MIRACLE. MUDDLE. MYSTERY. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 2025.03.18

We are still in the midst of wearing green and celebrating St. Patrick who wasn’t really Irish. But you know these things happen, don’t you? 

Back in the sixth century Patrick traveled to Ireland on assignment: Convert these pagans to Christianity. What Patrick did, however, was to endear the Irish people to himself and he to them. Rather than confront them with an agenda to convert, he got to know them. He familiarized himself with their pagan ways and rituals. These pagans always used the sun as an image of Divinity. Patrick therefore incorporated that bright roundness onto the Christian cross.  To the people he was saintly simply because he respected them and their local traditions. 

If only we all could behave like Patrick and simply listen to each other with respect not agenda. DO NOT try to convert anyone to your own ways. Listen. Take the relational way, the way of letting-be. Patrick honored the pagan ways and used their own imagery. Here, for example, is a Celtic Cross with the round sun, favorite pagan symbol, superimposed onto it. 

Poet and devout Roman Catholic, the late Brian Doyle, demonstrates this way in his prayers, addressing Divinity as Coherent Mercy. Doyle minces no words in his prayer-talk. 

Prayer of Spitting Inchoate Rage That You Allow Such Things & People to Inflict Such Horrendous Pain & Agony, Especially on Little Kids, How Could You Let That Happen? Most of us secretly wonder about such mysteries but few of us let God know as directly as Brian Doyle does. I usually quiet my rage by reminding myself that God, after all, gave us freedom. Doyle knows all about this freedom, too, but he goes directly to God with his prayer-complaint: “How could You have given us such freedom? But you did; and so my prayer must be finally for me, to work harder against the dark, to sing louder, is that right? Your silence is eloquent again ‘as always’ as always. And so: amen. 

St. Patrick not Irish?—But very Green.

St. Patrick didn't rant as we call it today when we are compelled to speak passionately about something but he was full of zeal. Nor was he "green" in the ecological way we use that color today, but he used green to teach spirituality. And he wasn't even Irish though he is that land's patron saint.

Patrick was born and grew up in Britain until at sixteen he was captured by Irish slave-raiders and taken to Ireland where he was forced to serve as a shepherd, a hard scrabble job, not romantic at all.

Patrick was a slave and treated roughly often enduring long hours alone in all sorts of weather to tend sheep. In dark loneliness he prayed, somehow, like the biblical Joseph, never losing faith in exile.

He wrote in his memoir Confessio: "I used to stay out in the forests and on the mountain and I would wake up before daylight to pray in the snow, in icy coldness, in rain, and I used to feel neither ill nor any slothfulness, because, as I now see, the Spirit was burning in me at that time." He said that he heard the voice of God telling him to escape from Ireland, and then to come back as a missionary.

At twenty-one Patrick escaped, returned to his native Britain, studied Christianity, became a bishop, and in time returned to Ireland inspired by the voice of God he had heard deep inside him in his moment of deepest need. He returned to the scene of the crime not for retribution but for healing. He spent thirty years in Ireland teaching Christian ways of love, justice and peace. He died there on March 17, 462.

It inspires me when I notice that in so many lives—saints ancient and modern, biblical ancestors, and plain folk like you and me— the voice of God is felt/heard from within in the darkest moments, moments that should give way to faithless despair but don't.

It is also evident that the realization of the action of Spirit is often catch-up ball. We realize later the full meaning and implications of what really happened long ago in the fields, on the street, in sleep, in a pew or in a kitchen.

I once felt the voice of God at a time in my life when I thought everything was just fine but was not letting myself in on my spiritual deadness. Everything was fine. I had followed life's prescriptions for a woman of my generation to the tee. My life was as it was supposed to be—marriage, nice house in suburbs, growing healthy kids I loved, husband working hard to support us well. But something was missing: me.

I wasn't even praying like Patrick. (I 'd given that up although I went to church and wished a lot.) I was instead in my kitchen baking chocolate chip cookies as I was supposed to do. That's when I heard the voice of God-in-me asking with candor but not scorn or annoyance: Why are you doing this?

That was all. Simply so. I had many confused feelings. I didn't know just what had happened only that something had shifted inside me that had to do with more than me. I began to use my new energy to make decisions and do thing differently. I followed. Eventually I would say like Patrick, the spirit, "as I now see" was simmering and sometimes boiling over in me. The question was resurrecting.

It took me the next twenty years to answer that question.

I use God's question to motivate me when I feel loose-ended, anxious or only half alive about what I'm doing or saying. "Why are you doing this?"

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I wonder if Patrick ever asked himself that question as he worked listening and teaching in Ireland. Why are you doing this?

Patrick, not Irish born, was declared its patron saint anyway. He is important today as we try to think and act green, because Patrick used a tiny and rare bit of green grass, the three-leaf clover, to illustrate the three-ways-in-one nature of God to those who worshiped nature.