Prayers of St. Patrick

SOUL FOOD

For weeks stores have been selling all things green -- shamrocks,

leprechaun hats, iced cupcakes and cookies.

On Monday, St. Patrick’s Day, I’ll once again forget to wear

green. And if I go out, at least one person will dare to pinch me for

it.

St. Patrick’s Day, it’s another saint’s day gone the way of a

by-and-large secular, Hallmark holiday.

Friends and family, Irish, Catholic, Christian or not, exchange

St. Patrick’s Day cards. Green beer will flow until some imbibers,

themselves, turn green.

Last year Lynn Johnson, the creator of one of my favorite comics,

“For Better or Worse,” published a strip to honor St. Patrick on his

day.

“To St. Patrick and all that he did for Ireland!” one of her

characters, gathered with friends around a pub table, proposed to a

toast.

“Cheers! To Paddy! To the Saint himself!” his friends rejoined.

Then one of them raised the question. “So, what did he do?”

“Got rid of the snakes,” another replied. But the legend didn’t

fly. So someone mentioned that the patron of Ireland brought

Christianity to the green isle. But that fact, alone, didn’t fly

either.

“What else?” someone wanted to know. “What did St. Patrick do

besides bring Christianity to Ireland?” They pressed the question on

and Irish friend, Finn.

“Wasn’t that enough?” he asked.

In the 21st century some still think it was. There are others,

though, who survey the toll of a war waged between rival factions,

identified on one side as Protestant and on the other side as

Catholic, yet both sides Christian, and they wonder.

If St. Patrick looks down upon the parades and parties, the green

cupcakes, cookies, and beer, and the carnage in neighborhoods of

modern-day Ireland, I cannot imagine what he thinks. I hope he prays

with the angels and archangels.

I’d never heard the story about the saint and the snakes of

Ireland until last year when I read Johnson’s comic strip. Then later

the same day I got an animated, and interactive, online greeting card

that let me help St. Patrick rid the isle of its snakes.

What I knew best of St. Patrick was a hymn, a beautiful hymn found

in the old, 1940 Hymnal of the Episcopal church. It’s set to a

traditional Irish melody, a haunting melody that somehow etches it

words into my soul.

Its words are a translation of a prayer of St. Patrick, a

translation more poetic than literal, though no less true. In

difficult times its sweet, entwining melody often sings the words to

my anxious heart.

“I bind unto myself today the strong name of the Trinity. I bind

this day to me forever, by power of faith, Christ’s Incarnation, his

baptism, his death on cross for my salvation. The power of God to

hold and lead, his eye to watch, his might to stay, his ear to

hearken to my need.”

St. Patrick’s life, in a number of ways, is reminiscent of the

biblical story of Joseph, whose brothers sold him into slavery in

Egypt when he was a young boy. Irish intruders snatched Patrick from

his home and sold him as a slave, at the age of 16, to a chieftan.

Neither Joseph nor Patrick despaired. Far from home, family and

friends, their freedom snatched from them, each bore his captivity in

patience, trusting and seeking God.

Joseph, in time, rose to power in Egypt and in his position saved

his family from starvation and death during famine.

“You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to

bring about this day,” he told his brothers and forgave them.

St. Patrick was prepared in a similar way, through his captivity,

to later bring Christianity to the very people who had enslaved him.

He learned the customs and the language of his captors. He learned to

lean hard on God.

Patrick wrote of his time in slavery, “In a single day, I have

said as many as a hundred prayers, and in the night nearly the same,

even before the dawn, I was roused to prayer.”

Patrick escaped his captors only to return to them, voluntarily, a

few years later, convinced that God intended for him to bring the

Gospel to them. And he did.

Was that enough? That, I guess, is for each to decide for himself.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at [email protected].