2026 Commencement Address: Pádraig Ó Tuama on "Needing Help"

I want to congratulate you all, every single one of you, students and friends, spouses, alumni, teachers, administrators, children, parents, all of you. Everyone. Congratulations to all of you who are graduating on the hard work and the met deadlines and the missed deadlines, and the anguish and the joy and the, “What am I doing this for?” And the, “I’m not good enough,” and, “What do I do with it now?” And, “What comes next?”

Congratulations on holding all of those questions.

And the books read, the books skimmed, the things that you wrote, the risks you took in your papers, and the way that you thought, “I don’t think this is in the books, but I need to write this because I can bear witness to what it is that I know through my life.”

Congratulations on all of it. With degrees focusing on theology and culture and peace and justice and reconciliation. Important and necessary. Needed.

I’m going to take a risk and tell you a very mild story. One time, 10 years ago, I’d gone on a holiday with my then partner, and we’d had a lovely time. And we got home, we didn’t live with each other, and later on that afternoon, I texted him to say what a lovely time we’d had. And so far so good. It was a very affectionate message. I might go so far as to say it was highly romantic message with some detail.

Anyway, I sent this text to my partner, except I didn’t. I sent it to my father. My dad, thank God, is still alive. A lovely man. He was then in his early 70s. He had never expected to have a gay son. And he was suddenly face to face with some actual data about having a gay son. And I did not know what to do. I needed help. And that’s what I want to talk to you about today, is what it’s like to not know what to do, and what it’s like to need help.

There will be times when you don’t know what to do, times when you need help. And when it’s easy to say you don’t know what to do and you need help, well, then it’s easy to say you don’t know what to do and you need help. Mm. But it’s the times when it’s difficult to say you don’t know what to do, and the times when it’s difficult to say you need help. That’s what I want to talk about. And why? Why would it be difficult sometimes to say that you need help?

There’s a thousand reasons, and you know them all already. We all carry them. You might have had negative experience of asking for help before and being turned down. Or you might have some embarrassment or its complex brother, shame. Shame at being seen, and the exposure and the vulnerability of your own seeming inability. Perhaps the thing that you secretly suspect is true, the thing that you don’t wish to be known for, even though you privately think it might be the thing that you are.

Yeah. You might be worried in asking for help about being seen as weak or vulnerable or ineffectual or whatever. You might have known that since you were 15 or 50 or 75. Shame is a lot of things that speak to us. We have ample evidence these days in the Herods of the past and the Herods of today, of people whose hatred for their own vulnerability makes them do hateful things. It isn’t as easy to say, “Ignore that which threatens to shame you,” because if it were easy to ignore it, it would be easy to ignore it.

Shame is a form of attention that you give. British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips says to us that shame is an attention-giving mechanism to something that we think might be dangerously true. And what is the truth? Sometimes in the inability or the resistance to ask for help, the truth might be that we are not sufficient.

The awful truth is that you are not sufficient.

None of us are.

We are interdependent.

We need each other. It’s evidenced here in the strangers, the friends, the family, the support system, the parents, the children, the teachers, the administrators, the past students, the students who succeeded, the students who took time out, all of it. You are not sufficient in and of yourself. We are interdependent. We are a we. And whether you’re a social person or more reserved, we each have the necessity for the we.

I was at a conference about peace work and funding many years ago. I don’t necessarily love conferences about peace work and funding. There was a presenter there, her name was Claudia Fontec, from Argentina, and she’d been working as an evaluator of development money that was given by the Dutch government to projects in Senegal, Mali, Uganda, and Kenya. And she used a methodology of evaluation called the Most Significant Change methodology, which was developed by Rick Davies.

And I’ll use one of the countries as an example, Senegal. She’d asked all the individuals there, who were part of the project, the professionals, the service users, the service deliverers, the administrators, all Senegalese people. She’d asked them all a similar question. “What’s the most significant change that we’ve been able to do together with this?” And she gathered about 100 stories, and then she asked them to tag and to categorize these 100 stories into 50, then down to 20, down to 10, down to seven.

And she said, “What’s a local concept that you have that speaks to the inherent value of these seven significant stories?” It wasn’t the best stories. It wasn’t the most entertaining or the most shocking. They were significantAnd while she was doing that, she also then worked with the Dutch funders and said, with the hundred stories that came forward, she asked them to reduce them to 50, to 20, to 10, to seven.

And she then got them to compare. There was never an imagination, of course, that they were going to use what the Dutch funders thought were the most significant stories. The whole point was is that she was saying, “I can, through evaluation, help the Dutch funders realize what it is that people in Senegal have collaborated with when it comes to this question, with concepts that are local, concepts that are powerful, concepts that are far-reaching, and concepts that are already embedded and held as values in the local area."

Help does all kinds of things, but knowing how to help isn’t always easy. And the one you think needs help may actually be able to help you help. And seeing what help will help, and knowing also what seeming help will not. And to be a leader in a community, in a society, in a church, in an organization, in a province, in a country, in any place, to be a leader is to know what it means to ask for help, and to receive it, and to give help, and to know when to change the kind of help you give when you realize that the help that you think will help won’t help. Help. It’s such an easy word, but it is not easy to know how to go about it.

When I was in my 20s, I had a long-term chronic illness, one of those dreadful fatigue things, and it was debilitating. It meant that I was dizzy and aching for all kinds of hours of the day. I could work, but I’d have to be really careful. I’d have to lie down in the evenings a lot. I had to be very careful to not exacerbate things. I was working with a Christian group, and I got used to the kind of help that wasn’t helpful, sadly, where people would say, "Can we pray for you?" And at the end of that say, “Are you better now?” They weren’t meaning it.

It was well-meant, but it truly wasn’t helpful. And what do we do in the face of what we cannot help? I don’t know. But I’m not always sure that religion helps because we all have stories about somebody who, in the name of their faith, has gone about trying to help and has actually made things worse. Anyway, at one point, I was in the midst of a terrible bereavement from home, which made everything worse, and my symptoms just went through the roof. It was awful. And a colleague said, “We want to pray for you to get better. We’re really excited about you getting better.” And I thought, “I’m really excited about nothing about you.” Nice people. I really did like them. And because I liked them, I said, “Look, I really appreciate your desire, but it’s exhausting.” At that stage, I was sick for five years. I said, “It’s exhausting to have to know how to cope with this. So how about you pray without me and pray about what kind of help you can offer?"

And the group got back to me and said, “We did pray. And someone said, ‘Look, he’s been sick for a long time. He’s been put through all these medical treatments, as well as other people who want to cure him miraculously. And he’s had a terrible bereavement.’ And we’re all broke. We all work with this ministry that had no money. I had no car, nothing. And somebody said, ’Look, my sister has a tiny hut near a beach. And I’ve checked with my sister, and she said you can stay there for a week if you want for free, and somebody will cover your work, and somebody else will drive you.’”

And the woman whose idea this all was, Gina Goo, later Gina Pettigrew, she drove me. She bought me a carton of logs to put in a fire, and she gave me a bottle of wine. She’s dead now. She died far too young. She was kind and good and generous and intelligent and brilliant. She was a social worker, a community organizer, a businesswoman, a mother, and a beloved partner and friend. And she had wanted to pray for a miracle, but she listened, and she changed the way that she thought help could function on the basis of that. My entire relationship with Gina changed, looking at the generosity of her pivot, and the recognition about realizing, oh, the help that I think will help may not be the help that will help. I did stay for a week, and I walked along the strand with gratitude, and I came back renewed and rested, still sick. I was sick for another three years, but there was something about that retreat with myself that taught me something powerful. We were all broke. There was so little money.

The Good Samaritan is a story that many people inside and outside Christianity are familiar with. So a guy’s beaten up, and his fellow co-religionists don’t help, but a member of a nearby but disliked group does help. So that’s fine. Go and do likewise. Easy. That’s what it says at the end of the text in Luke’s gospel. But I think there’s another reason, another lesson that we can learn. The writer Luke is an artist and a doctor and an author, and he situates this story being told to a listenership of people who would probably more likely identify with the fellow who was beaten up. So when Jesus says to him, “Go and do likewise”, I don’t think it’s only be nice to people, even your enemies. I think it’s also receive help, even from your enemies. Because it is a difficult thing to receive help. It is a difficult thing to feel shamed enough or depleted enough to think, I need some support. And it can be even more difficult to receive that support from somebody where you think, “I don’t want them to see me like this.” Mm-hmm.

I led an organization in the north of Ireland called Corrymeela, and one story from there was that there was people who had been bereaved by a bomb. Everybody had lost somebody in their family, and they were gathering for an anniversary of that awful bomb. And they were each going to light a candle in memory of somebody who had been bereaved. And there was people in the room, you could think of them all as victims, but because we had a sectarian legacy of British colonialism, some people saw each other as, “Well, you’re part of the side that’s the terrorist, and we’re part of the side that’s the state, the legitimate force.” And other people said, “Well, no, you’re part of the side that’s the colonizers, and we’re part of the side that’s the freedom fighters.” So the community of victims were split amongst themselves at times.

They were very brave, generous people who all said, “Look, we’ve all been bereaved.” But some of them did have difficulties being in the same room with each other because they said, “To stay in the same room endorses your political ideology.” Anyway, they decided that for one thing, where they’d sit around in a chapel and light a candle, one for each person who’d been murdered, that they would manage to share the same room. And one man couldn’t light the candle. His hands were shaking so much. He was holding a match, and he couldn’t do it. And the woman next to him put her hand on his hand to steady his hand and help him light a match. They were people who found it difficult to share a room with each other. Understandably. And they found it difficult afterwards to – This isn’t an easy story to say it was all fine afterwards. It is a story to say help comes from unexpected places.

An Irish language word for help is cúnna. And the Cúán of the Dé Danann, we might say, with the help of a god. And the word cúnna means something like co-beget, and even more, conceive or conception. And it’s the same in Greek, sunbano. Luke 5:7, “So they signal to their partners in the other boat to come and help, sunbano, to come and conceive with them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink.”

Help is always this co-making together. Truly. A co-making, a conceiving, a conception, the giving and the receiving of it. It is an intimate thing to offer and to receive help. Once during a disaster of my own life, I was saying the kind of thing like, “I can’t believe I’m in this situation.” I was outside a doctor’s clinic waiting for an appointment, and I was stressed and distracted, and I thought I’d check my email, anything to get my head off what was going on, on my phone. And there was an email from a stranger, a complete stranger, who said something like,

“Hi, Padraig, you don’t know me. I’m about to end my life this evening. My family will find my writings, and they’ll see that I’ve liked your writings a lot. And if they get in touch after I’ve died, I want you to know that it’s not your fault. But I love your writings.”

And then they signed off. And I was in desperation, but there was this email. I wrote back. I thought about it, and I think the desperation gave me a clarity. I said,

“Listen, you’re already living in a future where you’re worried about me, where you’re making my life easier, and you don’t want me in the future that you think you’re not going to be part of, to feel like I should blame myself. So I have confidence that you’re already thinking about the future. Your words are saying you’re thinking of leaving it, but your actions are saying you’re actually thinking of being in it. So write to me again tomorrow.”

And I went into this awful clinic, and he wrote again the next day. He had stayed. I was moved, and he changed something in me in the exchange of help. You will be the site of help in your life. You’ve been studying culture, and theology, and peace and reconciliation. Powerful things. You will probably not be well paid. You will probably be overworked. And you will probably do these things alongside other forms of work. But they are the forms of help that are so needed. The forms of the serious question of the crises of our lives. Serious help in your community, and helping somebody else’s community. Helping somebody stay alive or asking for help to stay alive. If you feel far from some of these needs of help yourself, you are not far from them in this room or in places where you live. Sometimes you’ll offer the help, sometimes you’ll ask for it. Sometimes you’ll simply be in a situation where help is necessary. Sometimes you might think that, "What would people think if they saw in me the weakness that I see in me?"

Welcome to the human condition. The greatest love stories of your life, and by love, I mean your family, your friends, and your community, and your society, your people. The greatest love stories of your life will be built on the times where help was asked for and given. Wherever you are in that situation, some co-creation occurred. The people who are able to help may not always be your closest friends, and that might hurt you. Sometimes it might be a stranger who can give the help, and sometimes you’ll be the stranger who’ll give the help.

Don’t despise the ones who may not be able to give to you, even if they’re your closest friend or your family member. Be glad that there is an opportunity for help, even from the stranger. Even from the difficult stranger. That too will form a great story of love, an expansive story of love. Because art is made of the unexpected, and help is looking for something that is unexpected in a crisis of an expected disaster or shame. And that is what I want to encourage you with. With all of your studies, with all of the dedication, with all of your joy, and with all of the intelligence that you’ve got from your own life, from your readings, from your own thoughts, is to employ that for the purposes of mutual support, of the co-conceiving of something new, something small, something filled with life, something unexpected.

Thank you.

Delivered in St Andrew's, NB on May 24th, 2026

Pádraig Ó Tuama (b. 1975 Cork, Ireland) is a poet with interests in conflict, language and religion. He presents Poetry Unbound from On Being Studios, and has published two anthologies (2022, 2025, both with WW Norton) from that podcast. In 2026 Copper Canyon Press will publish Love Between Men, his fifth poetry collection. A freelance artist, one of Ó Tuama’s projects is poet in residence with the Cooperation and Conflict Resolution Center at Columbia University. He serves as faculty at Yale Divinity School as a Professor in the practice of Spirituality. He splits his time between Belfast and New York City.