The Prayer of Saint Patrick

Week of Monday, March 18, 2002

Sunday March 17 commemorated Saint Patrick's Day, but for most Protestants the extent of honoring this saint probably went no further than gawking at the Chicago River dyed green each year at this time. Protestant individualism, which places man before God with no mediator between them except the Bible, makes it hard if not impossible or even impermissible to honor the saints, and that's a pity. Personally, the more company I keep on this journey with Jesus the better and safer I feel, and I am confident that I need all the help I can get from saints dead or alive. “To hell with the future,” runs an Irish joke, “we live in the past.” Protestants could enrich their faith if they would learn to move beyond their individualism and live in the past a little more, and one way to do that is to learn from the saints that have gone before us.

Saints are not mediators for us. That unique role belongs to Jesus, “the one mediator between God and man” (1 Timothy 2:5). Thus, we honor the saints but we do not worship them. Rather, the saints compose that “great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1) that urge us on in the faith. They comprise the invisible church in heaven as opposed to the visible church here on earth, and are included in the “communion of the saints” that Christians say they believe in when they recite the Apostles' Creed each week. I like how Sergei Bulgakov refers to them: they are our friends, and it is not beyond my imagination to hope and think that they do, in fact, pray for me and somehow help to protect me.¹ Lord knows, I need it.

One way to think about saints is to understand them as Christians who have distinguished themselves in holiness or, perhaps, their extraordinary level of self-sacrifice. Here we think of a “saint” in the singular sense of the word, like Saint Patrick. Jesus says the twelve apostles will sit with him in heaven at the renewal of all things (Matthew 19:28). Presumably they are with Him now even as I write, and I want to think that they care for me. Revelation 6:9 mentions all the saints who have been martyred for their faith. If we skip to the present it is not difficult to add some modern day believers who can and must be thought of as saints in this singular sense, people like Mother Teresa, who shone like bright stars in the dark world (Philippians 2:15).

But in the New Testament the word “saints” is almost always used in the plural, in a down-n-dirty sense, if you will. It is not a category to describe the great ethical achievement or extraordinary personal sacrifice of a very few people. If it was, then most of us would be left out. I know I would be. Rather, all believers are saints (1 Corinthians 1:2) and “called to be saints” (Romans 1:7), which means nothing more or less than to be set apart to God. Sainthood, by God's grace, is the expected trajectory of every believer. This is a radical and liberating notion, for when you think about it and extend the category to all believers you realize that

it is not just the saints of the church that we should remember in our prayers, but all the foolish ones and wise ones, the shy ones and overbearing ones, the broken ones and whole ones, the despots and tosspots and crackpots of our lives who, one way or another, have been our particular fathers and mothers and saints, and whom we loved without knowing we loved them and by whom we were helped to whatever little we may have, or ever hope to have, of some kind of seedy sainthood of our own.²

Recovering reliable historical information about many of the saints is difficult if not impossible, and Saint Patrick (c. 390–461) is no exception. Born in Scotland, Patrick was imprisoned and taken to Ireland when he was about sixteen years old. He retuned to Scotland, only to have a dream in which the people of Ireland called out to him, “we beg you, holy youth, to come and walk among us once again.” He did return, and although the details are obscure and the legends are large, he wandered and ministered in Ireland for over thirty years, converting the nation.

Saint Patrick is also remembered for his moving prayer, the so-called “Saint Patrick's Breastplate.” I offer it to you this week, as one saint to another.