Learning from Saint Patrick
Paul Kingsnorth: “Today is St Patrick’s Day. It’s a national holiday here in Ireland, during which there is a lot of drinking and parading and the wearing of green leprechaun hats. I’m too old for that sort of thing, and the leprechaun hats don’t suit me anyway. Instead, this morning I was in church listening to two Irish friends singing an old hymn about the saint they learned at school, in harmony with a Romanian nun. It’s an experience I recommend. This evening, I’ve been sitting by the fire reading about St Patrick. Now I want to write something impulsive about the saint. I think he has something still to say to us. I’m not Irish, I know: but then, neither was he. In fact, Patrick – Patricius to his friends – was British like me, and like me he grew up in a time of imperial decline, though he had no idea how quickly the empire of which he was a subject would collapse, and all its assumptions drain away. Patricius was a British subject of imperial Rome, born around the year 400 into a middle class family, and trained for comfort and success. All of that went out of the window when, at the age of sixteen, he was kidnapped by Irish slave traders and sold to a petty king named Miliucc, who sent him out to the hills to work as a lone shepherd.”
Click below to read an excellent essay on St Patrick.