May all the words that I say to you be in the Name of the living God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Go raibh na foclaí uilig deirim libh, in anim Dia bheo, an t–Aithair, a Mac, agus an Spiorad Naomh. Amen.
First, many thanks to the Dean for his very kind invitation to preach in this remarkable place and at this particular time, so close to the Feast of St Patrick, the apostle of the Irish people, wherever they may be throughout the world. I am truly grateful.
It is probably a little unusual to be able to say that we know for certain the very first extant words in the records of Irish history, written sometime in early fifth century, but we do indeed have them. And they are these:
Ego Patricius, peccator, rusticissimus et minin omnium fideles. I am Patrick, a sinner, the most unlearned of men and the least of the faithful.
And those few words tell us not only a good deal about St Patrick’s view of himself, but also about what we nowadays would call his “spirituality”; how he related to God.
Patrick is a bit of a paradox in the ancient world.
With many of the ancients we know when they were born and when they died and a few details of their lives.
With Patrick we have to guess where he was born and surmise when he lived and died.
But in the two quite brief authentic documents which have come down to us from his hand, we have a deep insight into his psychology; his inner life.
I think I should probably start by saying that Patrick’s understanding of God and of humankind belongs firmly in the tradition of early Latin Christianity and not in what is sometimes called Celtic spirituality.
And what he believes also contrasts very sharply with our own conceptions of God and humankind.
For Patrick and for the Christians of Ireland in those first few centuries of the Common Era, the dominant conception of God was as of a mighty King who had been offended by their sins; for us he is more like a Father whose heart we have broken by ours.
Of course both conceptions have much truth in them and it is one of the glories of the Church that she tries to hold together things that can be difficult to cut square or to resolve into a scheme.
We do our best to hold together the riches of the treasury which has accumulated through study and prayer and reflection from every age.
If I had to summarise the picture of Jesus which Patrick and the early Church in Ireland and elsewhere had in mind (and theirs was a very Jesus–centred piety) it would be something like this:
For them there is in Jesus no guileless simplicity of nature. He was perfectly sure and self–sure, knowing his mind and carrying it through with an unparalleled energy. When he stood before the civil authorities near the end of his life, he knew he was hurrying on events on a world scale. He had a proud, royal sense of himself; yet he sat happily among children.
He loved the religion of his people, and had an intense reverence for Israel’s past, but it was too small for him and, although it broke his own heart to do so, he tore it apart. He was an austere man and could be a severe critic, especially towards those who misrepresented the character of his Father.
For that reason he ripped through the pedantry of the scribes, the scholars of their day, and developed a simple pictorial way of speaking that brought his Father close to the simplest minds. He spent many nights alone on the cold mountain to search out his Father’s heart. He spoke with such power because he loved silence.
Although he had a sacramental idea of all human relations, he avoided for himself any tie of property or office or family. He was gentle to the last degree with those who were poor or shunned or sick.
There is not a single instance in the Gospels of Jesus telling the mentally disturbed or the physically ill who crowded round him to reconcile themselves to their sufferings. He healed them.
And all of this is the more remarkable because he had such a short life in which to wrestle with the turbulence of his vast soul.
Patrick, who was a disciple of this Jesus was not the author of some kind of fluffy version of Christianity, and if you read the Confessions you will find that many of the quotations and allusions to Scripture are on the rather stern side of the ledger.
Our reading from Philippians this morning about those who turn their back on the Cross, that “their end is destruction, their God is their belly, their glory is their shame and their minds are set on earthly things…but our citizenship is in heaven…” would have come very naturally to the lips of Patrick.
In every age of the world, by and large, we fear being poor. Patrick, like Jesus, seems to have dreaded that any person should be rich, and upon whose souls materialism and the practical cares of life have closed down like a coffin lid.
“Tell that fox Herod…on the third day I finish my work”.
Herod Antipas wanted to kill Jesus. Jesus escaped that threat in order to voluntarily offer up his life according to the will of his Father.
And in a parallel that Patrick is very well aware of he, Patrick, had been brought on the first occasion against his will as a slave to Ireland but he returned on the second occasion as a servant of God to offer his life voluntarily as a willing sacrifice.
And that is the only form of sacrifice that God wants or can accept.
A sacrifice, like his Son’s, born out of love, and therefore full of redemptive power.
And so it is for us today, the sacrifices that we bring this morning to this Eucharist; whether they are big or small, doesn’t matter; God will only weigh the love with which they have been carried.
And Patrick’s asceticism was not an eccentric oddity in the Irish Church of the first few centuries.
Here are some words of a hymn attributed to St. Columcille:
Alone with none but you, O God I journey on my way
What need I fear if you are near, O King of night and day
More safe am I within your hand
Than if a Host did round me stand.
Compare that to the words of our Psalm:
The Lord is my light and my salvation:
Whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life;
Of whom shall I be afraid?
And here are a typical few lines of a poem by an Irish monk of the sixth century translated from the Irish (so it’s a bit clumsy):
Cells that freeze,
The thin pale monks upon their knees,
Bodies worn with rites austere,
The falling tear – Heaven’s King loves these.
Those old Irish Christians did indeed love the natural world but they did not derive their spirituality (their relationship to God) from it. It was the other way round; nature was transformed by the attitude they brought to it.
For the most part we take our idea of Celtic spirituality not from early Irish Christianity, but from the grandson of an Irish Anglican parson who was by turns a theosophist and a pagan, WB Yeats.
For Yeats human life had a falling grace of weariness which drew the whole world closer to a dream than to reality. That was never the way Patrick and those monks in their beehive cells saw the world.
Yeats probably remains our greatest poet and because anything he wrote is so well made, and is the rhythmic creation of beauty, it is easy to assume that his poetry is natural; that he wrote verse the way a bird sings.
But, again, just the opposite is true. He is also our most intellectual of poets and anything that passed through that unique mind and remarkable temperament was bound to take on a strange shape as it emerged into the (inevitable) twilight.
Anyway, we had better move away from our best known poet and back to our best known saint and to his discipleship of Jesus. For all his humility and his “rusticcissimus”, Patrick was in no doubt about the important part he had to play in God’s plan for the salvation of the world.
He was convinced that he was the apostle who had been sent to the ends of the world at the end of the Age. In that sense he shared the apocalyptic vision which seems to have been common to Jesus and to Paul.
Ireland was the most extreme region of Europe, beyond even the reach of the Roman Empire, and in the Confession Patrick describes his vocation as bringing the Gospel to this remote place and in doing so completing God’s work on earth. So there is an urgency about him as there is about anyone who has that sort of messianic consciousness.
Perhaps the one thing that distinguishes the Church of the New Testament and the early Church in general from the Church of our day (and almost every other day) is this sense of the nearness of the end time and the return of the Lord. They expected it to happen, they wanted it to happen and they prayed for it to happen.
For all sorts of reasons, good and not so good, we find it impossible to share in those expectations. We are rather tied into the world as it exists in our day.
Indeed it is largely for that reason that the Church introduced and developed the season of Lent, as a time to take time to examine our desires – what it is we want most – and to see if our desires line up in any way with what God desires.
The Christian life is a great drama of desire – a great unfolding, even a great battle of whose will shall be done. We do not need to expect that the end of the aeon will come the Friday after next to know whether our “God is our belly” or whether our citizenship – our belonging – is in heaven.
However, a bit of self–examination might help. And that will require some self–suspicion and a little humility, and the Spirit of the living God, and much courage. It will be rather like those brave people who cross rivers and seas and mountains all over the world to live in a new country.
They may not know the language or the customs very well but there is something very deep inside them that tells them they were made for freedom so they risk much to go on their pilgrimage.
Patrick of course went one stage further. He did not come to Ireland on the second occasion to be free. He was already a freeborn Roman citizen of the Empire and more importantly he came as a servant of Jesus Christ, “whose service is perfect freedom”.
Instead he came to proclaim the Gospel so that the Irish people could be free.
Perhaps we too need a bit more of the spirit of Patrick and of the refugee and the sojourner; to travel a bit lighter and perhaps even a bit slower; and to be prepared to learn a new language.
And perhaps that language will condition our thoughts to see through that mist of tears (which is the true gift of the Celtic twilight) and to catch a glimpse of the Son of Man, the foregone conclusion of all history, drawing us towards himself, even as he comes to meet us and is placed into our hands at this Eucharist, as we say, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”.