THOUGHTS

March 17, 2020

St. Patrick's Day

He was a youth of 16 when he was snatched from his English sod and taken as a slave to pagan Ireland in the 5th Century.   Yes, Romans had taken over much of England from the Druids, yet some say a pocket of Christianity was already there as St. Augustine noted when he came to Christianize its shores. It is said that it was Joseph of Arimathea, the one who gave his tomb to lay Jesus in, who fled to Cornwall where he had copper mines and established Christianity.  It is believed and even recorded that Mary the mother of Jesus came with him.  While there his daughter married a Druid king who converted to Christianity.  In the next generation, her daughter, however, married a Druid and converted to his pagan practices.  The Romans allowed her husband to rule his kingdom until his death; yet she mounted a battle to keep his power after he died.  She lost to the overwhelming strength of the Romans.  There are statues in the south of England of this warrior queen and her daughters.  

All this to say that here lay the early fertile soil of Christianity in which  St. Patrick was planted.  Yet, he rejected it to his later sorrow and repentance.  As he watched over his master's flocks, he grew in faith.  When a chance to escape came, he begged passage on a ship and was taken home.  However, a few years later after he had sought the priesthood, he heard a call to return to the pagan green shores of Ireland to present the Gospel.  It was there he used the shamrock to teach about the Trinity.  Dear English friends who have traveled there in the north of Ireland found it still to have perhaps the most fervent people of faith in the world.  

"Truly to love ourselves we must love God;

To love God we must all his creatures love;

To love his creatures, both ourselves and Him."

Festus

An excerpt from "The Way of Holiness," by Colonel Brengle

"3.  Again, Jesus said, in speaking of God's kindness and love for unjust and evil people, 'Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.'

Again, He says, 'A new commandment I give you, that ye love one another.'  How?  According to what standard?  'As I have loved you, that ye also love one another.'  We are, then, to be like Jesus in love to God and to all men, even to our enemies, but especially to our brothers and sisters in the Lord."

We are in an unprecedented time with a world-wide pandemic.  It has shrunk the world with a side-effect of commonality even as we practice social distancing.   People everywhere are offering selfless service, whether in the hospital hot spots, or grocery shopping for others who are quarantined.  Sometimes it is singing together from apartment balconies like in Italy.  My daughter-in-law has joked that they would open their windows and doors so I can hear them all sing from my grannie pod across the pool if I would open my windows and doors as well where I am in "isolation."  She even jested that it could go viral, since her young son has had a virus.  I offered up the field beside me as a gigantic parking lot where people can come, park 6 feet apart, roll down their car windows and sing along.  Yes, we have time for imagination now, perhaps too much time. 

But seriously, "Greater love has no one than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13)  We are seeing this exemplified around the world, not just for friends, but for strangers.