March Journal, Passion Sunday, St. Patrick’s Day

Happy St. Paddy’s Day! And Passion Sunday. And the Fifth Sunday in Lent. We journey together within the Passion of Christ, to Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and Easter, Resurrection Day. My bishop of blessed memory often said that passion is the union of love and suffering. At the age of 76, I think I am beginning to know what he meant.

Our hills are Irish green, the sunlight drenching them in color. By May they will be summer brown and we will hear the weedwhackers shaving the hills, cutting the grass down, for now the grass is weeds.

St. Patrick (372-466) did the opposite, he turned the dry weeds of Ireland into the green grass of faith, much as Our Lord does with each one of us. Before belief we are dry and parched. After belief we are green and growing. As one of my characters says, “My life is now divided in two – before belief and after belief.” And once tasting the joy of believing, there is no turning back.

I am at times overcome with gratitude to God that I have been blessed with belief. Why, I don’t know. Why others don’t follow the same path to joy, I can’t fathom. But then, I tell myself, it’s not my business – it’s God’s business and theirs, and all I can do is witness with my life and my words. Each one of us must decide the path they want to take. It’s called Love; it’s called free will.

St. Patrick was not born in Ireland, but in Britain. He was enslaved as a boy by a trading ship and taken to Ireland. Wikipedia says,

According to Patrick’s autobiographical Confessio, when he was about sixteen, he was captured by Irish pirates from his home in Britain and taken as a slave to Ireland. He writes that he lived there for six years as an animal herder before escaping and returning to his family. After becoming a cleric, he returned to spread Christianity in northern and western Ireland. In later life, he served as a bishop, but little is known about where he worked. By the seventh century, he had already come to be revered as the patron saint of Ireland. (Italics mine)

Remarkable, that he returns to the land of his enslavement and preaches the Gospel. In doing so, he forges the link between Classical Civilization and what becomes Western Civilization.

Today, all this is severely threatened, as we head down the road to extinction. Even so, there are quiet links doing their linking, preserving what needs preserving, saying what needs saying, writing what needs writing. There is one here and one there and another one farther afield. Why, there is a network forming underground that none of us can see, but, then again, it is you and it is me.

I often wonder who is pulling the strings, whispering hints, pointing in directions, if anyone, from above. Angels? I play what-if… What if when we enter Heaven we are given one last chance to visit a loved one? Then we journey further to the gates of the city, over the brilliant green hills to the bright light of the walls of gemstones. What if some have a love that is great enough to influence us on earth a little longer? Perhaps the saints who listen to our prayers. Perhaps a mother willing to forgo instant heavenly delight to help a child maneuver further in life? What if love is the medium shows us the goings on on Earth? How much love is in our hearts? Love that we are willing to give away, to suffer for another?

I’ve enjoyed writing a bit about Heaven in my current novel, as I did in Angel Mountain, using theological texts as well as Near Death Experiences. I don’t make things up from whole cloth, but journey into the what-ifs that are presented by other witnesses.

Maybe it’s the Irish in me dancing this jig, telling this tale. While most of my ancestors are either Norwegian or British, I have some Irish (5%) on my paternal grandmother’s side. It appears her grandparents came from Ireland mid 19th Century (potato famine would be a good guess) to Ontario, Canada and settled just above Lake Michigan. They had many children, and several adult grandchildren eventually crossed into the U.S. Somehow my grandmother met my grandfather in a town farther south, Escanaba, where she lived, and he took her to Arkansas where my father was born.

I never knew my paternal grandmother. She died before I was born. I did, however, inherit her first name as my middle, Gertrude.

One way or another, I’m glad St. Patrick returned to Ireland. It made all the difference in our world.

St. Patrick is said to have authored Hymn #268, “I bind unto myself to-day/ The strong Name of the Trinity/ By invocation of the same/ The Three in One, and One in Three. It covers the Faith in five verses that ride a powerful melody of serious commitment, a binding, an oath taking. Then the tune shifts to a light dance calling on Christ to be “with me, within me, behind me, before me, beside me, to win me, to comfort and restore me, beneath me, above me, in quiet, in danger, in hearts of all that love me, in mouth of friend and stranger.” It’s a hymn, an oath, to the Trinity, one of the doctrines developed by the Early Church and debated. It clearly is a teaching hymn as most were and are, full of theology, images, words, all helping us understand who we are and who we are meant to be.  

Thank you St. Patrick, for your life and your love and your gift of Christ to Ireland. You made a difference, a huge difference in our world.

And Grandma Gertrude Lilian Foster Thomas, I love you.

Deo Gratias.