Saint Patrick in a Plague Year

As I recall, last year at this time, holiday plans weren't disrupted.  People still did Mardi Gras and Spring Break.  But here and there, Saint Patrick's Day parades were cancelled.  I remember shaking my head, but during a week when the NBA suddenly cancelled the whole season, cancelling parades made sense.

This year, they will be canceled too.  Part of me hopes that this time of exile away from our traditional ways of celebrating might help people find their way back to the actual saint, but that is probably hoping for too much.

Those Celtic saints of early Christianity have much to say to us still.  Many of us think of Ireland as pastoral, the land of the best butter and beer.  We forget how savage it seemed to those early Celtic Christians.  Not just seemed--it was a harsh, harsh land far from prestige and power.

In many ways, modern people are living in as distant an outpost of empire as those ancient Celtic monks. Many of us are far from the corridors of power, whether they be in the U.S., in China, or in India. Most Christians reading this post are far from the places where Christianity flourishes today.

But instead of despairing and longing for the mythical glory days of past times when the Church was more influential in the U.S., perhaps we should think of ourselves as Celtic monks, trying to till a very rocky, thorny soil. We should take comfort and encouragement from how much God can accomplish, even in the most unlikely circumstances. There’s plenty of transformative work for us to do today.

The past year has shown us, month after month, of how much transformative work there is to do in the fields of racial justice, equal access to health care, the inequality of work and opportunity, the scarce resources for parents, the burdens that so often fall so disproportionately on the backs of women, of the poor, of immigrants.

The lives of the Celtic monks remind us that even in a distant exile, wondrous things can happen if we stay open to all of the possibilities. During our times of exile, it's good to remember that basic truth.