St Patrick's Day: Honor the Memory of the Saint by Living Like a Christian Today

I write to wish our readers a Happy St Patrick's Day! I also write to consider again the life, message and meaning of the Saint whom we honor. How we need his witness in this urgent hour.

I have Irish ancestry, and was raised in the Dorchester section of Boston, Massachusetts, an irish enclave. I am 60 years old, so I can remember the remnants of the Christian influence on the celebration. I remember when the revelry had roots and was not simply an excuse for poor behavior; when the parades were more than a platform for groups pushing destructive ideologies which lead to a new form of slavery, all the while masquerading as liberation. Patrick has always been one of my heroes. We live in an age of anti-heroes. Telling his story afresh can help us to recover what we have lost. Even more, raising a new generation who imitate him in his heroic faith could help us to turn the age away from the collision course it is on and toward the source of true freedom, Jesus Christ, the One who Patrick loved with such passion.

CHESAPEAKE, VA (Catholic Online) - Much of the world will eat corned beef and drink beer to celebrate the great Saint and Bishop of Ireland. Nothing wrong with either, in moderation.  However, the Holiday has lost its Christian meaning in the midst of a culture which has all but forgotten God.
All that seems to be left are the trappings of what once was a Christian influence on western culture.  

I write to wish our readers a Happy St Patrick's Day! I also write to consider again the life, message and meaning of the Saint whom we honor. How we need his witness in this urgent hour.

I have Irish ancestry, and was raised in the Dorchester section of Boston, Massachusetts, an Irish enclave. I am 60 years old, so I can remember the remnants of the Christian influence on the celebration. I remember when the revelry had roots and was not simply an excuse for poor behavior; when the parades were more than a platform for groups pushing destructive ideologies which lead to a new form of slavery, all the while masquerading as liberation.

I loved this day as a young child, mostly because we ate my ma's great corned beef and laughed a lot. She was an Irish/German who, like everyone else, became mostly Irish on this day. And, boy was her corned beef good!  I also loved hearing the stories of the great Bishop of Ireland from the nuns - and in Fathers sermon, when I was in early grade school and we would go as a class to Holy Mass.

Patrick has always been one of my heroes. We live in an age of anti-heroes. Telling his story afresh can help us to recover what we have lost. Even more, raising a new generation who imitate him in his heroic faith could help us to turn the age away from the collision course it is on and toward the source of true freedom, Jesus Christ, the One who Patrick loved with such passion.

Now, at 60 years old, with five grown children, and seven grandchildren, I have become acutely aware of the loss of the Christian influence in our contemporary culture. That is why I have chosen to keep the stories of the heroes of our Christian faith alive.  I will be writing a book soon - to do just that.

Patrick was raised in a Christian home in Britain toward the end of the fourth century. This was an age very much like our own. It had its own culture of death and use. It was losing its soul in a sea of self idolatry. It was also captive to a spirit of lawlessness. Tragedy struck Patrick at sixteen years old, when he was kidnapped by Irish Pirates and taken to the Emerald Isle.

This was the first experience he would have of the land that he would later come to love - and for which he would give himself away in tireless missionary service years later. Upon arrival in this plush, green, breathtaking and beautiful land, he was sold as property to a petty chieftain who put him to work with his herds of swine.

Patrick could have become embittered. In fact, the reaction would have been understandable. Instead, he became holy. When this young man recalled these traumatic events in his marvelous work "The Confession", he perceived the tragedy not as a victim but rather as a penitent:

"I was then about sixteen years of age. I knew not the true God; and I went into captivity to Ireland with many thousands of persons, according to our deserts, because we departed away from God, and kept not His commandments, and were not obedient to our priests, who used to admonish us for our salvation"

While he was a slave, Patrick recalled his Christian upbringing and turned back to that true God of whom he wrote so eloquently. He became a pilgrim, turning his captivity into a time of spiritual growth. He learned to walk the way of love. He wrote of that time:

"Now, after I came to Ireland, tending flocks was my daily occupation; and constantly I use to pray in the daytime. Love of God and the fear of Him increased more and more, and faith grew, and the spirit was moved, so that in one day I would say as many as a hundred prayers, and at night nearly as many, so that I use to stay even in the woods and on the mountain to this end. And before daybreak I use to be roused to prayer, in snow, in frost, in rain. And I felt no hurt, nor was there any sluggishness in me- as I now see because the spirit was then fervent within me"

After six years of unjust captivity, during which this pilgrim had become a Christian mystic through growing in his prayer life, Patrick escaped with the help of some friendly traders. He pledged that he would never return to Ireland. However, the God whom Patrick had fallen in love with had other plans for his life. In the middle of the night the Lord gave Patrick a vision which he recorded for posterity.
 
Because he responded to the invitation contained in that vision, this wonderful man was used by the Living and true God to literally change the history of not only Ireland but the rest of the world:

"And there verily I saw in the night visions, a man whose name was Victorius coming as it were from Ireland with countless letters. And he gave me one of them, and I read the beginning of the letter, which was entitled "The Voice of the Irish"; and while I was reading aloud the beginning of the letter, I thought that at that very moment I heard the voice of those who lived beside the wood of Folcut, which is nigh unto the Western Sea. And thus they cried, as with one mouth: "We beseech thee , O holy youth, to come and walk once more among us." And I was exceedingly broken in heart, and would read no further. And so I awoke. Thanks be to God, that after very many years the Lord granted to them according to their cry"

Through much perseverance, Patrick finally returned to Ireland, now an ordained servant of the Church of that true God. His "Confession" tells of his experience of being used to transform that beautiful land into a seedbed of Christianity through his evangelization and missionary work. The Pilgrim Patrick is a model for our age and for the new evangelization that we so desperately need.

We live in a new missionary age. Patricks progression of faith can become our own. Patrick's profession of faith can turn this age around and set it on the right course, back to true liberation. The decision is our own. 

Patrick chose to reject victim-hood and self-centeredness. Instead, he embraced the way of the Cross, carrying on the redemptive mission of Jesus. He fell in love with the Lord by developing a profound and transforming interior life, a personal relationship with God.

He did this through deep, constant and abiding prayer. The kind of prayer which is cultivated and grows with practice. Not just saying prayers, but becoming prayer, by living in a constant dialogue with the God who waits to hear His sons and daughters.

In living this way of life, the Christian way, he learned to discern the voice of the Lord in his daily life, developed the eyes of faith and responded with perseverance to the call to become a missionary. Each of us is invited to do the same.

On this day, when the entire world pauses to remember Patricks life and his legacy, to rightly celebrate a full and meaningful life lived for God- and to honor to a beautiful country and people who have sent missionaries to the rest of the world to carry Patricks work forward through the ages, let us truly honor his memory by choosing to walk in His way.

Like Patrick, let us follow Jesus Christ. Let us make Patricks wonderful prayer, which reflects his very real, naturally supernatural life, our own. Let us march into the Third Christian Millennium called, as was this wonderful saint and hero, to proclaim, demonstrate and live the Gospel, bringing hope and freedom to a world waiting to be born again:

"Christ beside me, Christ before me, Christ behind me King of my heart; Christ within me, Christ below me, Christ above me never to part. Christ on my right hand, Christ on my left hand, Christ all around me shield in strife; Christ in my sleeping, Christ in my sitting, Christ in my rising light of my life. Christ beside me, Christ before me, Christ behind me King of my heart; Christ within me, Christ below me, Christ above me never to part."

Happy St Patricks Day: Honor the Memory of the Saint by living like a Christian today. Hear the voice of the Irish in this hour. They need the Lord. We all do.
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Deacon Keith A. Fournier is Founder and Chairman of Common Good Foundation and Common Good Alliance. A married Roman Catholic Deacon of the Diocese of Richmond, Virginia, he and his wife Laurine have five grown children and seven grandchildren. He is a human rights lawyer and public policy advocate who served as the first and founding Executive Director of the American Center for Law and Justice in the nineteen nineties and has long been active at the intersection of faith and culture. He serves as Special Counsel to Liberty Counsel. He is a senior contributing writer to The Stream.

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