Thoughts on St.Patrick's Day (Part !)

It is the Feast of Saint Patrick, and I have been reading the Life of the Saint in Butler's Lives of the Saints (s.v March 17, Ed. 1999, p.168).

When we think of Patrick, the association which we make between the saint and the race of which he became the patron is so immediate that it is easy to forget that Patrick was not an Irishman at all, but a native of what still thought of itself as part of Roman Europe.

Patrick, as his name implies, was of distinguished family, and bought up in an environment in which Roman standards of urban civilisation were still maintained. Such a person would not have been seen Ireland as a nation at all but as a peripheral wilderness inhabited by savage, lawless and godless men.

A boy carried into this desolation by a party of slavers would hardly have welcomed the idea that he would one day be identified with its people,, and Patrick's plight might seem to have been such as to make him a more suitable candidate for the patronage of modern immigrants deceived and betrayed into a life of exploitation, wage-slavery and prostitution, were it not foir the fact that even they seem generally to imagine that they are on their way to something better than their previous way of life and not on their way to something infinitely worse.

What is remarkable about St.Patrick lies in the view that he was later to take of his captivity and subsequent servitude.

Butler's says ‘Nostalgia for his own country, people, and kin, plus loneliness and poverty and exposure to the harshness of the climate bought him to that degree of denudation where God alone is found to be the sole, inalienable treasure of the spirit… The love and fear of God, he says, took over more and more, as his faith deepened and the Spirit worked within him… He came to regard his captivity as a blessing, his life of prayer as pure unmerited grace.’

What we see in St.Patrick is a man on whom there is imposed the challenge that Jesus Christ issues by way of an unwelcome invitation in Matthew 16.24:

'If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.'

St. Patrick would certainly not have chosen for himself the fate that befel him in his early teens, and as we view the pitiable condition of the poor, the despised and the exploited immigrant few of us will feel that their situation can usefully be set before us as a model for our own salvation.

Would we not, if overtaken by such a fate, be far more likely to indulge our feelings of victimisation, and to be filled with bitterness against the world?

Would we not lose any faith that we might otherwise have in a just and benevolent God?

Many are the Saints in whom the yeast of the Spirit has worked to drive them from their homes and families and into the desert to seek God, but St.Patrick offers the more interesting spectacle of a Saint in whom the yeast of the Spirit only began to work when he had been stripped of all that seemed to define him.

He is a Saint who was a victim, a slave, and a failure: he speaks to all who are despised, cut off and rejected of men, and he offers them the hope that there is, within them, a greater treasure than all the others rhat they may have lost, and which no one can take from them.