Be more St Patrick

How did the cultural icon win the hearts of the people that enslaved him?

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Associate Minister at Holy Trinity Clapham, London.

A parade particpant dressed as a bishop in green vestments with a false beard walks down a street.

A St Patrick’s Day parade participant, London, 2022.

Garry Knight, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The local pub has a sign out the front: 'Celebrating the Saints'. You would, too, if you were a landlord with Guinness on tap. And as we paint the town green, celebration is even more at the heart of St Patrick’s Day than we first realise. Beyond the frivolity, there’s foundations to be found in this kind of celebrating. St Patrick was a man who knew how to celebrate well. So instead of merely celebrating St Patrick, what if we were to celebrate like him?

The link to St Patrick himself on St Patrick’s Day might feel as tenuous as a pub’s signage or an American politician celebrating their Irishness, but its origins are worth celebrating. St Patrick didn’t have an easy start. It’s a tale of pirates, a king, and turning around a country. Either born in northern England or Scotland in 385, he was taken to Ireland and spent about six years in forced labour before he had a vision or a dream to escape back to Britain. And yet he was then, remarkably, driven to return to Ireland, despite threats on his life. As someone faced with this antagonism, those of us looking to change the world today can learn a thing or two from his approach.

In How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill wrote: 'Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of the Irish psyche and warming and transforming Irish imagination—making it more humane and more noble while keeping it Irish.' He was able to celebrate the good in what he saw, and inhabit the culture, while remaining distinctive, and changing it from the inside.

Take a leaf out of St Patrick's book. Patrick had a mission, and Dr George G. Hunter writes that, without compromising, ‘One day, he would feel [the Irish] were his people.' Identifying with the enemy is probably not the first thing we try. When it comes to the battles we're facing as a society, and all the ways norms need to change, can we change ideas robustly, winsomely and gently all at once? Think of the kind of protest today that is polarising, loud, and often destructive rather than constructive. You don’t build bridges by damaging things. Clickbait doesn't mean connection. And pressure rarely leads to persuasion in things of significance.

As our world finds itself on the rocks, we’d do well to not only get to the bottom of the glass, but also where all the energy for this celebrating originates.

So how could he celebrate others, while staying secure in himself and his own values? His ability to celebrate others was found in the way he celebrated God. It was during St Patrick’s captivity that he was captured by his faith and became captivated by Jesus Christ. The prayer known as St Patrick's Breastplate shows a man totally immersed in God. It’s both the resolve and the resilience he found in the Trinity that characterised his life. John H. Darch and Stuart K. Burns write:

'The adventures and escapades of his journey home honed his reliance upon God, and when he finally returned to his family he felt that he should become a priest, and began a period of training that was to last for several years. According to tradition, some years later in 431 Patrick, newly consecrated bishop, returned to Ireland. He devoted himself to evangelism, reconciliation amongst local chieftains, and the training of monks and nuns.’

So, as we raise a Guinness or a whiskey, we are inadvertently celebrating a man who changed the hearts and minds of a nation through prayer and the practical presence of the church in the country. As our world finds itself on the rocks, we’d do well to not only get to the bottom of the glass, but also where all the energy for this celebrating originates.

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Death & life

Music

19 November 2024

2 min read

Lullabies and lists that tell of lifelong love

A Laura Marling gig and an All Souls remembrance reverberate life.

Jess Scott

Jess Scott is an assistant professor at the University of Nottingham.

A misty back lit stage hosts a singing guitarist and a double base player

Laura Marling performs at Hackney Church.

YouTube.

This year, I did not go to my own church’s All Souls Day service. I went instead to another church - Hackney Church - to hear Laura Marling perform her new album, Patterns in Repeat. Marling wrote its songs in the months following the birth of her first child. Her daughter’s coos and gurgles occasionally overwrite the recording of Marling’s own ethereal, elastic voice as she contemplates parenthood, heritage, and new domesticity. Critics are in agreement: this is Marling’s most accomplished album yet.

As I stood amid the congregation gathered to hear her, I was struck by the overwhelming love contained in those lullabetic songs. As if line by line Marling swaddles her daughter, each lyric wrapping her with words that hold and assure. Sleep my angel, you’re safe with me. What she conjures is the magnificent reorientation entailed in love - Time won’t ever feel the same - and the promises that tip from the mouths of those experiencing it - I’m not gonna miss it, child of mine.

Of course, love is not always so pure. We may find, miserably, our own love tilting this way or that, towards dominance or possessiveness, or muddied by some other perversion. But this isn’t to deny that there really are pockets of pure love in our midst. All around us are people writing their own lullabies: sending texts, preparing meals, writing cards, taking photos. And, in these ways, saying to one another, as the theologian Josef Pieper paraphrases the affirmation of love, ‘I am glad you exist’.

While I listened to Marling sing lullabies for her baby daughter in one church, the gathered faithful of my own congregation read out the names of the dead in another. Each year the list is long and spans several minutes. By its end the names start to undo themselves, beginning to sound only like their component syllables, blurring towards the non-words found in a book of phonics. But each name uttered - perhaps for the only time that year - tells of a whole beloved life, witnessing some homely love swirling still, years later, in the memory of a congregant. In years past I have sat around that altar as those names are read out. I have listened out for the names I added, like a child seeking the face of her mother.

These two Saturday evenings, unfolding a few Overground stops apart, were not wholly discrepant. Each sounded the cry of love from one person to another, against cynicism, even against death. Each told of love that reverberates where love cannot yet, or still, be reciprocated. All these hearts swelling and bending and breaking for each other strikes me as a kind of Grand Canyon: a remarkable thing to consider, seeming to be a miracle that might, if we let it, render us speechless.