March 15, 2009

The Rev. Henry Ticknor
Unitarian Universalist Church of the Shenandoah Valley

How the Irish Saved Civilization

The story I am about to tell concerns events that took place many centuries ago and the record that survives is incomplete at best.

In the year 387 CE in a small village in either Scotland or Roman Britain, we can't be sure which, a male child was born.

The boy's father, Calpurnius, was a tax collector for the Roman Empire.

In those days the job of tax collector was not an easy one. Most likely it was a cross between a civil bureaucrat and a mafia loan-sharking operation extracting payments by whatever means proved most effective.

A significant downside to the job was that the tax collector was held personally responsible for any perceived shortcomings in revenue.

The boy's mother, Conchessa, was possibly a near relative of-Saint Martin of Tours-the great patron of the Roman territory known as Gaul.

The son's given name was Maewyn Succat.

As a child of what we might today call the middle class, the boy grew up believing that his future included a good education and a promising career.

He knew early on in his teen-age years that his future did not include aspiring to follow in his father's footsteps.

But whatever plans this young man may have had were suddenly and forever changed when one day in the year 401 a great fleet of Irish pirates swept up the west coast of Britain," Seizing...'many thousands' of young prisoners (and) returning with them to a slave market in Ireland."

Among those captured was the sixteen year-old Maewyn.

In his wonderful book, How the Irish Saved Civilization, from which this sermon takes its title, the author, Thomas Cahill, tells us what happened next.

At the time of Maewyn's kidnapping, Ireland was home to hundreds of small kingdoms each ruled by its own tribal lord and history suggests that Maewyn was bought up by a king named Miliucc.

According to Cahill, "The life of a shepherd-slave could not have been a happy one.

Ripped out of civilization, (Maewyn) had for his only protector a man who did not hold his own life highly, let alone anyone else's."

"The work of such shepherds was bitterly isolated, months at a time spent alone in the hills. The occasional contacts, which one might normally seek out, could bring their own difficulties."

Even the casual approach of strangers could be a sure of real terror.

Deprived of any meaningful contact with other people , Maewyn must have taken a long time to master the language and customs of his new country.

But Cahill notes," We know that he did have two constant companions, hunger and nakedness, and that the gnawing in his belly and the chill on his exposed skin were his worst sufferings, acutely painful presences that could not be shaken off."

As his situation grew worse by the day, Cahill relates how the young man attempted to keep his wits about him and to survive.

"Like many another in impossible circumstances, he began to pray. He had never before paid attention to the teachings of his religion (remember that one of his mother's relatives had supposedly been a great Catholic priest); In fact later in his life he was to comment that before this time he didn't believe in God, and he found priests and their admonitions about salvation to be foolish. But now there was no one to turn to but the God of his parents."

As his prayer life deepened so did his faith.

He spent somewhere close to six years in this terrible isolation and during this time he experienced one of the great conversion experiences in religious life.

One night Maewyn has a dream and a mysterious voice told him: "Your hungers are rewarded: you are going home." And the voice continued: "Look you're ship is ready."

According to Cahill, the farm where the boy was being held was "nowhere near the sea."

But he runs away from his captors and travels some two hundred miles, through territory he has never seen before, until he reaches an inlet where indeed there is a waiting vessel.

After some difficult negotiations, he convinces the crew of the ship to let him board for the voyage to what today would be known as Normandy or Brittany in France.

He then wanders across the countryside for a few years until he is finally able to make it back to his home in Scotland.

Here he is welcomed home much as the prodigal son, but Maewyn's life experiences have changed him too much for him to be content living in his parents' home.

In fact, he once again has a series of mystical visions.

In one he experiences the voices of a multitude crying, "We beg you to come and walk among us once more."

And as Cahill puts it " The escaped slave, is about to be drafted once more-as Saint Patrick, apostle to the Irish Nation."

And as the late Paul Harvey would have said, "Now you know the rest of the story."

Well, not quite.

The path from Maewyn , child slave, to Saint Patrick would be almost as arduous as his years in captivity.

Having missed out on his opportunities for a formal classical education, he is forced to take advantage of whatever education he could coble together, and again he leaves home this time traveling back to Roman Gaul-to a monastery off the coast of Cannes..

With his lack of a formal education, his studies must have been very difficult but he manages to be ordained first a priest and then a bishop.

In fact, according to some, Patrick is the first missionary bishop in the Catholic Church.

Patrick returns to Ireland in his late forties, about twenty-five years after he fled and serves as a Bishop in that land until his death thirty years later.

It is impossible to know exactly what drew him back to a land which held so many terrible memories.

Did he hope to return with a sense that now he could force his ideas upon a people that had forced him into labor?

Was he seeking revenge of some kind? Did he return to realize the personal riches that came to many bishops on the continent?

According to Cahill, by going back to Ireland, "Patrick was really a first-the first missionary to barbarians beyond the reach of Roman law.

The step he took was in its way as bold as Columbus's, and a thousand times more humane....in his later years Patrick wrote in his autobiography, "everyday I am ready to be murdered, betrayed, enslaved-whatever may come my way.

But I am not afraid of any of these things, because of the promises of heaven; for I have put myself in the hands of God Almighty."

Of all the conditions that he saw, the continued practice of slavery was to him the most abhorrent and he was probably one of the world's first abolitionists.

Again, Cahill states that while serving as Bishop in Ireland:

"Patrick worries constantly for his people, not just for their spiritual but for their physical welfare. The horror of slavery was never lost on him."

Whether or not it was the result of any direct efforts on his part or just the change in times and conditions "within his lifetime or soon after his death, the Irish slave trade came to a halt."

Only a former slave could have brought such strength to this culture war.

What Patrick brought to the Irish was nothing short of a whole new life vision where " slavery and human sacrifice became unthinkable, and warfare, though impossible for humans to eradicate, diminished markedly...new laws, influenced by Gospel norms, inhibited conflicts."

Another claim that can be ascribed to Patrick is that Ireland is one of the few lands where Christianity was introduced without bloodshed. Until more modern times there were no Irish martyrs.

Patrick's great success among the Irish may have been due to two factors.

First was his understanding of the Irish people and his willingness to be open to the long held pagan practices of the druids and other groups.

The second was his skill at convincing this once barbaric people that co-existence and cooperation were preferable to living in a constant state of violence.

Through Patrick's understanding of his own Christian theology and the theologies of the indigenous pagans, he was able to assimilate the Celtic virtues of loyalty, courage and generosity into "the Christian equivalents of faith, hope, and charity."

Patrick seems to have innately understood the importance of such pagan rituals as Beltain, on the first of May and Samhain on the last night in October and seemingly tolerated their practice thereby winning the hearts of his followers.

Again, Cahill tells us "None of this should be surprising is we assume that there were characteristic aspects if Irish culture that Patrick had taken to heart and on which he chose to build his new Christianity."

These aspects of Irish character would have included courage, a natural mysticism about life and nature , which informed the Irish that the world-all the world and not just select places-was indeed a sacred-even a holy-place.

It was on this sturdy insight that Patrick "choreographed the sacred dance of Irish sacramental life (that was) open to the whole created universe. All the world was holy, and so was all the body-the physical self."

Let me share a brief passage from what is generally considered one of the greatest pieces of writing attributed to Saint Patrick.

This is in the form of a prayer and is often referred to as "Saint Patrick's Breastplate" because it was thought to protect him from the dangers of this world and the nether worlds .

One critic the Prayer of Saint Patrick as the "work of a Christian Druid-a man of both faith and magic."

It begins with traditional Christian language, but within that language there is also the acknowledgement of the wholeness of life.

To Patrick the world was filled with light and radiance and splendor. It contained a sense of the mysterious within the traditional elements of earth, wind, and water.

Life, for Patrick, is full of the marvels of nature and creation.

Humanity is not a passive observer of creation; humanity and the universe are an integrated whole. A oneness of existence. A oneness of humanity. A oneness of the family. A believe in the universal love of god that every person is a child of the divine and every being is holy and worthy of respect.

In nature, Patrick celebrates the beauty of creation; and humanity is at fault if we do not revel in all the splendors of the world.

So with great skill Patrick was able to meld the paganism of the Irish with his understanding of the church's theology.

In the end, Patrick's life was much more than his efforts to bring religion to the people of Ireland.

He is credited with bringing greater literacy to what had been an illiterate and mostly violent citizenry.

He established libraries and schools.

As Christianity settled in, monasteries were established throughout Ireland.

The monks became passionate scribes not only of the Scriptures but also of other classical texts that were as risk of being lost after the fall of the Roman Empire.

Celtic art forms were among the traditions that survived into the Irish Christian era and would lead to the development of spectacular illuminated manuscripts at the monks' hands.

And so, Cahill closes out the story of Saint Patrick:

"The transmission of European civilization was assured. Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries...Wherever they went they brought their love of learning and their skills in book making....they reestablished literacy and breathed new life into the exhausted cultures of Europe."

And this is how it is, then, that Cahill claims that the Irish saved civilization.

Tuesday, the day after tomorrow, is the traditional day set aside to mark the life of Saint Patrick.

Although, St Patrick's Day is synonymously linked to all things Irish-Guinness, shamrocks, leprechauns, good luck charms and green in general-it is also at it's core a religious holiday.

And falling, as it does, about halfway through the Christian observance of lent-it affords an opportunity for the faithful to relax their Lenten practices and celebrate a wee bit of the blarney.

And I think Patrick would be among the first to celebrate with us even though we really know he didn't drive the snakes out of Ireland.

For even as life and the economy may have us down on our luck, there are so many aspects of life that deserve to be celebrated.

So on Tuesday, let us arise renewed in the spirit, And mindful of:

And the love of one person for another

May we all embrace the wonder of existence and be mindful of the precious gifts we derive from one another.

Amen and Blessed be