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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Gaza

Middle East

1 October 2024

5 min read

The human cost of the Israel-Gaza war

A veteran volunteer surgeon laments a well lived life.

Tim Goodacre

Tim Goodacre is a reconstructive plastic surgeon, and volunteer at a hospital in Gaza.

AbdulRahman at work.

Tim Goodacre.

The Israel-Gaza war rages on. Every few days a new tragedy hits our dulled senses. The West Bank and now Lebanon are getting dragged into the conflict. Palestinians and hostages continue to die, and hunger and disease threaten Gaza's displaced people as autumn and winter approach.

Yet what is often lost is the human face of this conflict. This is the story of one such life.

AbdulRahman was an intelligent, gentle and diligent young third year medical student in his early twenties, with judgement well beyond his peers. Towards the end of 2023, as the war spread more viciously towards southern Gaza, he was one a group of around 10 students who volunteered to join the team of health care workers at the European Gaza Hospital (EGH). I was volunteering there as a reconstructive plastic surgeon and and met him in the hospital.

Both medical schools in Gaza before the war began were in the north alongside their parent universities. They had been destroyed during the onslaught in the early months of fighting. In the southern town of Khan Younis, the EGH was the sole surviving operational facility to which the wounded could be transferred. It was overwhelmed by the vast numbers of families also taking refuge in what was deemed a safer space than most of the surrounding war zone.

Many of the senior medical staff and surgeons had retreated to scattered parts of the strip, displaced frequently by the ever-moving conflict and driven by the need to support their families and stay together. ‘Live together-die together’ is an understandable feature in the horror show of war. Students, frequently left with no money or resources, started to volunteer to serve in hospitals in exchange for a little food and a sense of worth in the work they could offer. Any functioning hospital, if briefly ‘deconflicted’ so they could provide relatively safe care, found itself staffed by a disparate crew of local staff, displaced students, and an indeterminate number of more senior surgeons from both Gaza and humanitarian agencies.

His desire to learn all that could be learnt, and to try to become the best surgeon possible, was palpable.

It was into this chaotic mix that young AbdulRahman walked having fled his family home in the east of Khan Younis in November 2023. A bright young man, with great aspirations to qualify as a surgeon and serve his community, he had spent the first six weeks of the war at home, unable to attend his medical school in Gaza City to the north, but working hard at his studies regardless, using every online and library resource available to him.

At some point in late November, the battle zone moved south, and his family home was shelled along with many dwellings in the vicinity. Caught in crossfire, he sheltered in his neighbouring relative’s house after his parents and other close family had escaped to Rafah.

Abdulrahman told me the dramatic story of his escape into the house in which he survived for a week alongside his relative’s family when I spoke to him in late January 2024. This young man not only survived an ordeal of indescribable fear and potential slaughter, but he was then arrested and interrogated in brutal fashion by IDF forces.

On his release after a harrowing week, he made his way barefoot to the nearest hospital, which happened to be the EGH. In that place of safety, he was given food and water and after recuperation, volunteered to work alongside a reconstructive plastic and burns surgeon who had recently returned to Gaza after training in the UK.

Although his family were still all alive in Rafah in displaced makeshift shelters, he opted to stay and throw his weight into whatever he could do to support the hospital whilst continuing to learn his profession as a doctor. Travelling occasionally at great personal risk to see and support his family, he devoted all his waking hours to surgical work in EGH operating theatres and wards. His excellent command of English made him immensely valuable to any visiting surgeons who managed to access Gaza during the war months. He was always cheerful, always willing to respond to requests for his time, however stressful the surrounding clamour from desperate patients and relatives might become.

When his working day was done, in the middle of the night he would arrange for his fellow students to have informal teaching seminars from whoever he could cajole to deliver them, and would absorb knowledge and ideas about best practice like a sponge. His desire to learn all that could be learnt, and to try to become the best surgeon possible, was palpable.

I had every intention of supporting this fine young man in achieving his professional aspirations by whatever means I could once a ceasefire arose and he could be brought safely to Europe to continue his training.

In the last week of August, AbdulRahman was sheltering in a relative’s house in Khan Younis. In the small hours of the morning an Israeli attack was launched on the neighbourhood and the house took a direct hit. AbdulRahman was killed instantly.

He knew, as does every Gazan in these troubled times, that nowhere was safe, and all lives in that tragic zone are at risk. His is a story of a life tragically cut short, of the randomness and destructiveness of war. His death strikes right at the heart of my hopes for the remnant of the fine young population of such a desperately sad nation state. He, and those like him, could have been at the heart of the re-building of Gaza, able to live in what now feels a far-off peace. I cannot translate this into anger, as AbdulRahman himself had a passionate concern for peace and reconciliation, and never once spoke to me in many conversations of support for Hamas, or of hatred for those who had destroyed his country.

What can be done however, is to honour his life and commitment with similar tenacity in supporting the pursuit of peace, justice for his people, learning and education for the remnant of the nation, and reconstruction of a Palestine that can proudly and honourably reflect the finest values it possesses. AbdulRahman was a great Palestinian, and his all too short life was one which I want to celebrate as one of the finest I have seen in many students of the next generation of doctors. May he rest in peace, and may a lasting peace come quickly to Gaza, to all of Palestine and the whole of the Middle East.