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View from the Pew
Mary Adamski
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St. Patrick offered a new take on God
TODAY'S the day the Irish celebrate themselves as a special people by remembering the great missionary who brought Christianity to Ireland.
Going to church on St. Patrick's Day was the tradition in Ireland for centuries after the saint died on March 17 in about A.D. 461. The reverent observance was carried abroad in the Irish diaspora by 70 million people escaping conquest, poverty and famine. Some older folks actually still go to church on this day.
But, truth be told, the celebrating today by generations removed from the old sod is linked to their pagan roots as much as it is to the good saint's legacy of faith. Not that Patrick would be surprised or dismayed by the drinking -- wasn't he the son of wealthy Roman-Brits who undoubtedly had a vineyard? -- and the storytelling -- for it was his own penchant to write stories that provides a credible historical account of his life.
We have his description of encounters with the Druids whose religion thrived when he arrived. Of course, the story was told by the winner, so we are left to imagine -- and hundreds of authors have done that -- about what the pagans thought when this guy came and spun their world out of its orbit.
He requisitioned their stuff to make his message easier to digest. Patrick used a plant to demonstrate the three-person nature of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That resounded with people whose vision of deity was in nature. He grafted their image of the sacred Sun onto the cross, now known as the Celtic cross.
Even more powerful than the shamrock story is the bonfire story. Patrick's grand entrance on the scene was to pre-empt a springtime Celtic ritual involving bonfires. Only the high king could kick off the Beltine holiday by lighting a fire on the hilltop. Patrick ignited his fire first nearby, in celebration of Easter, and prevailed in the face of hostility and threat from priests and king. His preaching about Christ, the light of the world, made a believer out of the king.
Fine though it is to be a descendant of some of the earliest Christians, an Irish sansei can't help yearning to know more about the pagans in the family tree. Visiting sites in Ireland where Patrick built a church or made a pilgrimage was a breathtaking experience. But the place that was truly awe-inspiring was built by pagan people more than 3,000 years before Patrick took Ireland. People with stone tools built buried tombs an acre wide under overlapping layers of flat rocks and mounds of dirt. Once each year, the light of the sun penetrates Newgrange through a precisely calculated opening and sprays the deep chamber with light.
These people knew the movement of the sun, calculating solstice and equinox as the holy days when sun would touch the tomb. That was 5,200 years ago, before the Giza pyramids were built. They built monuments that reflected their knowledge and their sense of the divine. They provided roots for the understanding of Patrick's shamrock. Here's to those awesome pagans who knew God in their own way.