St. Patrick’s Breastplate (It’s Not Easy Being Green)

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!   Today is a day when festivities celebrate many things: Irish heritage, the color green, corned beef and cabbage, stout beer, four-leaf clovers, and good luck!  But what about the namesake responsible for all these festivities, St. Patrick himself?  Do we even know who he is, or why we should even care?  It can’t just be shamrocks and driving out snakes that make this legend so pervasive.  As with many legends, the real story tends to be even more interesting.

To start, Patrick wasn’t even his birth name…it was Maewyn Succat (say that three times quickly).  And he wasn’t even Irish…he was born in Scotland, which was part of Roman-controlled Britain at the time.  At age 16, he was captured by Irish pirates and sold into slavery to a Druid high priest in Ireland, where he worked as a shepherd.  There while alone tending his sheep, he prayed continuously and his faith in God increased.  After 6 years in captivity, an angel appeared to him, encouraging him to escape and return to his home.  Once safely home, he had another strange vision of a man asking him to return to Ireland to walk with the people there.  He first traveled to France to study to become a priest, and eventually his vision became reality when Pope Celestine commissioned him to become a missionary to Ireland.  Pope Celestine gave him the new name “Patricius” (father of the people) to mark his future role.

Patrick traveled back to Ireland, to the land of his enslavers, to a land initially hostile to the faith he was trying to teach.  His efforts were a threat to the ruling Celtic chieftains and the druidic religion practiced in Ireland, and he had to evade attempts to re-enslave and kill him.  Ultimately, his persistence, his intimate knowledge of Celtic ways and language, and his faith in God won out, and Ireland was converted to Christianity.  What followed was a great outpouring of faith that led to the establishment of churches, monasteries, convents, and the like, filled with monks, nuns, priests and saints.

Over the ensuing centuries, in the wake of the fall of the Roman empire and the destruction wrought by the barbarian hordes across continental Europe, the legacy of St. Patrick would bear even greater fruits.  While much of the scholarly, historical, philosophical, and literary works of classical civilization were being destroyed, Irish monks toiled to save and copy all of the books and manuscripts that they could, to preserve for posterity the wisdom that would otherwise have been lost.  And later, Irish missionaries who were the legacy of St. Patrick, traveled throughout most of devastated Europe to achieve the conversion and restoration of western European civilization.

St. Patrick’s Day commemorates the death of this holy man.  He is not just for the Irish or for the Christian, but for all of us.  We all owe a debt of gratitude (and not just for green beer) to this brave soul who endured the hardships of slavery in a foreign land, then found the courage to escape and return home.  But once home, rather than live out his days in safety and comfort, he was propeled by his faith to follow a path of uncertainty and danger to help and serve the people of Ireland, including those who had harmed him.  For St. Patrick, it wasn’t easy being green, but he looked upward to God in faith and outward to others with courage, selflessness, and love.  If not for him, we might be living in a very different world.  We should be grateful that he chose to walk that green path. 

I will leave you with an excerpt from a favorite prayer of mine, known as St. Patrick’s Breastplate, composed by him for protection:

God's power to guide me,

God's might to uphold me,

God's wisdom to teach me,

God's eye to watch over me,

God's ear to hear me,

God's word to speak for me,

God's hand to guard me,

God's way to lie before me,

God's shield to protect me,

God's host to save me,

Christ with me, 

Christ before me,

Christ behind me, 

Christ within me,

Christ beneath me, 

Christ above me,

Christ at my right, 

Christ at my left,

Christ when I lie down,

Christ when I sit down

Christ when I arise,

Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,

Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks to me,

Christ in every eye that sees me,

Christ in every ear that hears me.