Let Us Enter Into A Spiritual Manner of Living
On the True Meaning of St. Patrick's Feast
As a teacher, I supervise senior theses, year long research projects that culminate in a public speech with a prolonged defense. This is, of course, an anxiety inducing process for the high school seniors involved. As is common, one of my students recently shared her anxiety with me. As is also common, she didn’t share it outright. Instead, she asked me whether her topic was any good. After a bit of prompting, it became clear that deep down the question wasn’t really about the topic. She was experiencing imposter syndrome—the impression that one is a fraud, that it’s only a matter of time before everyone finds out, and the accompanying anxiety that attends those impressions. Sometimes it can be helpful to have a name put to what one is experiencing, and to know that you’re not the only one (although humans generally—and teenagers especially—relish the thought of being the only one, even as it pains them).
In this case, however, the conversation went deeper than just assigning labels. We talked about how this was clearly an instance of spiritual warfare, which is almost always waged in our thoughts. Very often the source of something like imposter syndrome is an intrusive thought—an idle curiousity about how others consider me or my accomplishments—a thought that is not my own. When we allow those thoughts to take root, they give birth to despair and insecurity. As my student and I talked about these things, it was especially helpful for her to make sense not just of what she was seeing, but of the unseen things that underlie those seen or experienced phenomena.
I keep thinking about this interaction, because it reminds me of how much and how easily we lose sight of the unseen. This student is a wonderful, devout Christian young woman. She knows that there is an unseen realm of spiritual warfare, but when I suggested to her that her experience was tied to that reality, she had never even considered it. Others, of course, would look at me like I’m crazy.
This is no knock on the student, of course. It’s always been a challenge for Christians to remember the unseen. This is why St. Paul had to remind the Ephesian church that “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6:12)
On the other hand, this is getting harder to remember all the time. The root of it is the comfort granted us by centuries of industrialism in a country that sold out hard for it. Each phase of industrialism (we’re in the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” now by popular reckoning, although there’s truly just one revolution that keeps us spiraling forward without end) pushes the limits of what comforts the average person can afford, comforts they never could have dreamed of attaining before.
There’s a lot of good in this, of course. I’m all for penicillin, speedy travel, amplified music (maybe my favorite result), and many more. But there’s a lot of bad mixed in, as is banal to point out. We have penicillin, but we’ve got worries about bio terrorism and nuclear warfare to contend with. We have speedy travel and about 1.35 million people die every year in auto accidents. We have amplified music, but now most of it will be made by AI.
While there’s a lot that has been said about these things, and more that could be said, the bad effect I’m interested in dwelling on here is the way that our view of the world has become so focused on the seen in the 200 or so years that industrialism has been unfolding. Essentially, the more we allow the patterns of our lives to be dictated by the conveniences that technology affords, the more we flatten our experience of the world and consider only what’s right in front of us. It’s a process we’ve seen playing out for hundreds of years, but it seems to be speeding up as we fully immerse ourselves in screens.
There should be some kind of converse principle here. I think there is, and I think we see it in the life of St. Patrick. St. Patrick describes himself in his youth as one who is also unconcerned wtih the unseen realm. Even though he was the son of a deacon, he declares in his autobiography that he “was ignorant of the true God,” having “pulled back from God.”1 Essentially, Patrick seems to have been totally unconcerned with things unseen.
What changed his perception was the captivity and forced exile into the wilderness of Ireland he received at the hands of his captors. Patrick refers to this as both “punishment” and “grace” from God, and describes his time in captivity, saying, “when I had arrived in Ireland and was spending every day looking after flocks, I prayed frequently each day. And more and more, the love of God and the fear of him grew, and faith was increased and spirit was quickened, so that in a day I prayed up to a hundred times, and almost as many in the night.”2 For St. Patrick, this time in captivity served as a catalyst for awakening to the unseen. Shortly thereafter, he began to receive visions and dreams, being guided by the Spirit out of Ireland back to his homeland, and once again back to Ireland as its Enlightener.
The converse of the principle above seems to be that the rejecting temporal comforts allows us to see and secure eternal goods. Importantly, this isn’t some kind of magical spell for making God do what we want. The truth is that those have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ: they already have access to all the eternal goods they could want. The problem is that we often get in our own way. C.S. Lewis addresses this problem in his essay, “A Slip of the Tongue.” Recalling a moment when in his prayers he had meant “to pray that I might so pass through things temporal that I finally lost not the things eternal; I found I had prayed so to pass through things eternal that I finally lost not the things temporal.”3 Most of us would chuckle such a moment off and think nothing of it. Lewis, characteristically, is incisively self-reflective and realizes he has touched on a buried wish and a bit of self-deception.
What he points out is that while he had never expected actually to “pass through things eternal,” he had hoped to keep his mind off such things so their demands wouldn’t disturb his temporal activities. “The root principle of all these precautions is the same: to guard the things temporal… A good author…asks somewhere, “Have we never risen from our knees in haste for fear God’s will should become too unmistakable if we prayed longer?”4 This is the spiritual equivalent of, “If I can’t see it, then it doesn’t exist,” and it’s related to the principle I outlined above about the conveniences of technology. In particular, the more of those conveniences we’re afforded, the more things temporal we have to grow attached to (and to guard), and so the more on guard we have to be against thinking about the things eternal if we don’t want our comfort disturbed.
St. Patrick’s testimony points to one way that comfort can be disturbed for our own good: God can do it for us. Sometimes God allows hardship in our lives as a tool of divine purgation, as a good father chastises a lazy son to bring him to a better state of character.
But we don’t have to wait for God to impose that on us. The season of Lent is at hand for all Christians now (for the Orthodox it begins the day after St. Patrick’s feast day this year, on March 18th, while most western Christians are full more than halfway through). Great Lent is a time of preparation. By preparing our hearts to celebrate the resurrection (the celebration of which here and now is itself a preparation for eternity), we can travel together past the seen and temporal to the unseen and eternal. The tools are simple: prayer, fasting, and giving. Simple doesn’t mean easy, but let’s not end our prayers “in haste for fear God’s will should become too unmistakable if we prayed longer.”
St. Patrick is famed for having driven the snakes out of Ireland.5 Of course, the first thing you’ll find if you research this is that St. Patrick did not, in fact drive the snakes out of Ireland. But of course he did. As anyone with a semi-literate understanding of biblical imagery knows, a snake is a symbol of Satan, and anyone who reads the life of St. Patrick knows he did battle with the powers and principalities that held sway over Ireland, and by the power of Christ he won.
As we celebrate the feast day of St. Patrick and the season of Great Lent, let us strive to drive the snakes out of our own hearts, and to so pass through things temporal that we might not lose the things eternal.
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“Patrick’s Declaration of the Great Works of God,” in Celtic Spirituality, trans. by Oliver Davies and Thomas O’Loughlin, p. 67.
Ibid, p. 71.
C.S. Lewis. “A Slip of the Tongue,” in The Weight of Glory: And other Addresses, Harper Collins, 1949, pp. 184-85.
Ibid, p. 186.
I wholeheartedly encourage the reader to read his short spiritual autobiography and the life of St. Patrick written by Muirchu to get a deeper sense of his life and works.