by CCW | 17 March 2010 22:10
The Gospel says nothing about shillelaghs or about shamrocks or even about snakes. It does say something about places on a sea-coast, about the preaching of Christ seen as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy about light to those in places of darkness, about repentance, about discipleship, and about healing and salvation; in short, about all the things that belong to the evangelium – the good news that is the meaning of the word, gospel. Something of that sensibility belongs to the Feast of St. Patrick, the outstanding Apostle to Ireland, the bearer of the light of the Gospel to the pagan darkness of the Gaels.
It was Chesterton’s great quip: “For the great Gaels of Ireland [meaning the gaelic],/Are the men that God made mad./For all their wars are merry,/ And all their songs are sad.” Much of that remains true but through the missionary zeal and pastoral patience and understanding of Patrick, happy songs, the songs that belong to the divine comedy of Christianity are also heard and sung, known and loved. In How the Irish saved Civilisation, the writer, Thomas Cahill, notes that Irish and civilization are words which are “seldom coupled,” but if there is any justice in making such a connection, and I think there is, then much of the credit must go to Patrick.
And the lesson, too, from Acts underscores the same theme as the Gospel about the new light of Christ that scatters and transforms the pagan darkness. “The word of God grew and multiplied,” meaning what, exactly? A new gospel, new things be added to the essential proclamation of the faith?
This is, unfortunately, a feature of our contemporary confusion, a kind of arrogance, really, which assumes that we know more and better than others before us about the nature of God and even about our humanity. Don’t we, though? Have there not been discoveries that challenge and overturn older ways of looking at things? Are we not always progressing? And if so, it is almost axiomatic that there is very little if nothing to be learned from those who have gone before us. To the contrary, it seems to me, there is much to be learned from the witness and the mission of St. Patrick.
The idea of progress is one of the enduring myths of our technocratic culture. There have been, of course, remarkable changes and improvements in many areas of human life, in medicine and in the so-called conveniences of everyday life. But all of our technological improvements also come with advisory warnings attached. It would be naïve to suppose that everything is moving in a constantly improving and upward direction. That is the fallacy of the ideology of progress. The reality is that there are losses as well as gains, losses of the understanding, especially about ourselves and God. All developments and improvements need to be seen within the more comprehensive understanding of the relation between God and our humanity that belongs precisely to the proclamation of the Gospel and not as a rejection and a jettisoning of the basic and essential teachings, in short, the doctrines of Christianity, the greatest and most critical of which is the doctrine of the Trinity.
The celebration of the Feast of St. Patrick cannot ignore that wonderful hymn attributed to St. Patrick, his great poem which we call St. Patrick’s breastplate. You can find it in the hymn book – Hymn # 812[1] where it is presented, appropriately enough, under the unambiguous heading Invocation of the Trinity.
The hymn offers a wonderful collection of images that deal with the power and grace of God in relation to us through nature and scripture, through spirituality and theology, and even psychologically, we might say, but all of these images are contained as it were within the Trinitarian understanding that embraces and frames the entire hymn. It begins and ends with the invocation of the doctrine, the teaching about God as Trinity. The doctrine is itself at the heart of our devotion and worship of God.
I bind unto myself today
The strong name of the Trinity;
By invocation of the same,
The Three in One, and One in Three.
Sadly, all of the contemporary confusions within the Anglican Communion – liturgical, political, and moral – have to do with the willful and ignorant forgetting of what is signified so profoundly in this poem and hymn. Everything comes down to the matter of Trinitarian orthodoxy – the wonder of the revealed teaching about the nature of the God in whose image we are made. In the Christian understanding of things, that means the Trinity, God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
It is not the case that any three will do. Churches greatly err in allowing forms of address to God that compromise and, really, betray the scriptural revelation of God to us by Jesus as the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, the God in whose name we are named at our baptisms, a point of great emphasis and meaning for the ministry of St. Patrick. All of the other images about God’s relation to us are subordinate to these primary terms. They are not negotiable neither can they be dismissed sociologically and politically as human inventions reflecting the power structures of ancient cultures. That is to betray, in the most egregious manner possible, the intellectual integrity of the cultures that have gone before us and to which we are indebted. We betray the very insight that moves and compels them and which has shaped the church and her teaching. We betray the philosophical and theological understanding to which social and political concerns are at best secondary.
In reducing everything to the politics of power, we either knowingly or unknowingly subscribe to a form of atheism – the atheism which assumes that God is nothing more than a construct of the human imagination, a metaphor at best for how we envision ourselves and the ordering of our lives socially and politically. It is all about power structures, on the one hand, and the inviolability of the sovereign individual, on the other hand, though how one can talk about the individual, especially about ourselves as persons, without talking about God is, even historically speaking, a conundrum. The term “person”, after all, is a term rooted in the theology of the Trinity, rooted, that is to say, in the ways in which we have endeavoured to find and even develop a language that honours the revealed mystery, a language that doesn’t reduce the mystery to the human understanding but which raises the human understanding into the mystery itself.
It is not for shillelaghs, shamrocks and snakes that we commemorate St. Patrick, but for bearing the light of Christ to Ireland in a time of darkness, lighting the paschal fire on the Hill of Tara and banishing the pagan darkness. Thomas Cahill juxtaposes the image of a silver cauldron and a silver chalice to capture the transformation of a culture in its conversion to Christianity; the one, beautifully carved and deliberately broken symbolic of the culture of pagan human sacrifice; the other beautifully engraved and whole, capturing the names of the apostolic fellowship; the one, a century or two before Christ is known as the Gundestrop Cauldron and depicts animal and human sacrifice; the other, late seventh or early eighth century AD is known as the Ardagh Chalice. There is, I suppose, all the difference between a cauldron and a chalice; in this case, the juxaposition captures the transformation of a culture.
Shillelaghs, shamrocks and snakes all belong to legend and myth; but about the poem and song, St. Patrick’s Breastplate or Lorica, there remains the aura of truth as definite and convincing as the cauldron and the chalice. While some have doubted Patrick’s authorship with respect to the hymn’s final expression, few would doubt its inspiration; it lives and breathes the patient, pastoral, impassioned and devout spirit of St. Patrick. The Creator of every created thing is the Blessed Trinity. The Irish delight and joy that issues in happy songs derives from the one who chased away the dark shadows of the pagan darkness, the one who lit the paschal fire on Tara’s hill. Such a one was Patrick.
In the time of our darkness will we bear witness to that same light of truth and mercy?
Fr. David Curry
Feast of St. Patrick
March 17th, 2010
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