Faith and Begorrah

Lenten Vespers, Week Five

Isaiah 55

Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David. See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you.

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Often have I heard it quipped that St Patrick’s Day has little to do with being saintly. March 17th has become, instead, an ethnic holiday, a celebration of all things Irish or Irish-American. And yes, that includes whiskey, beer, and Gaelic good cheer. In many ways, however, I think this a perfectly appropriate way to honor the memory of St Patrick, who won not just a nation but the entire Western world for Christ.

It is a story worth telling every year. Young Patricius was a Romanized Briton living in what we would today call Wales. He came from a wealthy and Christian family—Patricius means patrician—but he had little time for religion in his youth. Then one day came the barbarians, pagan pirates from the neighboring island. “Wolfland,” some called it, and these sea wolves dragged poor young Patrick from his home, from his family, and enslaved him in a foreign land.

The great Gaels of Ireland were not wilting lilies. These were men whose dark gods demanded human sacrifice. Celtic children grew up in houses festooned with the severed heads of their fathers’ enemies, for the head was held to hold the soul. They were a warrior people, strong and proud, born to fight and sing and drink. But they were also master astronomers, artists, and craftsmen. They taught the Romans to build roads and chariots, taught the Germans to carve knotwork and runes. The Celts were the indigenous peoples of Europe, and at one point their empire stretched across the Continent from Turkey all the way to Spain. It was from Spain that the Gaelic Celts would migrate to Ireland, and there would Celtic culture most powerfully endure.

Patrick was bought as a slave and assigned to tend his master’s sheep. This involved long periods alone in the wilderness, exposed to the elements and to stranger things that lurked in the shadows of the Hibernian woods. It was here, in his sufferings, in his loneliness, that he turned to his parents’ God and prayed and prayed and prayed. Lo and behold, his pleas were answered. Visions directed him to flee across the country, and miracles allowed him to find passage on a ship transporting Irish wolfhounds. He returned to Europe and eventually to Britannia, to be reunited with the loved ones he had lost. Yet Patrick was forever changed by his sufferings, and became a man of the cloth, a priest and bishop of the Church.

Now comes the truly remarkable bit. For Patrick began to have visions of poor Irish slaves begging for his help, for his return. And wouldn’t you know it? Return he did. Returned to the people who stole him away from all that he’d had and all that he’d loved. Returned to the people who made him a slave in the wilderness. And he taught them about Christ. And he freed their slaves. And he baptized their kings. And stories would soon abound about the miracles of St Patrick, of the wonders that God wrought through him: defeating the magic of the druids in supernatural duels; conquering the demons such as the savage worm-god Crom Cruach; transforming Christians into deer that they might escape persecution, and highwaymen into werewolves that their predatory nature should be revealed to all.

And it was in fact the druids themselves, the great pagan foes of Patrick, who most enthusiastically embraced the beauty of the Christian faith. They recognized hints of Christ in their own legends, in their art and in their poetry and in their mysticism. And Christianity flourished in Ireland, a wolf-land no more, now transformed into the Holy Isle.

But our story does not end here, with a single man winning a single nation to and through Jesus Christ. Oh, no. For the Roman Empire, the classical civilization that had produced good St Patrick, soon fell to the marauding Teutonic hordes. The barbarians were no longer at the gates but in the streets, and Europe was remade by pagan lords awkwardly attempting to claim the glory of fallen Rome for their own. And as Europe collapsed and coalesced again, as learning was lost and manuscripts burned, it was the devoted mystic monks of Ireland who preserved the ancient wisdom, who copied texts both classical and Christian, who studied law and Latin, God and grammar.

And it was the Irish monks who converted Scotland, then England, then France and Germany and Spain. Many kings and emperors had accepted baptism without knowing quite what all it meant; and so the monks of Ireland came to teach them. Though it has become something of a cliché, it is nevertheless still true that the Irish saved civilization. Those barbarian pirates at the end of the world returned to save us from ourselves. Truly the Lord works in mysterious ways.

Such an embarrassment of riches have we from the Irish! Such learning, such manuscripts, such song and art and wisdom! Such love for the harmony of Nature and for the glory of Nature’s God! We are who we are, and think how we think, because of the Irish. We are the West because of them. We belong to Christ because of them. And none of this would have been possible, none of this would have come about, had not one young slave prayed to our Lord Jesus Christ for deliverance—then used the very freedom granted unto him to return to his captors and set them free. Not with a sword. Not with threats. But with the love and grace and mercy of God.

So by all means, celebrate the Irish, even if you’ve not a drop of Gaelic blood in your veins. For God called a people who knew Him not and they ran to Him. And in sharing with the world those graces freely poured out upon them, the Irish rightly glorify God and His servant St Patrick.

In ainm an Athar agus an +Mhic agus an Spioraid Naoimh. Amen.