The Feast of St. Patrick
It’s March 17 again, a particularly important day in the calendar, as judging from another increasing in the advertising and promotion around this date. It is, of course, on this date that we celebrate the feast of Ireland’s most important saint, St. Patrick.
St. Patrick is, of course, the patron saint of Ireland, New York, Boston, Nigeria, Montserrat, engineers, snake eradicators, and the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne, Australia. The Solemnity of St. Patrick is a principal holiday in Ireland, as well as a feast day celebrated in many other locales throughout the world, including many places in the US.
It is truly heartening to witness the celebrations we see here, even in Cascadia, honoring the accomplishments of the great Irish missionary of the fifth century AD. By the eighth century, he had become the patron saint of Ireland, and today, in the early twenty-first century, we use the anniversary of his feast not only to honor his life, but also to commemorate the beauty and grace of all things Irish.
Flag of Ireland
Like many holidays we currently celebrate, I am in awe of reverence and perseverance with which we celebrate these annual rites. I was witness today to quite a variety of celebrations of this important Christian icon. The color green is obviously important, as it is the color of the shamrock, itself a marketing symbol of the Republic of Ireland. It is also believed by many that the flag of Ireland is a solid green rectangle. This results in the wearing of green clothes, green makeup, and green hair tints. We celebrate with the eating of copious quantities of green colored foods, the drinking of ale infused with green food coloring, and other outlandish gastronomic fare. By the end of the evening, some will even have the opportunity to expel assorted green-tinted fluids from their bodies. Again, this is all in celebration of this important patron saint.
It somehow interests me, albeit in a perverse way, how in this allegedly Christian nation, we celebrate the feast of a Christian saint by testing how much liquor our bodies can stand before it is involuntarily expelled. If that is our goal, we have failed. If the goal is to celebrate Ireland and the Irish people, we have again failed. If we are going to do this right, it seems that someone would take the time to figure out what is really there to celebrate about in Ireland, and then to do so. I’m know that if we took the time to look, there are some perfectly honorable and great things about Ireland that we can celebrate. There are, you know.
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