Zooming in from Ireland, poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama addressed the student body and broader community in a series of events spanning the past week, using his poetry to explore justice issues and offer healing. 

During the Writer’s Read, he spoke on how he was attacked for his identity as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community. “I was put through three exorcisms,” Ó Tuama said. The exorcisms were done to “cure the gay,” as Ó Tuama put it. He described them as “fast and awful and exciting and long-lasting in their impact.” 

First-year Hannah Landis was moved by his stories. “I have never heard of someone performing an exorcism on someone else,” she said. “It seems pretty scary, honestly… to go through that.” 

Ó Tuama created a poem entitled “Volta” about the exorcist. “He’ll claw his way to glory. Me as well,” he wrote in the closing line. As much as Ó Tuama wanted to write about the exorcist going to hell at the end of the poem, he couldn’t. Instead, he made the exorcist experience and share the same glory as someone else, namely, someone who was gay. 

“It is incredibly brave and powerful to have him share his experiences about being gay,” junior Asha Beck said. “I always feel that having someone well-known talk about their identity in the LGBTQ+ community normalizes who many of us are and provides more safe spaces to be ourselves.” 

Beck went to the “In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World” convocation and she appreciated hearing Ó Tuama share about a circle group that he led. Each individual in the circle was presented the challenge of describing the beginning of their life in only one sentence. “I still haven’t figured out what my sentence would be, but it is something that I want to reflect on more and pay more attention to the beginning of other people’s stories,” Beck reflected. 

One of Landis’ favorite moments was when Ó Tuama shared a poem entitled “How To Be Alone.” She liked his reading of it as much as the words themselves. She enjoyed how he shared it with a “certain tone of voice, with a certain voice quality, [and] a certain sense of timing.” The poem was about how to love yourself, appreciate yourself, and listen to your own emotions and body. 

Ó Tuama’s hope is that we can “find together how we can be courageous in our language.” To him, this courage is “about saying difficult things to ourselves, about ourselves, and finding a way to hear and be heard.”