An unanswered question is a ghost. It lingers in the narrow corridors of your mind, keeping to shadows, creeping past logic and beneath habit. It haunts, pervades, insinuates. It is an insurgent. An obsession. It’s a cry in the darkness—of agony, or ecstasy, or mad longing.

The question that Pádraig Ó Tuama can’t stop asking is: “Do you believe in God?”

The Irish poet, theologian, and broadcaster’s recent collection, Kitchen Hymns, resounds with the interrogation of lost faith and the relentless search for meaning—in nature and daily ritual, in the delights of the body and the remembrance of the dead. Do You Believe in God? is repeated as the title of fifteen poems. The question surfaces from the collection’s first line, as the poet “asked the grasses if they believed / but they said believe is a poor verb.” The dual ‘poverty’ and power of this verb become the central struggle of Kitchen Hymns. We are not grasses, after all. To be human is to believe in something, in anything, to grasp for understanding, for a name that offers order and sheds light. But if Ó Tuama’s poems return again and again to that same question, in refrain or catechism, the answers he finds are surprising and diffuse.

The book’s second section—entitled Do You Believe in God? and containing most of the eponymous poems—begins autobiographically, charting the history of Ó Tuama’s family, saturated in “debts due to drink” and “famine roads, laid by starving men”. His Catholic upbringing, his father fishing along a rough sea. Then the lens widens: the overwhelming pleasure, pain, and tenderness of sex with another man; the physicality of digesting bread and butter; a walk along the ocean at night. What sort of answers are these to the common question running throughout each? Do you believe in God? suggests a single response: yes or no. Ó Tuama, however, rejects such simplicity. Each poem reveals his turn away from belief in God, eventually made explicit, but they also depict beautifully how the belief itself endures. To lose faith is really to lose the object of one’s faith. The need, the profound longing remains in us. It may be transformed into grief or pain—undeniably persistent in Ó Tuama’s work—but we might also bring our belief downward and inward. We might look on the everyday and ourselves as miraculous. We might love one another as holy.

As much as these poems exult in the physical and embrace its glory, the role of God is far from passive or resolved. The way one would write letters to a dead friend, or an estranged relative, Ó Tuama continually returns to God in lyric address. As he puts it:

    I turn to you,

    not because I trust you,

    or believe in you,

    but because I need a direction for my need. You—

    […] what I turned away from and will turn to; you—

    my ache made manifest in address;

In this way, the recurring question becomes more than itself. What Ó Tuama craves is a name for his loss. The God he addresses is the very absence of God. His is not a lack of belief, then, but a belief in nothing. In the emptiness, to the emptiness, he mourns what he’s lost, yet simultaneously rejoices at the freedom that loss allows. A liberation from the crush of ritual and blind obedience. From shame. The deliverance of eroticism and uncloseted queerness. An escape from God, and a continual retreading of the raw abandoned ground where God used to live.

The first and last poems of Kitchen Hymns offer another sort of address. In each, the poet turns to the plants and animals around him. He blesses himself “in the name / of the deer and the ox, / the heron and the hare, / evangelists of land and wood”. This cyclical turn, from the natural world to the emptiness of God and back, hints at an envy for such simple and certain existences. But the act of naming and observing is also a work of true devotion. The world we live in is so utterly alive, teeming with cacophony and chaos and growth. Even death is the mere precursor to reconstitution, decay to digestion to renewal. These poems—at times reminiscent of Mary Oliver’s spiritual naturalism—dare you to plunge your hands into rich, black soil. Yet Ó Tuama doesn’t call to a greater order or profound meaning here. On the contrary, the oblique logic of living and dying is hardly different from that which he calls God—arbitrary, vast, searingly beautiful, and empty.

The questions posed by Ó Tuama refuse to be forgotten. Personally, I don’t believe in God. Since reading his collection, though, I find myself asking how the daily moments of my life are answers, too, for that insistent query. The flowers are blooming now along the sidewalks, bright clumps of crocus and daffodil. On the news, the world is ending, slowly. The sun is brushing across the open window beside my bed, as the wind creaks and whispers. These are all things I believe in. Maybe they are nothing. Maybe they’re God, too. Through its masterful repetition, Kitchen Hymns implicates you in its interrogation. It is a melody you will not soon forget and a ghost that will follow your footsteps. It is contradiction, invocation, and reckoning.

As Ó Tuama writes: “I have lost God. God / is the only language that I speak.”

Kitchen Hymns was published in January 2025, by Copper Canyon Press.

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