"St. Patrick's Day and the Indigenous" Musings (Bi-Annual Kieran Post!)

[goatoverlord42]

Yes, I exist!  Though these days you're better finding me on facebook.

I'll also be posting a sermon in for friends in a bit.

Some friends over at my Salem church's Pagan and Christian interfaith dialog list really like this, so I thought I would repost it here.  It was my response to the questions of "why should we celebrate St. Patrick, who

Comments

[goatoverlord42]

My basic point was that people dissatisfied with the status quo often embrace a new religion or idea... we shouldn't assume Christianity was always opposed, and much evidence shows that particularly lower classes and slaves, from its earliest days embraced and made it their own in every society from Rome to Ireland to the Deep South. We see ancestral traditions being used in the wake of colonial abuses, such as in Native American communities. Neo-pagan traditions seem to be reacting, frequently to both a present dissatisfaction with a dominant faith that also resonates with the perception of the colonial theft, however historically unclear to us, of cultural traditions by Roman/Christian influence in Europe.

Belated reply... my brain is a little numb, but your point is respected. Of course history always changes, but I don't think the desire to connect with something ancestral or important to your sense of history is a bad thing, if approached with a healthy sense of self-criticism.

In part the desire to get to a historical "core" comes straight out of 19th century theology, as I understand it... all the attempts to get at the "core" of Christianity in the German schools eventually stripped us down to a pretty stale Jesus. Today Biblical Scholars or essentially admitting there probably was NEVER one "original" to the writings of the New Testament, or whatever sources preceeded them. Rather, in the ancient world greater fluidity in oral or textual traditions seem to be something people didn't worry about as much- and perhaps even valued, from what we know of oral traditions today. Even in the NT, you see some pretty sloppy quotations of stuff we know the writers considered THEIR Bible (ie- the Greek Hebrew Septuagint).

I guess I try to hold all these things in tension. I try to learn what I can of my Celtic ancestry, also dealing with the fact what we know of the pre-Christian stuff also includes at least some human sacrifice (however much the Romans may have amplified that in their writings), and other things that just don't speak to me.

For me, the stories of Patrick and other saints, however embellished do show us a glimpse of how the people in the centuries following him viewed the transition from pagan to Christian. The fact the early Irish Saints could lead troops into battle or offer them magical protection like a Druid is interesting. We do have historical evidence of spiritual figures, including women with armies from Roman accounts of Celtic and Germanic peoples. It seems the Irish did express or accept these early Christians on terms very much their own, and this tells us things about their value system.

I do think the general Irishness of St Pats is a little silly... though I wonder how mcuh of that is an immigrant-Irish phenomena. I know hes' big there, but probably not in the same way we do.