeps us dancing. I think that's probably the simplest answer I can give.
Drew Collins: Improvisation is not something that people, I think, generally associate with poetry, but it's such an important theme in yours.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Well, I think that life consists of improvisation. We're given these stories, but we have to, in each context as life moves on, keep improvising on them. Anybody living in family life will know that it's a perpetual improvisation. In a loving relationship, it's always improvisation. But I love the whole image of jazz, basically, because the thing is if you're given a tune, an old tune--just your lifetime: you're born, you die and it ends. It's the same for all of us. But think of the endless rifts which we can manage in between.
And I also love the idea of improvisation connected with jazz because it's also involved with suffering. Think that jazz came out of the exuberance of the people who survived slavery. It reminds me always too that you think of other musics with that sort of exuberance, that improvisational exuberance. Think of keening music, which probably came out of the Irish Famine. I think of klezmer music, for instance, coming out of the shtetl of Eastern Europe and so forth. So all of that seems to me to be a picture of how we live, how our lives evolve through this improvisation.
Drew Collins: Yeah, that reminds me that I once heard Herbie Hancock give an interview about his time in Miles Davis, in his Bitches Brew band. And he talked about one of his first shows and he was playing a solo and he played this sour note early on in the solo and he stopped. It was out of key. It was the wrong note. And he said, he looked at Miles Davis, who paused, cocked his head for a second, and then played a line, an improvisational line that made that sour note fit.
Micheal O'Siadhail: I had a friend who was a jazz musician and he used to say to me, "When somebody set off on a riff, if you were really listening, you could anticipate what he was going on."
Drew Collins: I was thinking about your connection between improvisation and suffering, and this way of looking at things that are wrong and trying to put them in perspective.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Yes, the dissonance.
Drew Collins: David, Madam Jazz featured very prominently in your work as well. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about why Madam Jazz is so important to you as well.
David Ford: I love jazz, of course, so that's the first thing. Just over the last few weeks, I've been playing several times over A Love Supreme, John Coltrane's great recording, and just savoring that again. But I'm a classicist by training--Greek and Latin classics--and so I appreciate the muse dimension of Madam Jazz.
But one of the other analogies is, of course, as Micheal suggested and mentioned, in John's Gospel. I've been spending the last 20 years on a commentary on John's Gospel. So it's about to come out. Thank goodness. But in doing that Gospel, I came more and more to think that the Gospel is actually an encouragement to improvise in the Spirit on the life of Jesus--the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, that in other words, the Spirit--there's more on the spirit in John than any of the other gospels. There's this lovely sense of being invited to be led into more truth, being invited to do more things and endlessly be imaginatively improvising on the sort of person and the sort of words and actions of Jesus.
Drew Collins: Yeah. So a sort of a temporal component to this sort of jazz and improvisation is what I'm hearing from both of you and that it's sort of involved in past, present, and future. Micheal, I wonder if you might say a little bit more about--you were talking about jazz as a sort of posture of attentiveness and of listening and both of the need for and the freedom of the search for meaning. Each canto of The Five Quintets is dedicated to a specific discipline: the arts, economics, politics, science. And then the fifth is, I suppose, philosophy and theology?
Micheal O'Siadhail: Philosophy, theology, but meaning, perhaps it's finding meaning.
Drew Collins: Yes. So could you say a little bit more about how this epigraph, this sort of early invocation of Madam Jazz shapes the way you hope readers will engage with this epic poem.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Like all prologues, it was written late because then you knew what you had done. Often people think you start with the forwards. You usually end with the forward as you will know yourself. And so it was a way of pointing a little bit or suggesting how you might read each of the quintets. In the case of the first one, "Making," which is what I call the arts, it's really an appealed in words, in painting, in music to try and do something to reveal the complex glory of God and of creation.
The second one, which is economics, which I call "Dealing," I speak here of pointing people towards the idea of the openhandedness, which combines generosity and justice as the essentials in an economic attitude. Following that then, in terms of politics, which I call "Steering," here it's really an appeal, I think, not to look for an approach with a but rather starting always from where we are and proceeding to make the world a little less imperfect and proceeding with fortitude and patience.
The fourth quintet then, which is "Finding," which David very kindly was adverting to there a minute ago, it's not that we don't want to continue to explore the wondrous world, but to explore it with, perhaps, a new found humidity, to know that we will never master everything. It's quite obvious to us that once we move into the subatomic world, into the whole world of probability and so forth, and it just goes deeper and deeper and deeper, and we know we will never get to the bottom of it--still the joy and the humidity of this wondrous search.
And finally, the fifth quintet, which as you said, it's in conversation with the philosophers and the theologians over the last 400 years. But here I think the appeal in the epigraph is to direct people towards the idea of an acceptance of both a religious and a secular world, but also with different traditions, which we can share, and in sharing go deeper into the improvisation of our own tradition, but also enriching other traditions. So I think that's what I have tried to encapsulate in the epigraph to The Five Quintets.
David Ford: Could I put a footnote in there, Drew? It really interests me that the stanza in that epigraph that says, "although each sacred book is a lip-read score, improvising, there is always more. You jazz on what's our own and our rapport." And I think I'm right in saying that was partly inspired by the practice of scriptural reasoning, which we've all taken part in, where people from different religious traditions read their texts together and find that there's always more, but also that we jazz on what's our own and our rapport with the others. And that's been a wonderful practice for exemplifying the sort of thing that this is talking about.
Drew Collins: "We flourish in a syncopated peace." Such a beautiful description. I was wondering, Micheal, if you would mind reading, from a section that David opens up his essay, with the little section from Hannah Arendt.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Yes. May I give a little context to it? It's coming from the fifth Quintet, which is "Meaning." So in the heaven section, the fifth canto of the fifth quintet, I have five people who are philosophers and theologians playing jazz together. There's five days when I'm introduced to each of these. And I'm introduced by five women, which I leave aside for the moment. But one of the people who speaks to me in this is Hannah Arendt. So this little excerpt, which you asked me to read, is in fact Hannah Arendt addressing me.
"Poets' work must always be the interface. Embracing all the wonders we've amassed with gratitude, but also in the light of what we've lost. Our thought we had surpassed. Motifs of wisdom, you with second sight will slowly re-begin to interweave. You won't look back to try to underwrite all loss, or hanker for some make-belief in the glare of here and now. To find a vision for our world, you must conceive. As Dante once prepared the modern mind, you too must show a depth and breadth of view that lets the future in our now unwind.
Drew Collins: Thank you, Micheal. David, you opened up from your recent essay about The Five Quintets with this passage. Could you say a little bit about why?
David Ford: It's got everything, really. Doesn't it? It was partly because it's about a poet's vocation. It's got "embracing all the wonders that we've amassed." It's got the gratitude for the past, the wisdom and the present, the vision for the world for the future. And it's got the depth and the breadth. And then it's got that marvelous reference to Dante as well, who really is, it seems to me, this sort of great analog of the whole poem, The Five Qintets. I'd also point to the poem on Dante himself in the first quintet, which has this lovely dialogue between Micheal and Dante. I think it really does in many ways go to the essence of what the whole thing is about.
Drew Collins: Yes. I'm glad that you brought this up because the engagement with history in The Five Quintets seems to be a central concern of both of yours. And one point of connection here, one of many, as we began to note, is between Micheal and Dante. And another obvious connection is that both deal with the question of God. And David, in your essay, you have this quite stunning line, which is, "O'Skadhail should be judged the more daring of the two because of how he engages with God. "Neither in English language, literary culture, nor in the dominant intellectual spheres of economics, politics, the sciences and philosophy has it been generally fashionable to walk our daring God of love highwire in the way O'Siadhail does in The Five Qintents. And I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that and both the connection that you see between the projects Dante's divine comedy and O'Siadhail's Five Quintets, but also particularly why dealing with God here is different? What marks it? What separates it from the way in which Dante is theologizing in poetic form.
David Ford: Dante was in a culture where God was utterly part of the culture. Modernity was emerging out in the middle ages. Whereas we are in a culture where, as I say in that article, it often--especially in intellectual circles, such as all of us who have moved in, I've studied in Germany, in the UK and in Ireland and in all of those, there's a tendency among intellectuals to be what I would call secular supersessionism. In other words, they see religion essentially as something of the past. They don't tend to look on religion as something that people as intelligent as themselves can hold to in this period. They don't recognize that you can be at least as sophisticated philosophically, scientifically, historically, and so forth, and also be somebody who is a person of intelligent faith. And so I think one of the extraordinary achievements of Micheal in this book is to be a person of intelligent whilst faith, and also to be utterly at home with the whole rage of modernity in all its various parts, and also to show how much of modernity is richly theological as well, and richly informed by engagement with God. And I think this sense that we are in a pluralist world where there are multiple depths--there isn't just the same; there's also many religions and many forms of secularity. And I think Micheal enables a conversation, enables anyone to engage with this range of things and also to improvise on them, as Micheal says, in relation to their own tradition while being deeply in conversation with other today.
Drew Collins: Yes, Micheal, I wanted to ask you about that as well, because in many ways, as David's pointing out, this is an overtly theological poem. And yet, many of the characters of the historical figures who feature in the poem are out and out secularists. So why include them in such a theologically concerned work?
Micheal O'Siadhail: First of all, thank you for your kind words about The Five Quintets, David, and thank you for all your support in being my first reader throughout the whole 10 years, which I spent writing it. But back to your question, I think really that I'm trying to see--it's a taking stock, if you like, of how we got to where we are, and also suggesting--to use an echo of David's title of that article--a wiser vision for the 21st Century. But in order to discover and take stock as to where we came from, I had this extraordinary insight that it seemed to be that in all of these domains--in the arts, in economics, politics, science, philosophy, and theology--in all of these five quintets, there is an extraordinary sort of vertical unity. It seems as if they all echo the moods or the phases, which our culture was going through. And I wanted to catch that in sort of these vertical parallels.
Let's just give a very simple example. For instance, John Donne and the arts--he's back and forth as to whether we go around the sun or the sun goes around us, or whatever. In the equivalent, say, in economics, you're going to have Adam Smith. In science, you're going to have Copernicus. And you have these extraordinary parallels of these eras. I wanted to capture these. Inevitably, that's not just done by people who are overtly, or even at all in a sense, theologically involved, but that wasn't the point. The point was to catch the whole mood of those eras. And inevitably that involves people who would not only be not particularly religiously involved, but would be anti-religious. But that's all part of the history and all part of this movement towards how we might develop a vision for where we are should go.
Drew Collins: I wonder if you could say just a little bit about what it was like imagining these conversations. What kind of research, what did you do to try to imagine what a conversation with Hannah Arendt would be like, or with Karl Marx on issues and questions and subjects that they might not have written anything about, or that they might have referenced only in critical fashion? And you've got these sort of wonderful constructive conversations with them about truth and the search for meaning.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Obviously they're imagined conversations, but they're based and often interlaced with quotations from the figure involved. How did I go about it? A lot of reading is the answer to that. I read biographies of the people; I thought about them. But I also thought it was a connection between their biography, quotations from understanding them, and particularly I was fascinated by the childhood of most of these people because the childhood and the youth and the parents and relationships with the parents formed them so much, that it's almost incredible how this echoes through their lives. To fasten on details of that, which gave me a sort of a key to the character, but also to relate to them and how they related to my seeing the era that they were involved in. So it's a mixture of all of those things, and it becomes an imaginative conversation between the two of us. But it's also of course, to an extent and one can't get away from this, a judgment. In other words, I couldn't shy away from making some sort of judgment, but though often leaving the last word to the person involved.
David Ford: Yeah. So I think if I might say that one of the intriguing things is that Micheal doesn't conceal the fact that he has convictions and that he makes judgements and has thought a lot about these things. And yet everyone speaks for themselves that you feel you're in a genuine conversation.
Drew Collins: There's one line here that I wanted to ask both of you about, and just to have you react to what you just read, which is where Hannah Arendt commends to you to "embracing all the wonders we've amassed with gratitude, but also in the light of what we've lost or what we thought we had surpassed." And here's the line: "motifs of wisdom, you with second sight will slowly re-begin to interweave." I wonder if you could just talk about--first of all, I love re-begin as a coined term--but if you could talk a little bit about what you mean by second sight and the sort of interweaving.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Yeah. It's probably simpler than you may have thought, in a sense, because it means looking a second time at. You see the point I'm trying to, I think, make here suggests that while embracing all the wonders we've amassed with gratitude, but also in the light of what we've lost. We lose things to history. And think we have surpassed, which of course is David's previous point about intellectual supersessionism were things we think we've left behind because we were much brighter now; we've surpassed them; it's this linear view of history--but often I think you need to look back at history and suddenly to realize that some of the things we thought we had surpassed, we need to retrieve. There's a certain retrieval of wisdom. And so to get these motifs of wisdom, looking a second time, which you slowly begin to interweave again into our lives.
But then there's the caveat that you don't try to do this because anything that's lost it's bad to lose. Of course, there're things that are good to lose as well. So you're not trying to underwrite all loss. You're not looking for the hankering, which is a very common one--hankering after a past, a perfect past, which never was, of course. So hankering after some make-beliefs. But rather looking at how we are in the here and now to conceive again a vision for the future, but taking sometimes retrievals of wisdom from the past.
David Ford: Yes. I think the recur--Paul Ricoeur's lovely hermeneutics of both retrieval and suspicion, but trying to make sure that the retrieval is generous and that one really does engage with things all over again. As a classicist, I know that just how Sophocles, for example, or Plato or Aristotle or Virgil or whoever from the classical civilization, you can just read and reread and reread. And of course that's what I've been doing with John's Gospel for the last 20 years. And I find that every time I re-engage with it, it's not just second sight; it's third, fourth, fifth, up to a hundred sights and it keeps on going. t isI one of the amazing things, isn't it, about the richness of deep meaning?
Drew Collins: It's very un-nostalgic when you describe it like that. This is the sorts of engagement and concern with history--they're very much in service of the present and the future. I was wondering actually, partly because of the nature of your different disciplines--David, you have the opportunity to reflect explicitly on Micheal's poetry in essays and in books and things like that; Micheal, it's obvious that David has been hugely influential in your work, but perhaps ways that are not as explicit or obvious to the casual reader. And so I was wondering if you could share a little bit about the influence that David's work has had on your life and also the influence and the significance of your friendship.
Micheal O'Siadhail: The two, of course, are extremely interwoven. It's hard to separate them because I think the greatest influence of all is that it's a shared view of the world. It's developed over some 50 something years, which we've been best friends. As we've grown, we've shared everything and shared reading, and shared friends, so it's a deep involvement in one another. That actually is probably the greatest influence.
As I said, I'm awfully grateful for this because I was in academic life. I was a lecturer and had tenure in Trinity College, Dublin and left. And then, I was, for some years, a professor in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. And again, I left that because I wanted to give my full dedication, not my full life, to writing poetry. I could so easily have been, as I've said before, isolated. You sit, you get up every day and you're in your study. But David was in an environment in a top university at Cambridge, where he was coming across these people and was in contact with people. That sharing, that channel into my life, I am extraordinary grateful. And that is probably the greatest influence.
David Ford: If I might say, that moment when Micheal resigned his professorship, I remember being utterly in awe. It was 1987, I remember when he told me he was going to go independent as a poet and make his living. Just seeing the way in which Micheal after his professorship was liberated to investigate in all directions and to not to be just confined to one discipline where you have to produce publications and so forth has been a very striking thing. In other words, I don't think that The Five Quintets is imaginable without him having been an independent poet with all the time to do that massive amount of reading, trying to master Einstein and Heisenberg and all those, as well as all the economists--Amartya Sen and Adam Smith and so forth--and all the politicians and all the artists and so forth. It's just unimaginable in academic life, if Micheal had stayed in academic life. And I think that risk that he took with his whole career in leaving the professorship, as I said, I was in all at the time and I continue to have that feeling about it.
Drew Collins: David, in your essay, you quote a line that Micheal wrote, where he writes "the desire is to know how in your complex glory we let go." And you explain: "What sort of knowledge is that? It's one that like the deepest wisdom invites us into transformations of our perceptions and discernments, our relationships, our passions, our habits, our practices, and our ways of living. The best way to learn this is from those who embody it. They are the ones who have risked letting go and the complex glory of Madam Jazz." it strikes me. On the one hand, this applies in at least two levels, which is on the one hand, is that a description of your relationship with Micheal?
David Ford: It's certainly a description of my perception of what happened to Micheal when he let go of his professorship. And also actually the books of poetry became more unified. Each of them seems to me to be more unified, beginning with The Chosen Garden, his autobiographical one, but each one after that. And of course they also alternated between more personal things and more public things, the most public being his book on the Holocaust, that remarkable thing. And I remember going through this complex glory--glory in Christian terms of course includes the cross. And I remember the five years that Micheal spent immersed in the literature of the Holocaust and also even meeting survivors and so forth and to produce The Gossamer Wall.
And he was so taken up with all of that. We were on the phone almost every day. I was in England and he was in Ireland at the time. He was so taken up with it that he had to take up something that completely absorbed him. So he took up sailing in Dublin Bay and learning to sail. And I remember the awesome feeling I had once when he took me out and I trusted him completely because I have no skill in this area. But then a very large boat, the MailBoat, came around the corner, and Miho masterfully steered us away from it. And I remember thinking the intensity and the attention that he had put into that, giving him no time to think about what he was working on the rest of the day and demanding complete concentration. His capacity to be multipily intense--to be intense in one thing then to be intense in another--was striking.
I think that whole engagement with the Holocaust in The Gossamer Wall, and the final culmination--"Prisoners of Hope" was the name of the final one, where he looked beyond the Holocaust. And I think that has something very profound to say to our time today as well.
Drew Collins: Micheal, do you have anything to add to that?
Micheal O'Siadhail: No. This is very much a sort of a by-product of it in a sense, but they were tough years. In fact, my first--my late wife, Brid was very worried at the time because I was reading nothing but about the Holocaust for four or five years. And she was really worried that I got terribly depressed. So, the sailing was a counterpart to that. But interestingly, the next book which I was to write, which was a huge relief in some ways after The Gossamer Wall, which was the Holocaust book--poems and witness to the Holocaust--was Love Life, which was a celebration of a marriage, which at that stage--I can't remember--but it must've been 30 years or more at that stage. But the main imagery which I used throughout that book was actually sailing, which I would never have anticipated, but that came out of that period of sailing, which David was describing.
David Ford: May I say a footnote to that, Micheal. As you have read from your poems in Love Life at the marriage of each of our daughters, but our son is getting married, and of course, because of the lockdown things that at Micheal can't be there. They wanted him to read as well. The poems that they choose are always from Love Life. It's extraordinary how powerful that is. And I don't know another book that is dedicated to year after year of marriage, actually--another book of poetry that is dedicated like that. Maybe you know of something. But I have found it always a source of great quotations for my wife's birthday cards.
Micheal O'Siadhail: It was said that a good marriage was never material for poetry. I found it otherwise. I had 44 years of a wonderful marriage. But I should add, thankfully, I now have had seven years of a second wonderful marriage, so I am the most blessed man on God's earth.
Drew Collins: I wonder if you might share a reading from Love Life since it's come up. Actually, I should say that David gave me this when I started studying with him, a copy of your collected poems. He wrote an inscription and which he quoted the poem that I'd like you to read. And it is "Covenant."
Micheal O'Siadhail: Yes. That's very apt given what we've been talking about, but let me read it for us and we can talk about it afterwards.
Covenant, the first moves we played by touch and feel mutual come hither of glow and control.
Share and share a, like our Seesaw deal, some subtle paralleling of a quid pro quo or so it seemed, but how we turn, spend drift as already we've begun our foolish potlatch spiraling upward in endless covenants of gift and so hopeless. It becomes to try and match.
and make no bones about my bargain. Nothing asked or sought quits before we start neither getter and our giver. We travel on beyond the tables and the stones. No barter, no payback gratis for not, I desire you just love me now and forever.
Drew Collins: Wonderful. David, I'd actually like to ask you the first question. It was this line, "spiraling upward in endless covenants of gift," that you wrote on the front cover of this book that you gave to me. And I was just wondering if you could talk a little about what this poem means to you.
David Ford: Drew, giving it to you as one of my doctoral students in Cambridge, I was just savoring that extraordinary thing, which has continued ever since then, too, between us, that extraordinary privilege of being a doctoral supervisor to somebody, to be an advisor for a major piece of work over years when you're engaged in something really worthwhile, and also just seeing the gifts that I got. I assume you may have got one or two things from me as well. But of course, always in the doctoral relationship, the supervisor gets more, I'm afraid, because I know what a good doctorate is, and I can tell you when you've got it, but I haven't done all your reading; I haven't done all your thinking. You've intensively applied yourself to something, year after year.
The covenant, I think, is also worth just noting. It's become one of the most important words for me in my life, not least for our whole civilization, it seems to me--what I was talking about, the pluralism of multiple depths. The depths need to be in conversation with each other. They need to collaborate. But above all, they need to have the sort of long term joint commitments to the flourishing of our world, to the common good. And it seemed to me that the sort of covenant there is between a doctoral professor and the student is also a muddle for all sorts of other long-term relationships where the mutuality grows and deepens and cross the generations too.
One of the things my Jewish friends have taught me a great deal is how crucial unity is across the generations. And the more I go on in life and now have grandchildren, the more I appreciate how vital those family covenants, those friendship covenants, those institutional covenants when you found something, and it goes on year after year and hopefully across the generations.
The final thing I'd say about this is those final lines: "no barter, no payback, gratis for naught. I desire you just love me now and forever." I think I was writing Christian wisdom, desiring God and learning in love at the time. And one of my most moving engagements was with the Jewish philosopher and theologian Peter Oaks, and grappling with his thoughts and with the Book of Job, actually where Job is challenged by Satan: does he fear God for nothing? Right at the heart, it seems to me, of our relationship with God is we love God for nothing. We love because God has got what could be more glorious than to love the one who is ultimately eminently lovable. But also we love each other that way, I think, and we try to image God's love in our love. And so we love each other for our own sake, not because we're useful to each other primarily--though that of course has often been the case with Micheal, collaborating in all sorts of things--but fundamentally there's just this sense of no payback, gratis for naught.
Micheal O'Siadhail: And that's what I would hesitate to say at the beginning when I was going to read the poem and I said I'd rather you talk first--was that phrase "for naught." Job, I'd often puzzled over, but David's reading of Job really took me the idea that this was almost a thought experiment of sorts. But the great phrase was Darian, which was "for naught" so that you love God not because He was good to you or bad to you or anything else, but just for His own sake. And it made a big impression on me and he must have been working on Job at the time because that phrase "for naught" that shows up in "Covenant" is definitely an echo of David's work on Job.
Drew Collins: I want to just go back to something. David, you were talking about the Jewish idea of the unity across the generations as an account of covenant. It strikes me that because earlier and throughout The Five Quintets, something that's outlined is a kind of unity that does not exclude disagreement, or difference. And one of the things that I pick up as central and in trying to understand the sort of unity that you're talking about here--and perhaps this is another apt description of covenant--is trust.
There's a sort of trust in God that we see in Job independent of the events that befall him. There's a trust that God is good and that God is what wills the good for Job, even if he's not experiencing it. And I get the sense that there is trust. There's a trust that you each have for one another, that the other person will have something to say to you, even if it's not obvious that there's a trust there, that this is going to be important to you. And Micheal, one of the things that I get from your engagement with all these different figures in The Five Quintets is there's a trust. No matter the difference, no matter the sort of the time, place, or the theology, etc., that this person has something of value for you and for the world. And I wonder if you could just share a little bit about how you see maybe the problem of trust today in the sort of pursuit of wisdom and why that is such an important theme for us to reflect on today.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Everything we do is based on trust. If I go into a restaurant and I take food, I trust they're not poisoning me and they trust I'm going to pay for it so that your every single act to do is, in some ways, based on trust. But the danger, I think, and one of the big dangers in our society at the moment, is the culture of suspicion. The media played greatly into this as well, that there is a lack of trust that people mean well. You always look for the underhand motive first, which is dangerous. But for me, it's been at the heart of my life and the heart of my two marriages, at the heart of my friendship. It is trust. Without trust, you have nothing.
Strangely, of course, etymologically, it's interesting. The cognate of it in other Germanic languages, it means consolation--in other Germanic languages as well. In Norwegian, it means consolation. It can mean the same in German. Whereas in Icelandic and English, it means trust in a sense we're using it. So trust is a huge consolation.
David Ford: Yes. I think, Micheal, you have a poem about that, haven't you, in "Tongues." One of the things I have been continually amazed by Micheal is his facility with languages, with contemporary languages--I think about 11 or 12 of them. And, "Tongues," at the end of it tributes to the people who taught him these languages. And I've always been struck by how Micheal learns languages in the context of friendships that he actually developed deep relationships, and therefore, I think has a deep understanding of the language.
But also, I'm triggered by your question about trust, Drew, to reflect on two remarkable women that I've learned from about trust. One is my favorite public intellectual in this country in England, Baroness Onora O'Neil, the philosopher, who for eight years when we were both syndics--that's on the board of Cambridge University Press. We examined all the books to be published by Cambridge University Press year after year. And I was so impressed by her wisdom and insight into them. But one of her books is called Trust and it was her Reith Lectures in this country. And it's a wonderful examination of trust in the public sphere.
But the other one is Susan Highland who's one of my favorite New Testament scholars. I was a visiting professor in Emory University at Candor Divinity School a few years ago. And she's also a scholar of John's Gospel and she taught me that, "Every time I come to the word pisteuw, which is usually translated to believe in John's Gospel, I translate it to trust--and it's our faith in, of course, but to trust." And she said the impact on her students of always translating that just in her classes, always as trust, was quite profound. And I do feel that John's Gospel has some of the most relevant lessons to us today in the area of trust.
Drew Collins: We teach a class here called "Life Worth Living" at the Center for Faith & Culture, and we teach it for undergraduates. And we look at different religious traditions and philosophical traditions, not to try to identify the sort of discrete belief system and truth claims so much as to try to get an understanding of their story of everything, the truth claims in connection with the vision of the good life--what it means to live the true life or the flourishing life. Because it's a question that student are no longer encouraged to ask in many universities, including ours.
So one of the things that we'd like to ask our guests is to describe a little bit about their vision of flourishing life, of the life worth living. So each of you, if you wouldn't mind just giving us a sense of what your vision of the life worth living is, and maybe feel free to bring in elements of your work that we've talked about for syncopated peace, etc.--things like that. Micheal, what is your vision of the life worth living?
Micheal O'Siadhail: It's very simple, really, for me, I think. I've always wanted just two things. One, I think it is to be a decent human being. And by that, I mean living in loving and trusting relationships and both, obviously, with my spouses, but also with my friends, and having an attitude of love towards life generally and trust, which is perhaps a trailer for heaven.
And the second thing I've wanted to do all of my life is whatever talent I have, be it's big or small, to bring it back, as in that parable. I felt deeply from a very early age that I have to write poetry. I want to do that as best I can whether it survives me or it doesn't survive me, at least that I bring the talent back, whatever it is, as best I can. I think that's all I can say, really.
Drew Collins: Thank you. David, what's your vision of the life worth living?
David Ford: My goodness. What a question, Drew. It's fascinating. I suppose I'd need to start with--I am a theologian and I start with God. And I think I go back to that theme in Christian wisdom, the loving God for God's sake. That's this sense that there is God at the heart of reality who is just worth rejoicing and praising, adoring, contemplating, loving endlessly, and that this is the core of the reality in the universe and that one lives from that to that, and it relates to everything else. So the first thing would be loving God for God's sake.
And I suppose the second is analogously loving people for their sake too--and it involves all the things that Micheal talked about, obviously. And then within that, I suppose it's what Micheal talked about his vocation as a poet, my vocation as a theologian. One of the things for Micheal and myself has been this sense of taking roads not usually taken, so to speak, that we both diverged from the expectations of where we'd be going with our degrees and so forth. And so for me, it's that sense of a life with a purpose with a vocation, but not subordinated to that sheer delight in God and other people that--or rather very much subordination to it. Sorry. The primary thing is that delighting God in each other and in the whole of creation. And I suppose my ultimate image of that is what I might call an ecology of blessing, where God blesses us and the whole of creation; we bless God and each other and the whole of creation. And that theme of blessing just means more and more to me as life goes on.
Drew Collins: That was so wonderful. Thank you both so much for joining us today. It's been such a delight to speak with you.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Thank you.
David Ford: Thank you very much, indeed. Micheal and I don't often have conversations like this either, so it's been good for us.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured poet, Micheal O'Siadhail, and theologians, David Ford and Drew Collins. Production assistance by Martin Chan and Nathan Jowers. I'm Evan Rosa and I edited and produced the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu. New episodes drop every Saturday with the occasional midweek. If you're new to the show, so glad that you found us. Remember to hit subscribe, so you don't miss any episodes. And if you've been listening for a while, thank you, friends.
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