Behind the fanciful legends of the fifth-century British missionary stands a man worthy of embellishment. Our culture has certainly embellished St. Patrick but in a very grotesque, disgusting way. We seemed to have forgotten the real reason for celebration.
We seemed to have forgotten the legacy and impact St. Patrick had in spreading Christianity around Ireland.
We seemed to have forgotten or perhaps do not know the meaning of the shamrock. Patrick used the three-leafed shamrock to explain the Trinity. He used it in his sermons to represent how the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit could all exist as separate elements of the same entity. His followers adopted the custom of wearing a shamrock on his feast day.
During my study abroad experience in Ireland on the eve of St. Patrick's Day I participated in a "monastic" chapel. Hymns were sung, monastic chants were echoed throughout the room, and then a moment of silence and quiet reflection pursued. As I heard St. Patrick's confessions, I realized how faithful St. Patrick was to God. Before this experience, I had never really thought much about the life of St. Patrick, but the spiritual regeneration he introduced to Ireland changed the rest of history.
Some people go to mass, others take their children to parades and many others drink on St. Patrick's Day. After returning from a full day in Dublin, one of the members in my group commented "we smell like sin." Walking the streets in Dublin on St. Patrick's Day, it is nearly impossible to escape the midst of alcohol and smoke that heavily lingers in the air.
For a day celebrating the bringing of Christianity to Ireland, Dublin turns into a place of attention-seeking -a self-destructive mass of people. Beer bottles crash against the walls. Feet stick to the layer of alcoholic filth on the ground. Sirens scream in the background.
A picture of a fun day filled with green clothing turns hopeless as time wears on into the night. I've seen the contrast in St. Patrick's Day. Christianity in Ireland is celebrated with some beautiful traditions and some ugly realities. Yet as the imposter of St. Patrick danced around the parade, I could not help but be thankful for the truth that St. Patrick brought to Ireland and the impact those truths have had in Ireland and the rest of the world ever since.
"If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace." (Now and Then)
"If God speaks anywhere, it is into our personal lives that he speaks.....To try to express in even the most insightful and theologically sophisticated terms the meaning of what God speaks through the events of our lives is as precarious a business as to try to express the meaning of the sound of rain on the roof or the spectacle of the setting sun. But I choose to believe that he speaks nonetheless, and the reason that his words are impossible to capture in human language is of course that they are ultimately always incarnate words . They are words fleshed out in the everydayness no less than in the crises of our own experience."
"Life itself can be thought of as an alphabet by which God graciously makes known his presence and purpose and power among us. Like the Hebrew alphabet, the alphabet of grace has no vowels, and in that sense his words to us are always veiled, subtle, cryptic, so that it is left to us to delve their meaning, to fill in the vowels, for ourselves by means of all the faith and imagination we can muster. God speaks to us in such a way, presumably, not because he chooses to be obscure but because, unlike the dictionary word whose meaning is fixed, the meaning of an incarnate word is the meaning it has for the one it is spoken to, the meaning that becomes clear and effective in our lives only when we ferret it out for ourselves."
"What each of them [events of our lives] might be thought to mean separately is less important than what they all mean together. At the very least they mean this: mean listen. Listen. Your life is happening....A journey, years long, has brought each of you through thick and thin to this moment in time as mine has also brought me. Think back on that journey. Listen back to the sounds and sweet airs of your journey that give delight and hurt not and to those too that give no delight at all and hurt like Hell. Be not affeard. The music of your life is subtle and elusive and like no other -not a song with words but a song without words, a singing, clattering music to gladden the heart or turn the heart to stone, to haunt you perhaps with echoes of a vaster, farther music of which it is part.
The question is not whether the things that happen to you are chance things or God things because, of course, they are both at once. There is no chance thing through which God cannot speak -even the walk from the house to the garage that you have walked ten thousand times before, even the moments when you cannot believe there is a God who speaks at all anywhere. He speaks, I believe, and the words he speaks are incarnate in the flesh and blood of our selves and of our own footsore and sacred journeys. We cannot live our lives constantly looking back, listening back, lest we be turned to pillars of longing and regret, but to live without listening at all is to live deaf to the fullness of the music. Sometimes we avoid listening for the fear of what we may hear, sometimes for fear that we may hear nothing at all but the empty rattle of our own feet on the pavement. But be not affeard, says Caliban, nor is he the only one to say it. "Be not afraid," says another, "for lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.." He says he is with us on our journeys, He says he has been with us since each of our journeys began, Listen for him. Listen to the sweet and bitter airs of your present and your past for the sound of him." (Sacred Journey).
Learning to flow with difficulties can be…well, difficult. While we should not cavalierly brush off the trials and sufferings that affect us deeply, it is important to remember the control we exert over our disposition. It is also extremely important to remain sensitive to the disheartening happenstance of others and to weep with those who are weeping.
I am reading this book, The Boy who Came Back from Heaven, which retells a true account of a six year old boy who briefly visited heaven after a terrible car accident (I know I was skeptical too at first -given the boy’s young age -but it’s worth a read). Anyway, the family went through a lot with the boy’s intense, long hospital stay and the trauma of it all, but the troubles didn’t end there. Hospital bills piled up, of course, and then a tree fell on their house causing massive damage. After hearing this news, the grandfather just laughs in front of his son.
In the words of the grandfather upon hearing the news of the fallen tree:
“my first response was to laugh –not a laugh of callousness, but a laugh of joy at the goodness of God. I truly mean that. For me, the question isn’t, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” but “Why does anything good happen at all?” We certainly don’t deserve it.
I told Kevin [his son], “First, consider that the power went out. What a great blessing. Had it not gone out, Kevin, you would have been in the house with the kids when the tree struck the roof. Second, you badly needed to replace your roof anyway. Now you’ll get a brand-new one, and your insurance is going to pay for it! And third, I have a question, Kevin: Which trees were taken down in this storm? All the weak ones! The strong trees are still standing. You’ve received a natural pruning, making your property safer and healthier, leaving the strong trees for your family to enjoy. By next July, you won’t be able to tell a single tree was taken down.
The hand of God was everywhere to be seen in this situation, but, as I pointed out to Kevin, we have to be willing to see it –to receive it as God’s good in our lives.”
Another wise, mentionable quote by Kevin’s father: “Does our daily focus on the ordinary events of life dampen our awareness of the providential and miraculous events occurring in and around us all the time?” It’s so easy to allow self-pity to imprison us in the walls of our own self-absorption.
I know I am trying to laugh more readily and frequently at life’s everyday problems. Just in these past couple of weeks alone I have had to force myself to just laugh…to laugh when I got my first speeding ticket (even though I felt it was completely unfair given I was unfamiliar with the area and the speed limit changes abruptly and I am the kind of driver who should get speeding tickets for going under the limit for the most part); to laugh when I chipped my tooth on a gummy heart candy (you know how you accidentally grind your incisors when trying to use your tongue to remove some of the gummy from the molars, okay maybe this hasn't happened to anyone else....well this isn’t the first time it happened to me); to laugh at losing my first real job offer which I had my heart set on because I kind of forgot to get back to the company when I said I would because I got sidetracked that day as I was traveling to Oregon for a grad school interview (but, as my now relieved mom pointed out, perhaps God closed that door because of the safety risks involved in me going into Gary, IN, which, if you don’t know Gary, it has some pretty rough neighborhoods).
Now I am trying to laugh at how incredibly anxious I am about this whole grad school process…..getting into a PsyD program is supposedly more difficult than getting into medical school…what if I don’t get in? then what will I do? Begin a master’s program? Where will I go for that? Have I passed up those application deadlines yet? This has been my train of thought for the past couple weeks as I wait nervously. My anxiousness is so normal yet so absurd! It is so laughable! God will provide no matter what happens. He always has and He always will. Some people never even get a basic education and here I am begging God to allow me to get into a doctoral program.
It is kind of funny (and ironic that I find this funny on two different levels) how there are actually laugh therapy groups out there. But it is so important and healthy to laugh at the various absurdities, incongruities, and paradoxes of our lives.
We all know of the health benefits of laughing –reduced levels of serum cortisol, increased oxygenation to the brain, increased immunoglobin A; and laughter allows us to be defenseless and open to new experiences and people in a non-judgmental way.
I like this quote: “If you don’t learn to laugh at trouble, you won’t have anything to laugh at when you grow old.”
Maybe I will forget my marriage and family therapy practice and go into laugh therapy….
But, seriously, who are we to expect anything good to happen to us at all? Who are we to actually assume we deserve so much good and very little bad? We are not deserving of anything at all.
Laugh when something doesn't go your way -laugh at the paradox of how undeserving you are for the object or thing you can't seem to reach that you think you are so deserving of. If there is one thing in life that we do deserve, it is to laugh at ourselves for the fools we are.
