[Note: Today’s guest blogger is Keith Wilson. Keith is a therapist in private practice and a volunteer at Spiritus Christi Mental Health Center. He’s also the author of six books and hundreds of articles on the intersection between mental health and philosophy. Thank you, Keith!]
Whenever I pass by a holiday, I like to look carefully and try to find whatever is holy about it. When St. Patrick’s Day parades by every year, there’s plenty to look at: leprechauns and shamrocks, corned beef and cabbage, green beer and drinking until you puke. It’s a celebration of Irish ethnicity. None of that seems especially holy to me. Holiness has got to be something deeper than intoxication and ethnic identity. Besides, it’s not my ethnic identity. There’s lots of Irish here in America and they’re great, but so are the Scots, but they don’t get a day in which we wear kilts, eat haggis, and drink whiskey; there wouldn’t be anything holy about that, either.
The holiday originated as the feast of Saint Patrick, famous for bringing Christianity to Ireland and driving the snakes out. This gets us a little closer to holiness. Patrick was a Saint, after all. He died on March 17, 461, the day we celebrate him. We know Patrick better than we know most figures from that time because he wrote an autobiography. In it, he’s clearly zealous about his faith and protective of his adopted people. He repeatedly apologizes for his poor Latin and decries his lack of education. If he truly was holy, it was precisely because he never believed he was holy.
When he was 16, Irish raiders captured him from his home in western Britain and sold him into slavery, where he spent six years tending sheep on the rainy, windswept hills of County Mayo. That could account for his lack of education. There, he was comforted by a sense of God’s presence. That didn’t mean he had to put up with being a slave, though. He escaped and made his way back to Britain. Eventually, he became a priest in Gaul. He might have lived out his days sipping wine in a comfortable French village, but he felt a calling to return to the very people who enslaved him, not to seek closure or to conquer, but as someone who believed they needed the sense of God’s presence too.
Who does that? When you’ve been harmed, the natural thing is to leave and make sure it never happens again, but Patrick saw something about his persecutors worth saving. He certainly didn’t return so he could be harmed again or to lord his freedom over them. He came back because he believed they needed to see what faith could do. This deliberate choice to go back to the place of your suffering to redeem it, requires something more than courage; it takes chutzpa. It entails seeing past your own pain to recognize that the people who caused it are human too, trapped in darkness, but capable of change if you walk into that darkness with them.
The rituals of St. Patrick’s Day have little to do with the man’s life. The wearing of green started as a political statement in Irish nationalism; Patrick wore blue. He is said to have explained the Trinity with a shamrock, as if that explains anything about that profound mystery. He didn’t bring Christianity to Ireland, but he became the face of it. There were no snakes when he arrived. The parades began not in Ireland but in America, where Irish immigrants used the day to flex their political strength in a culture that despised them. On the Emerald Island itself, the day was marked by attending Mass and enjoying a modest family meal, with pubs closed by law. The boisterous, commercial celebration we see now, with rivers dyed green and gutters filled with vomit, is America’s gift back to Ireland.
Perhaps we drink, dress up like leprechauns, and parade through the streets because we can’t understand why Patrick returned to the site of his bondage. In this era of firm boundaries, patrolled by hate, retribution, outrage, and cancel culture, it’s inconceivable that anyone would extend grace, much less someone with a grievance. I would urge you to take St Patrick seriously. We have enough victims in the world, already. We need some redeemers.
One Comment
Mary Ann
Amen. My grandmother emigrated from Ireland in 1906. She lived with my family and I learned so much from her about faith and her Ireland. She said that St. Patrick’s day in Ireland was marked by Mass and a small family meal. No parades, no spectacles. It’s a shame that the holy day has turned into an American excuse to drink to excess.