Some Thoughts on St. Patrick's Day 2020

How ironic it seems that the world should be self-isolating right around the most social holiday of the year.

I was curious about this timing—not just because clearly the social distancing our governments are calling for requires some adjustments to my own project, but because, like many of you, I’ve been curious as to what this great change in lifestyle might do to us as a people.

Particularly on a holiday when most people go out for a few beers.

So I looked up the story of St. Patrick. Here are a few things I hadn’t known.

St. Patrick wasn’t Irish.

Nope, not Irish at all. He was born in England, when it was under the Roman Empire, about 1600 years ago. Kind of a sad story—when he was a young man, he was taken prisoner by Irish barbarians. He’d been living in the lap of luxury—or at least what might be considered that in those times. While Christianity had come to his part of the world, the Romans weren’t necessarily devout. They were still pretty self-serving in general. But then again, that’s what can happen when you’re ruling the world.

St. Patrick was a slave.

After he was taken prisoner, his prison became the vast green mountains of Ireland. It was basically just him and some black-face mountain sheep…for six years. That’s right. He lived in isolation, in nature, for over half a decade. As a young man.

This was where he discovered God. It was praying that got him through his forced social distancing. One day a voice told him he’d return to his country. So he knew he could endure whatever he had to, because he’d get to go home. Another, the voice said, “A ship waits for you.” So he trekked across the entire country of Ireland, from the northwest to the east, to find a small boat. At first they refused to take him when they learned he was a runaway slave. So he prayed. And then the ferryman had a change of heart.

Things like that can happen when you rely on faith. Above all else.

He didn’t choose to become a man of faith—God chose him.

So often when people make life-transforming decisions, they aren’t thinking with their heads. They are thinking with their hearts. It was near impossible that St. Patrick had survived up in those mountains alone for so long. He attributed his survival to God, and felt driven to share God’s love with anyone who would listen.

He grew to believe this was his calling. He knew it would be difficult, but he didn’t care. What he believed he’d been chosen to do mattered more.

Despite growing up rich, he wasn’t learned.

Patrick had missed years of his education when he was kept in bondage. When he studied to become a clergyman back home in England, he was far behind his other classmates and felt inadequate. But he wrote about his experiences with God in Ireland anyway. Even though he wasn’t sure if it would be good enough, he forced himself to do it. He prayed that God would give him perseverance. The documents we have today that chronicle his experiences were the first of its kind from that time.

It was his crazy idea to go back to Ireland.

Before Patrick, nobody would have dreamed of being a missionary to an “unholy” land. But one night in his sleep he had a vision—a man came to him and handed him a scroll and at the top of the scroll it said, “The Voice of the Irish.” And he knew right away that God was asking him to go back.

Now what kind of person treks 1,200 miles to escape six years of total isolation in the mountainous wilderness of a foreign country, spends a few years back in their cushy home and then decides to return? He was a fugitive of Irish law. And he actively chose to go back.

Because he thought the Irish needed him.

His decision was highly unpopular.

Nobody believed this was a good idea. His classmates and professors tried to talk him out of it. Once he was in the water, he had to remind himself that everything he was doing was purely driven by faith. But his trust in God was so strong that it struck any fear he might have out of him.

He believed in blending faiths and cultures.

Part of why the Irish took to him so immediately was because he’d learned enough about their culture in his early days of bondage that he could speak their language and communicate the gospel in their tongue. He knew their traditions, he knew they had a dark sense of humor, he knew they liked to exchange gifts, he knew they were a proud but not pompous people. So he brought faith to them in a way that incorporated nature, which until then had been the central focus of their gods. They believed in Jesus because Patrick’s survival was a living testament to him. He taught them to read and write, which would become a crucial skill once Patrick was gone. The result of this was the first illuminated manuscripts, the Book of Kells, which you can still find in Dublin today. The Irish monks were the first to put spaces between words, to utilize upper-case and lower-case letters. They were the only people doing this during the dark age that was to come.

They sort of invented literature.

Most of what we’ve heard about Patrick is made up.

The Irish are really good at blarney—at exaggerating things just for the sake of entertainment. If you think their most revered saint is an exception to this, you’d be mistaken. The stories we hear about St. Patrick’s miracles, about sending the snakes out of Ireland, aren’t real. We don’t know for sure if he did climb Croagh Patrick for 40 days every year, for example.

This didn’t stop my husband and me from trying it ourselves when we went to Ireland in Year Two of checking off my dad’s bucket list.

Ireland wasn’t on the list. My mom wanted to go there because the trip to London was for her birthday. It was just a coincidence that London was also a list item.

But I know my dad would have planned to go to Ireland too. It’s where he was from.

Croagh Patrick isn’t far from County Mayo, where the Carneys come from. I found the church where they got married, the town where they lived. And then we took this pilgrimage up the mountain—well, we only made it halfway up.

Thousands of people still climb this thing every year in July, lots of them barefoot, to honor St. Patrick. The parades we have in the U.S.—the one we won’t be having this St. Patrick’s Day—bear little resemblance to the way the Irish revered him.

This was a man who embodied the word solitude. Self-isolation. Social distancing.

He was just damn good at it.

It was there that he found God.

So, as we all celebrate St. Patrick’s Day this year, 2020, maybe we can think a little about the real meaning of this holiday. And remember that right now, though our circumstances might be different than we’d hoped as we wait out this pandemic, perhaps there’s a calling waiting for us on the other side.

Go into the abyss. Don’t be afraid.

You are never truly alone.