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The New England Church PulpitNew England Congregational Church UCC |
Green Martyrs: How the Irish Saved the World |
Lent 3 |
Though he really didn’t believe in God, his years in the lonely hillsides of Ireland brought him to his knees in prayer many times daily in order to survive. These years, though lonely and very difficult, proved to be spiritually fruitful years, and the unbelieving boy became a man of vision and faith.
One night the lad had a dream that a ship would carry him away from the island, back to his native Briton. Though his post was far inland, the young man of 22 years of age started walking until he came to the shore where a ship was leaving for his country. Having no money, he persuaded the sailors to let him on board, and eventually came back home.
The savage land that was his slave-home was Ireland, and the lad himself was, of course, Patrick. In the years that followed his return, Patrick became more convinced each day that he should return to Ireland with a word of peace. He studied for the priesthood, and at age forty-seven, he returned to Ireland and eventually became her patron saint.
When Patrick returned to Ireland, he introduced a Christian faith that was integrated into the Irish culture, savage as it was. He did not require them to abandon their pagan druid culture except where it was damaging the society. Human sacrifice was finally overcome, and the fear of the gods was changed when Patrick showed them the love of a god who sought their good, not required their sacrifice. The pagan ceremonial rituals that celebrated the seasons of the year continued and the Christian perspective on creation gave a new meaning to the abundance of lush green vegetation and rocks that littered the field. These were signs of God’s presence in ways the Irish had not thought of before.
According to Thomas Cahill, Ireland is unique in religious history, being the only land into which Christianity was introduced without bloodshed. The irony escapes us until we learn that the Irish were a fighting lot in pre-Christian times, and little changed in that regard even with Patrick’s introduction of Christianity. Stories are told of invaders being frightened off by the Irish who attacked them naked, blowing loud horns and shrieking, and distorting their faces to look like demons in order to scare the enemy. A glorious death by violence presented an exciting finale to this earthly life, and having learned to read the grisly stories called ‘martyrologies’ which Patrick and his successors taught them, they found it unacceptable that they hadn’t had to fight for the cause. Given their warring heritage, they needed to find another way of being martyrs for the sake of their honor (How The Irish Saved Civilization).
So they called themselves ‘Green Martyrs,’ a reference to the lush green (forty shades, they say) of the countryside. They were different from the ‘Red Martyrs’ who had suffered bloodshed. Green Martyrs were those who, leaving behind the comforts and pleasures of ordinary human society, retreated to the woods, or a mountaintop, or a lonely island–to the green no-man’s-lands outside tribal jurisdictions–there to study the scriptures and commune with God. Hermits they tried to be, but by nature the Irish were a social culture, and they found the hermit lifestyle difficult to sustain for any length of time. Where monks were in hermitage, people gathered around them to study and learn. Monasteries were formed when, following biblical numerology, hermits took on twelve disciples to form communities. In these communities, as time went on, the task of copying scriptures and other important manuscripts became the craft for which they are most remembered.
Natural poets, these monks also penned their own rich visions of life with God as it integrated in their native Irish culture. At the tail end of a convoluted Latin translation of a Pauline letter, or in the margins of an impenetrable Greek commentary on scripture, they would amuse themselves and stave off sleep with scribblings of traditional Irish tales. In the margins of manuscripts were often found short poems from these cloistered hermits. For example, a 9th century text finds in the margins these words:
All are keen
To know who’ll sleep with blond Aideen.
All Aideen herself will own
Is that she will not sleep alone.
There is another comparing the daily routine of a monk’s cat to his own: each has his own work to do, the cat hunts for mice and the monk hunts to comprehend an idea.
Since Ireland had no cities at this time, the monasteries became the first population centers, hubs of learning and art. They were eager to receive anyone who wished to come into their community to learn and explore, and so enthused were they with books, they brought into their libraries anything they could lay their hands on. They were resolved to shut out nothing. They were not concerned about orthodoxy or correct belief. They would read and copy old Greek and Latin pagan literature along with the Gospels and sermons and commentaries from the church fathers. The Irish thought language a game–too much fun to be deprived of any part of it. The Irish language, according to some, was the first vernacular or common language of the people, to be put into written form.
It is easy to see the stage being set for the wealth of literary giants that Ireland would nurture, from Nobel Prize winners William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, and Seamus Heaney, to James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and the infamous Oscar Fingall O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. And not only these, for it is the Irish, according to Cahill, who preserved and copied the great literature of Europe, volumes that would have been lost after Rome fell and the continent was raided by barbarians who destroyed libraries and monasteries. So much of what Ireland has given the world started when a teenage boy was taken into slavery 1600 years ago.
Perhaps the point of learning in all of this is that just as Rome fell, so, too, may the First World of today fall. We have come to believe that our advances in technology and science, in medicine and information will save us. But Rome found out otherwise. What saved the world was not correct belief, or reliance on what they could achieve or who was the self-appointed policeman of the world, but rather the humble outpost of a barbaric island where life was simple and priorities were established in spiritual questing. It may not be the stock exchanges of the USA or the banks in Tokyo that will be the future of the world, but some orphanage in the foothills of Peru, or Mother Theresa’s house for the dying in a back street of Calcutta or some other unheralded corner of the world where a large-hearted visionary is committed to loving outcasts in an extraordinary way.
Patrick became a saint because he led the way to a better world for all. He turned his misfortune as a slave into a fortune of giving and caring. In our celebrations with green rivers and green beer, green shamrocks and corned beef dinners, may we learn to emulate the life of this one whose life continues to inspire parties and prayers, and through whose joyous yet selfless style of living, we can all be saved. Amen.
–Gary L. McCann
(Based on the book by Thomas Cahill How The Irish Saved Civilization)
PASTORAL PRAYER
Eternal Spirit of truth, creator of worlds unknown to us and sustainer of those worlds we inhabit, we come apart from our busy lives to worship you. Weave the strands of our frayed lives into a larger tapestry that contains the whole of all that transcends our limited perceptions. Lead us up from our wallowing in self-pity and out from our narrow boundaries that we may escape the obsession with ourselves. May we grasp the paradox that we only find ourselves when we lose ourselves in loving others.
Grant us new vision of the causes we should serve, whether it be justice in a world full of injustice, unselfishness in a time when many suffer, or peace in a day of violence. When we are worrying about the stock market plummeting, fearing that our millions may become thousands or our thousands may become hundreds, millions of people are wondering where their next meal will come from, and millions more are losing their lives because of disease and poor living conditions. Give us a vision for sharing so we may save ourselves as well as others.
As a candle is an ambassador of light even as the sun, and as a stream is water just as any great lake, so we may be representatives of the best of life, regardless of our perceived effectiveness or size. May we give out of our smallness.
We offer our prayers today for those in nursing homes, for those homebound, those recuperating from hospital stays, those facing death. Embody our prayers with cards we would send to encourage those who need uplifting, or by making a phone call to let them know we’re thinking about them, or by offering them a plate of cookies that says we care.
Make our faith contagious. May we keep in our vision all those things that are honorable, and excellent, and beautiful and helpful. May Christ’s joy be ours, and may that joy be made known in all that we do and all that we say and all that we can become. Amen.
| Copyright © 2001 by Gary L.McCann. All rights reserved. |