by CCW | 17 March 2017 01:01
We are those, too, who sit or have sat in “the region and the shadow of death”, having heard and seen and then, perhaps, have forgotten the light that has arisen upon us and is in our midst. The story of St. Patrick is the story of the conversion of Ireland, of a turning from “the region and shadow of death” and darkness to the light and glory of Christ. The paschal light lit upon Tara’s hill marks the transition from paganism to the beginnings of Christian culture. There is nothing about shillelaghs or shamrocks or snakes in Matthew’s Gospel, let alone about green beer; only something about sea-girt places such as Ireland and, I suppose, Nova Scotia, which while meaning New Scotland, has had its full measure of settlers whom are designated as Scots-Irish., not unlike St. Patrick himself born in Scotland in 387 AD.
More importantly, the Gospel appointed[1] for the commemoration of a Missionary such as St. Patrick, speaks about the preaching of Jesus seen as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy about light coming to those in places of darkness, about repentance, about discipleship, and about healing and salvation; in short, all the things that belong to the turning to God through God’s turning to us in the Gospel. It is very much a part of the meaning of Lent. It is all about the turning.
And the epistle, too, underscores the same theme. “The word of God grew and multiplied”, Acts tells us, meaning what, exactly? A new gospel, new things 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?
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. Yet all our technological improvements come with advisory warnings. It would be naïve to suppose that everything is constantly improving and constantly moving in an upward and forward direction. That is the fallacy of the ideology of progress and the idolatry of time. The reality is that there are gains as well as losses, losses of the understanding, especially about ourselves and God. All of 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.
On the Feast of St. Patrick we should not forget that wonderful hymn attributed to him, the great poem called “St. Patrick’s Breastplate”[2]. It 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, 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 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.
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. When we forget that we place ourselves in “the region and shadow of death” and in a darkness of our own choosing.
It is not the case that any three will do. Churches err greatly in allowing forms of address to God that compromise and, really, betray the scriptural revelation of God by Jesus as the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, the God in whose name we are named at our baptisms. All of the other images about God’s relation to us are subordinate to these primary terms. They are neither negotiable nor can they be dismissed sociologically and politically as human inventions reflecting the power structures of ancient cultures. That is to betray the intellectual integrity of the cultures that have gone before us and to which we are indebted. We betray the very insight that compels them and that contributes to the being of the church and her teaching. We betray the philosophical and theological understanding to which social and political concerns are, at best, only secondary.
In reducing everything to the politics of power, we either knowingly or unknowingly subscribe to a form of 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 great mistake. The term “person” is a term deeply rooted in the theology of the Trinity, rooted, that is to say, in the ways in which humans 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, and not even for green beer, but for bearing the light of Christ to Ireland in a time of darkness. In the time of our darkness will we bear witness to that same light of truth and mercy?
Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Feast of St. Patrick
March 16th, 2017
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