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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Music

Sustainability

17 October 2024

4 min read

What’s the point of celebrating the harvest?

We reap what we sow: a once young man’s guide.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A soot stained burnt-out harvester sits in a recently harvested field.

A burnt-out harvester, Lonesome Farm, Oxfordshire.

Nick Jones.

I plan next week to visit a small nursery school, called Young Haymakers, for their Harvest celebration where toddlers to five-year-olds will sing songs about tractor wheels going round and round, with vigorous manual actions as they shake, shake, shake the apple tree.

We’ll have a Harvest snack at tiny tables, a prayer and then they’ll give me the Harvest gifts from their families for those who may be hungry.

It is, of course, a delight, one of the happiest duties of a parish priest and I’ll miss it terribly as I hand it over to a new Rector. But, while I take nothing away from the sheer joy of thanksgiving of these children for the fruits (and vegetables) of this harvest and for those who farm them, I can’t help but wonder what Harvest, as a festival, really means for grown-ups.

The metaphor has been just too rich to avoid this season. We reap what we sow – and we witness that from Ukraine to Gaza and Lebanon, from Sudan to a United States that teeters on the brink of self-destruction as the world’s beacon of democratic values.

One might add to this sorry list the longer-term grim gathering-in from the world’s reliance on fossil fuels, a failed harvest of biblical-scale abomination as we destroy our planet’s natural capacity to host us. Truly, we have sown a wind and, in so many areas of human endeavour, we look like we reap a whirlwind (literally, in the case of weather crises such as Hurricane Milton).

There are prophetic voices that cry out in our human wilderness, from those who foresee the demise of the US at the hands of a shallow nationalism to those few on the political stage who predict an all-out war in the Middle East as the only possible conclusion to the escalation of revenge attacks between Israel and its neighbours.

The ancients saw famine and failed harvests as judgments for their sin, their divergence from the divine will. It’s unlikely that our world is going to accept such culpability any time soon. To do so would require a humility that we have lost, along with losing our religion.

We need to be careful of ascribing too much of a prophetic voice to Young. This was, after all, a fairly bombed-out singer-songwriter of the start of the Boomer generation.

Setting aside the reaping of whirlwinds from millennia ago, I’m going to invoke a popular folk song from a little over half a century ago. I do so because, in 1972, we lived in a more innocent world, before we knew how industrialisation could destroy our human species and when a western hegemony in democracy was taken for granted. Little did we know the precipice on which we were perched.

The song is by the folk-rock colossus Neil Young and is called, appropriately enough, Harvest. It is, lyrically, one of his more obscure works and to listen to it now is to struggle to get past a strangulated hippy voice that verges on self-parody.

But it repays the effort. Young’s lyrics are infused with religious reference and imagery, but no claim should be made for his affirmation of the Christian faith. Nonetheless, we’re entitled to view art through the prism of what informs us and, as such, Harvest yields its fruits. Young may well be singing about his lover, but it’s in love that all truth is explored.

Listen to it. Young’s Harvest opens with the lines “Did I see you down in a young girl’s town/ with your mother in so much pain?” Through a scriptural lens, this sounds like the pain of incarnation, the sharing of Mother Mary’s agony in visceral human experience.

It continues: “Will I see you give more than I can take”; for the confessing faithful, we’re at the foot of the cross here. “Will I only harvest some?”; we can, all of us, only harvest a little of the mystery of that event. “As the days fly past, will we lose our grasp?”; of course we will – time is finite. “Or fuse it in the sun?”; an uncanny pre-echo of climate change worthy of Nostradamus.

We need to be careful of ascribing too much of a prophetic voice to Young. This was, after all, a fairly bombed-out singer-songwriter of the start of the Boomer generation. But it’s also true that we should be careful of where we look for prophetic voices.

For Young, the Harvest is indeed a cruel and painful event, which we can only understand in part. We do indeed reap what we sow, but there may be purpose to be found in that. And the Harvest is indeed bitter, but in it we may glimpse a plan: “Dream up, dream up, let me fill your cup/ With the promise of a man”.

Or, okay, it’s just a song, harvesting a good deal of cash for its writer and singer. I’m no big fan of Young. But it might just have told me more about the Harvest than singing All Things Bright and Beautiful.