It was serendipity (which might be synonymous with divine grace), that led me to the poetry of Peter O’Leary. On a lark, I checked out a copy of his out-of-print 2013 book “Phosphorescence of Thought” from my university library. I kept it through the maximum five auto-renewal cycles, plus enough extra days to incur a five-dollar fine. In fact, I only returned the book when I found a used copy online for $40.
For most books, I would not pay $40. But it felt like a steal for “Phosphorescence of Thought,” because it’s full of grace.
O’Leary is a professor at the School of Art Institute Chicago and Ph.D. in divinity with a specialization in religion and literature from the University of Chicago. I knew nothing else as I read “Phosphorescence of Thought.” I tumbled straight into the poetry itself, and I found in it a spark of life that felt distinctly Ignatian:
The wren
the mind
allows
to sing
alights
— and flits —
on branches bare
of anything other than the sun’s ceaseless iodine
the woods at dusk flood with
like sutras mediators seep thoughts in
neurochemicals recall from the galaxy’s
antique axiometry.
If O’Leary’s language feels puzzling, it’s not an accident — it defies the techniques we usually employ to make sense of language. It moves idiosyncratically between vernacular speech to esoteric coinages; it blurs together verbs and nouns with freewheeling frequency, swirling around its subject matter — mystery. In short, it’s not easy to parse.
But it was precisely that mystery that gripped me. What began as a strange little question, arising from the first lines — What do you mean “the wren the mind allows to sing?” — became the current that swept me into the poem. O’Leary returned, over and over again, to the divinity that seems to charge the material world and the role of the human imagination — so important in Ignatian spirituality — in mediating that divinity to us. A few pages later, O’Leary exults a particular mysterious force:
[the] oldest cherubim of knowledge,
the phanophagous cherubs, devouring
with their bodies the light they transform into scissoring flame
flared forth sword-like and brandished, unspeakably
world-like, fully
recklessly
imagined.
Cherubim: angels. Phanophagous: a coinage of O’Leary’s, its Greek roots (phano- and phage)combining to mean “light-eating.”
These light-eating angels, it suddenly struck me, are human eyes, which take in light, transmit it upside-down to the brain (like “scissoring flame”), which, in turn, flips it right-side up and grasps that data together to create, so to speak, the world we perceive. And through that world, we feel the warmth of divine love.
This divinity suffuses the entirety of “Phosphorescence of Thought” and the entirety of O’Leary’s catalogue.
It closely echoes Ignatius’ suggestion, in the “Principle and Foundation” of the “Spiritual Exercises,” that all of creation is made to reverence and cherish and sing the praise of the divine. And when you read O’Leary’s poetry, you’re thrown into a cacophony of praise — a celestial song in the spin of atoms and the flight of birds and the movements of planets and the love of human beings.
O’Leary’s words have imprinted themselves into my brain and have knitted themselves into my spiritual life. When my intellectual and my spiritual life threaten to come apart, when I struggle to feel that which I know, I turn to O’Leary’s poetry. In it, I feel something like the ecstatic life I feel in Ignatius’ Contemplation to Attain Divine Love, which asks us to see the shower of divine blessings descending on the world and returning to God — an abounding energy pulsing in all things.
Still, I wondered what kind of practice could inform those words — wondered, indeed, if the Ignatian connection was just my hallucination. So I decided to ask.
**
Over a Zoom call on a warm late-September afternoon, I spoke with Peter O’Leary for an hour — about, it seemed, everything, from the heights of the heavens to the depths of the earth. Should you happen upon O’Leary in the wild, I recommend speaking to him for as long as you can. Besides his generosity of spirit, O’Leary has a mind whose shuttling movements are dazzling to witness; when he speaks, he maps out topics and sub-topics and constructs ad-hoc systems for articulating his wide-ranging thought. He insisted to me that his “talent for philosophy is really non-existent,” and that he instead avows “isomorphism,” by which he means “I’m going to take this thing and I’m going to apply its moves to something else.”
And so, as it turns out, it wasn’t a coincidence that O’Leary’s poetry struck me as so Ignatian. In fact, several of those isomorphic sources come from the rich tradition of Ignatian spirituality, even as he transforms them.
O’Leary mentions two Jesuits in his work. One is the paleontologist and mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who O’Leary quotes in the title of “Phosphorescence of Thought;” the other is poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who shared O’Leary’s love of birds and who O’Leary mentions in his 2019 book “Earth is Best.” A smile lit on his face when I mentioned them — and then, his mind began to move.
In the first of several elegant multipronged responses during our conversation, O’Leary shared that he’d discovered Hopkins first, finding his work electrifying. “[It’s] both a model and a watering hole,” he said. “A place where I go to refresh, but also discover something.”
But more moving than Hopkins’ poetry were his journals, O’Leary said, particularly their lengthy descriptions of clouds.
“The descriptions were granular, rich, saturated descriptions of what the clouds looked like. But then he would relate to those clouds biographically, saying things like, I think that was the most beautiful cloud I’d ever seen, or I’d never seen that before, or it reminded me of something I saw three years ago. I began to recognize that he had this catalogue of cloud experiences that he was just relating to things.”
The encounter with Hopkins’ clouds, O’Leary explained, harmonized with his theological study at the University of Chicago under the scholar Bernard McGinn. During this period, he encountered the concept of anagogy — a theological term that refers to an “uplift” from the material world to the divine. In Hopkins — who, at the time of his writing, was struggling with isolation and feelings of inadequacy as a priest — O’Leary found such uplift.
“He was in tumultuous transformation. Things were not settled for him,” he said. “Then he’s writing these lyrical, explosive, comprehensive descriptions of clouds.”
This surge of energy, the celestial mingling with the human, inspired O’Leary’s 2019 book “Earth is Best,” in which his poems frequently return to the themes of the classical elements — namely earth and air. “I started to think of them as reflections, as inversions even, and the inverted element became apparent to me through Hopkins’ descriptions of the clouds.” Like Hopkins’ own skyward gaze, O’Leary imagined what it might look like for poetry to begin on the ground but lift the reader upwards — to elevate the earthbound mind, fraught and dark as Hopkins’ (and my own) could so often be, to God.
**
O’Leary’s relationship with Teilhard came next. He narrated to me a movement, fitting to his poetic sensibilities, of strange resonances — from Annie Dillard’s “For the Time Being,” which cites Teilhard extensively, to an early-Internet online bookseller called Alibris, from whose “big used warehouse emporium of books” in the American Southwest (the idea of an arcane desert repository “kind of sounds like Indiana Jones,” O’Leary quipped) came “glorious hardbacks” of Teilhard’s “The Phenomenon of Man” (1955) and “The Divine Milieu” (1957).
The latter text’s “photovoltaic property,” he explained, “was the way in which Teilhard was providing a theology of evolution.” While the books wear the garb of science, they’re also something more: “He’s doing primarily theological work, mystical work. I find the use of natural science, especially evolutionary science, exquisite: to have seen in evolutionary theory a model for theological exploration, theological uplift.”
In Teilhard, this “uplift” leads to the “Omega Point,” at which all of the cosmos unites in God — in O’Leary’s words, both becoming divine and “getting to the absolute center of things.”
Once more, “uplift.” Once more, the crackling tension between earthly substance and heavenly energy.
This is no accident, for O’Leary is keenly attentive to the relationship between “the spiritual and the natural.” (He prefers the latter idea over “material,” and it shows in his poetry, in which the world of sights and sounds is always rooted in the incarnate, feeling bodies of living things). Drawing from sources like Hopkins and Teilhard but also Carl Jung and medieval mysticism, O’Leary frequently returns to the notion that our world, the terrestrial realm, “is infused with life, from the most inert seeming material,” but also points toward the heavenly.
Poetry, he suggested to me, is the mediator between the two.
“I prejudicially think poetry is the imaginative medium par excellence,” he told me. “Poetry is vision manifested in language. You have these two media that saturate our experience of self and life, vision and language, and you have them converging in poetry.”
**
Towards the end of our conversation — which felt like a trip to the fringes of the cosmos and back — one more Jesuit made an appearance.
When I asked O’Leary what sort of poetry the world needs right now, he answered, unequivocably: climate change. “When people look back on our time, presuming there’s a world where people can look back on our time for them to be dwelling in, it’ll be an obvious litmus test: Was this artist engaging with the climate crisis?”
And for him, a text “as important as anything that has been published” on climate change is Pope Francis’ “Laudato Si’.”
O’Leary suggested that the 2015 encyclical makes two related claims. The first is that the world perceives the climate crisis as a “technological problem,” which means that “we have already ceded the solution of that problem to technocrats” invested in ecological extraction. The second claim “is that that climate crisis is actually a moral problem, because the people who are most affected by it are the disenfranchised.”
To them O’Leary, said, “I would make a third potential claim.” Climate change is “a problem of the imagination. That means the work of addressing the problem belongs to artists. And that includes poets.” This sort of poetic vision, he suggests, should “activate the terminology and the thoughts and feelings of apocalypse when it comes to making art.”
Although O’Leary conceded that Francis doesn’t speak much about art in “Laudato Si’,” I wager that he’s correct. After all, it was Francis who said in 2023 that artists “confront things that at times are uncomfortable … criticize today’s false myths and new idols, its empty talk, the ploys of consumerism, the schemes of power” and give us “the ability to press forward and beyond, in a tension between reality and dream.”
Although O’Leary’s far too humble to speak about himself this way, he strikes me as the exact sort of poet of whom Pope Francis was thinking, someone who touches the incarnate world but feels the transcendent, the dream promised in all things. Doing so, in the context of climate change — another recurring topic for O’Leary — is a project of helping us apprehend the relationship between divine life and our own assailed world.
Like those “phanophagous cherubs” his poetry conjures, and like those Ignatian figures with whom his thought converses, O’Leary uses the imagination to access a world charged with grace. More, he helps his readers access this graced world — commissions us to reach for that divine reality just beyond at the other end of our fingertips and to make it real. You need only open one of his books and let yourself be uplifted.
Photo at the top of this piece is by Zach Barcas