Failte romhat ("Welcome" in Irish)

Thank God for His saints.  We get to celebrate their righteousness, and enjoy the legends and myths that spring up like flowers in their footsteps.

Look first at the saint himself.  Captured and enslaved by the Irish when he was a youth, Patrick escaped, became a Christian leader, and came back to Ireland as a missionary. What love for his slave-masters!  He taught them of the love of God, baptized his converts, and established churches, schools, and colleges.  Using the three-leafed shamrock, he taught them about the blessed Trinity--the three-in-one.  Legend has it that he drove all the snakes from Ireland by beating his drum, and that is why to this day there are no snakes in the Emerald Isle.  The truth is that after the Germanic invasions of the old Roman empire, missionaries from Ireland had much to do with converting the savages to Christianity, so Patrick is important to the history of Christendom.  It is said that St. Patrick died on March 17, 493, so that date is celebrated as his birthday into eternity.

If you would like to read a brief history of St Patrick in his own words (called his "Confessio") click here.   It is really a beautiful confession of faith.

Since St. Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland, all the delightful stories of the Irish cluster around his day.  The leprechaun, an Irish fairy, is a favorite myth.  His name comes from lu-chorpan, meaning 'little body,' because he stands only two feet tall.  His name was incorrectly thought to refer to a shoe, so that is how he came to be known as a cobbler.  The story is that you can find a leprechaun by listening for the sound of his little cobbler's hammer.  If you find one, he will ransom himself by offering you a crock of gold.  But if you take your eyes off of him for a second, he will be gone.  One Irishman who caught one forced him to show him the bush under which his crock of gold was buried.  The man had no spade to dig it up, so he tied a red garter to the bush, released the leprechaun, and went home for the spade.  When he returned, every bush in the field had a red garter on it.

My mother, who claimed to be mostly Irish (but she was always a romantic), told me that I should never believe that there were no such things as leprechauns unless a leprechaun himself told me that there weren't.  I have followed her teachings.  When I was a wee lad, she often sang me to sleep with this song.

So, celebrate the joy of St. Patrick's Day. Kick up your heels and dance an Irish jig!

St. Patrick's Day is special to me, because my birthday is less than a week away from it (on March 11), because I'm about a third Irish, and because I love leprechauns.

A truly delightful way to celebrate St. Patrick's Day is to watch Walt Disney's Darby O'Gill and the Little People. No other movie has ever captured the magic of the leprechauns and other Irish legends so well.  (I still have a mask of King Brian from my childhood.)

I leave you with that blessing, and also with this old Irish blessing:

And here are a few more besides:

Now that you're properly blessed, I'll be leaving you.

If you want to have some more fun on the web with St Patrick's Day, visit Marvelicious Happy St. Patrick's Day: good stuff and good links

Click on this strange shamrock if you want to go back to my holiday page.