Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day -- the feast of the patron saint of Ireland, and he wasn't Irish at all! Many tales about him are just legends -- that is, we have no idea whether there's any factual basis for them at all, but we do know a few things for sure because when he was an old man he wrote down some facts about his life. Patrick was born in or around the year 389, more than sixteen centuries ago. He was probably born in Wales -- which gives us a chance to honour the Welsh, too, whose day was on March 1, St. David’s Day, not remembered as often as this one. I have strong Welsh connections, but I didn’t even remember that it was St. David’s Day until I heard some Welsh music on CBC radio that afternoon. But almost everyone remembers St. Patrick’s Day. Patrick was raised as a Christian, at a time when that was by no means the majority religion (those were the very early days of Christianity in Britain), so his family was a part of a rather unusual minority group. It was a time of frequent raids by the Vikings, and when he was a boy Patrick was captured as a slave and taken to Ireland, where he was sold to a chieftain and set to work herding sheep and pigs.

The religion of Patrick's new environment in Ireland was even more thoroughly nature-oriented than Wales. The places of worship were groves of oak trees, where gods and goddesses were equally honoured and where possibly human sacrifices took place. The priests were Druids, who not only led the worship but were also the judges and teachers of the people, and foretellers of the future -- powerful people. Patrick clung to his Christian faith. When he wrote in later life about his years as a lonely shepherd, he said,

Constantly I used to pray in the daytime. ……… in a single day I said as many as a hundred prayers, and at night nearly as many, and I used to stay out in the woods and on the mountain to pray. Before the dawn I used to wake up to pray in snow and frost and rain ...

Slightly weird, eh?

Six years passed, then one night in a dream Patrick heard a voice saying "Thy ship is ready", which he took as a sign that it was time to run away. Who knows how long he’d been harbouring thoughts of escape and a more exciting life? Who knows how much his own longings accounted for the dream? At any rate, he headed for the sea, which was some distance away, and when he reached the coast, there was a ship ready to sail and he managed to be taken on as a member of the crew. Isn’t it amazing how these things always work out so conveniently? I suppose, though, that “a ship ready to sail” could mean within a few weeks, not necessarily that very day. And I suppose, “he managed to be taken on as a member of the crew” could mean he had to talk his way into it -- perhaps he was picking up the blarney which the Irish are famous for. In any case, to Patrick it seemed as if the words in his dream were perfectly fulfilled.

The ship was loaded with Irish wolfhounds to sell for (what else?) hunting wolves. After three days sailing, it landed, probably in what's now called France. Patrick and the other sailors headed inland with the dogs to look for buyers. They were rather dismayed to find that the country had been attacked by invaders and everyone had run away. The whole area was a wasteland and they couldn’t find any customers. (I guess they hadn’t done their market research very well ahead of time.) They wandered for a month over the deserted countryside; their food ran out and they were exhausted and starving. One day, when Patrick was praying for food, a herd of wild pigs came out of the woods: the starving men killed them and feasted for two days. Patrick, as you might guess, was quite certain that God had sent the pigs, and who’s to contradict him? Not me!

Eventually, Patrick and his companions arrived at something that could be called a town and from there on Patrick went his way alone. He discovered a monastery on an island (don’t know which) where all the people were Christians, and here he became a monk, but later on he was able to make his way back to Britain and his family of origin. (I’m not sure what prompted him to do that; maybe he was just suffering from a very human homesickness.) His relatives, naturally, wanted him to stay put after all those adventures, but once again he had a dream. This time, he heard voices from Ireland crying out, "We entreat you to come back to us!" You might think that this was a fairly clear message, even more than the earlier one about his ship being ready, but Patrick felt he needed more preparation to bring Christianity to the Irish people. It sounds to me as if he was becoming a little more cautious about following his dreams!

In any case, he spent several more years in monastic life, and worked his way up to a bishopric. It was as a bishop that he was eventually sent to Ireland by the Pope, with some assistant missionaries to accompany him. This was very different from the first time he went there, as a boy, and as a captured slave! There were already some Christians in Ireland by now, but only in scattered spots. Patrick travelled in the non-Christian areas and talked to the local chieftains and kings, knowing that once he had persuaded them to be baptized their people would easily follow. We all like to do what our bosses like most of the time, don’t we? Political correctness is not a new invention, and Christianity, like other religions, has probably spread through the power of conformity as much as anything else, although a little charisma of the kind Patrick apparently had certainly doesn’t hurt.

You probably all know the story of how Patrick used the shamrock to illustrate the doctrine of the Trinity. The shamrock is one leaf in three segments; just so, said Patrick, the divinity is one God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Not a perfect metaphor, perhaps, but obviously a memorable one. Those little object lessons are hard to beat, aren’t they? But the Druids weren’t going to give up their perfectly satisfactory religion without a fight, and they were quite hostile to Patrick. He wrote later, "Daily, I expect either a violent death or to be robbed and reduced to slavery or some such calamity." He knew what slavery was like; he’d been rich and he’d been poor, and he liked rich better. But his fear didn't stop him from doing what he felt called to do, and before long he was famous throughout Ireland as "Old Shaved Head", which I think was probably more a term of affection than criticism.

Each time a chieftain became a Christian, Patrick would ask him for land on which to build a church. He would mark off the church foundations on the ground with the crooked staff he always carried, and then leave some of his monks behind to build it as he moved on to a new area. Hmmm ........ maybe we could take some pointers from Patrick -- perhaps we could work specially hard on selling Unitarianism to one or two people who’re in a position to give us what we need to run a financially secure operation -- what do you think? My spouse has sometimes tried to sell me on that idea as a counterbalance to my natural tendency which seems to be to attract poorer and marginal kinds of people to the congregation, but it would really go against the grain for me -- and I think he’s mainly teasing, anyway. But if that kind of promotion comes more naturally to you, go ahead with my blessing!

Another reason for Patrick’s success as a missionary, and probably more important than the conformity factor or his personal charisma, was that he never tried to stamp out all the old religious customs. He knew that would have made it more difficult to convert people, and maybe he also recognized that the old ways were meeting some important needs. Instead of trying to expunge the old Druidic rituals, he found ways to combine some of them with Christian customs. For instance, the people were used to honouring the sun god at the Spring Equinox by building special, sacred fires. Patrick turned this into a Christian ritual by having the people build huge bonfires outside the churches on Easter Eve; this was a custom which spread all through Europe and still happens in some places today. The theological word for this kind of thing is “syncretization,” and as far as I’ve ever been able to see it always works better than trying to start from scratch with an entirely new idea. Start where people are ……

Patrick worked for thirty years in Ireland. He must have been quite a likeable fellow, and as Christianity spread, there was, understandably, much less hostility towards him. People got used to him and his weird ideas as he kept on teaching them. When he died, it’s legendary that all Ireland mourned -- which is amazing when you think of how long it would have taken for people to find out about his death in the days where the fastest kind of travel was by horse. There's a tale that two tribes argued over where he should be buried, each making claim to him, and that they eventually settled the dispute by placing his coffin on a cart pulled by two wild oxen: the place where they stopped became his burial place. I don’t know where that grave is supposed to be, but I feel fairly sure that it’s just a guess -- even more likely, there are several claims to be the true location, and I bet someone’s making money from each one of them!

Other legends grew up around Patrick -- that he'd caused the earth to open up and swallow the Druids -- well, I guess he wasn’t a totally tolerant man, -- that he'd made the blind to see and the deaf to hear (like Jesus), and -- best known of all -- that he'd driven the snakes out of Ireland. But most of us have heard that there never were any snakes in Ireland; the only reptiles that have ever lived there are lizards. Perhaps the legend arose because snakes were a symbol of evil, and people believed Patrick's power and goodness were strong enough to get rid of evil, which may have been a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. It may also have developed simply as an explanation for the absence of snakes in Ireland. Perhaps it had both those origins, although there aren’t any elephants in Ireland either, and I don’t know of anyone claiming that Patrick was responsible for that! I wonder if “snakes” was just one of those uncomplimentary words the Christians used about the Druids and other heathen, maybe -- and he did more or less drive them out, from the surface of Irish life, anyway.

Just one more point about Patrick which is more fact than legend. Before he came to Ireland there was no written language. The religious and cultural tradition was oral and musical -- stories accompanied by the harp. Poets and musicians were highly honoured, but when the people became Christian they had to have the Bible and other sacred books, and prestigious status was gradually transferred to the monks who copied the books by hand, and often decorated the pages with the wonderful art we call illumination. Did Ireland, and the world, gain or lose more by this change, I wonder? It's certainly possible that much of the learning that had been passed down orally from the ancient past might have been lost forever if it hadn't been for the work of the monks. On the other hand, the loss of the oral tradition would be tragic if it were complete -- but I don’t really believe that: too many good stories still come from the Irish!

Celtic folklore, from both pre- and post-Christian times, is wonderfully rich in myths and legends. There are some universal themes which connect with those of other parts of the world and seem to say something about human nature and the things about which we need to tell stories. One of these themes is that of the little people -- they crop up in stories from all over the world (think of Tom Thumb, for example) and in Ireland they take the shape of leprechauns. In Irish legend, a leprechaun was a fairylike being ranging in size from a few inches tall to the height of a small child. The origin of the word leprechaun is rather obscure -- perhaps it comes from the English lubberkin, an Elizabethan name for a fairy, or from the Old Irish lu-chorpan, meaning "little body".

However they got their name, leprechauns were solitary creatures, who spent their time making shoes. (I wonder why shoemakers figure so much in European mythology generally? I also wonder if there were any female leprechauns, which we never seem to hear about.) The little folk were usually pictured wearing cobbler's aprons and carrying hammers; in fact, it was usually the sound of their hammering that gave away their whereabouts. And of course greedy human folk were constantly on the lookout for them. It wasn't their shoes people were after, naturally; it was their gold. Each leprechaun possessed a carefully hidden pot of gold, and if a person could capture a leprechaun, the little person could be forced to tell where he kept his treasure, but the capturer had to be even craftier than the leprechaun. The little man would try all kinds of tricks to distract his captor, such as telling him that his bees were swarming and going away off, or his cows were getting into the oats. If the gullible human took his eyes off the leprechaun for a second, the little man would vanish, along with any clues to where his gold was.

The leprechaun has become one of the popular symbols of Irish culture, but very similar little people figure in the folklore of other countries. They come in many forms; one is the brownie, which belongs to the British Isles generally. The brownie’s a small fairy in a brown cloak and hood which attaches itself to a household and becomes a sort of guardian spirit. Although brownies occasionally play tricks on the families they've adopted, they're generally kind and hard-working. They're not often seen, but they've been heard cleaning and performing other domestic chores while the family sleeps -- although I suppose someone would have to be awake in order to hear them! When little girls take their Brownie oath, they're promising to imitate these helpful small household spirits.

Leprechauns and brownies may make us think of the fairy world in general. We use the word "fairyland" when we’re speaking of any very beautiful or charming place that seems removed from the plain old world of everyday reality. But although many of the fairy folk have always been thought of as entirely friendly, others played tricks or brought harm to people if they weren't properly treated. In contrast to the shy leprechauns and the helpful brownies, another group of Celtic sprites, the pixies, have a more mischievous streak. They’ve been believed to pinch maidservants, blow out candles, tap on walls and kiss girls in the dark -- you can see that again they tend to be visualized as male! It was said that they loved to dance by moonlight to the music of crickets and frogs. Most of all, they delighted in leading travellers astray. We've kept the words "pixie-led" or "pixillated" to denote someone who acts lost or bewildered.

It seems that fairy people generally love to sing and dance in the moonlight, often holding hands and making a ring. The night-time, under the light of the moon and stars, seems the natural environment for spirits which lurk in our minds at some level, although not in our normal waking consciousness. Although some fairies lived in human households, there was also a kingdom of the fairies, located in some vague, unspecified realm of existence, but not too far away from the everyday world. A queen and king ruled over the fairies, and in their country there was no sickness, old age, or death. You can see that there's a kind of equivalence to the Christian heaven, and if you know anything about Plato's world of Ideals, you may be reminded of that, too.

Now, if I were you I'd be wondering at this point how it was all going to be brought together and related to our Unitarian principles. But I think it's all too easy to spoil stories by analyzing them to death and making them fit some idea. All I'd like to say about the legends around St. Patrick's Day, and legends generally, is that I believe they speak to some longings and convictions in the human heart which are expressed in these stories, and in poetry and in music, much more than in philosophy or theology -- or science, either. In the story of St. Patrick, it's almost impossible to sort out the facts from the fantasies -- and what does it matter? What matters, to my mind, is the fantasy of the man who remains true to his convictions despite hardships, whose power then is so great that he drives away all evil.

What matters most is not the rights and wrongs of his religion against that of the Druids, but the need we have to honour our human heroes.

What matters is not whether the shamrock is a good or poor illustration of an abstract doctrine like the Trinity, let alone whether that doctrine itself has any value, but the fact that all around us, in the common stuff of life, is the illustration and evidence of truth.

What matters is not whether there are living breathing leprechauns but that our imaginations can open to a world beyond the mundane, a world of helpful and mischievous spirits, a world of saints and sinners, a world of myths and legends and courage and truth.

May we always be enriched by our encounters with such a world. So may it be.