Shouting cheerfully, green-clad revelers outside a bar jostle into a line that stretches round the block. They will begin celebrations here at 8 a.m., drinking and dancing until they pour out to stand at the riverside’s iron railings to watch as 40 pounds of dye snakes through the Chicago River until it is entirely, shockingly green.
Who Was St. Patrick? In Anglican and other liturgical churches, Christians will remember St. Patrick as the expat evangelist to Ireland.
Chicago’s St. Patrick’s Day is a strange amalgamation of the holy, as we honor Patrick’s loving evangelism to his former enemies, and the hedonist, as we pursue our national obsession with excess.
The glad joy of the day will turn darker as the party continues long past midnight. Drunk-driving accidents will double. Muggings and beatings will escalate throughout the city. The later you’re out this holiday, the worse the sexual ethic becomes.
It is an odd way to celebrate a monk. Part depraved, part divine.
Such is the Christian life anywhere. Believers have always sought to live well in our particular context — with mixed success. Sometimes we carve out a holy, humble resistance to the cruelties, idolatries, and sins of our specific time and place. Other times, we compromise.
It can be hard to tell which is which. Understanding the lives of exiles, from the fifth-century missionary to the 19th-century Irish to today’s newest arrivals, can help. There’s no better moment in the liturgical calendar for this than St. Patrick’s Day.
Saint Patrick’s Story: The Foreigner Meets the Father
In helpless rage, the priest Patrick shouted and pleaded with his countrymen as they wreaked havoc. Marauding Britons from across the Irish sea, led by one Coroticus in 458 A.D., cut down his newly baptized converts, their white robes still wet with holy water. Coroticus killed some. Others he dragged to boats and forced into slave labor in Roman Britannica.
For the priest, it was sickeningly familiar. He remembered all too well when, as a teenager, his family estate was set upon by Irish raiders. They killed the servants, ripped Patrick from his home along with thousands of others, and carried them into slavery and captivity in neighboring Ireland.
Yet for all the horror and injustice of Patrick’s first stint in Ireland, it’s where he met the Lord. Though Patrick had grown up in a Christian family (St. Patrick was born, as far as most historians believe, around 385-390 A.D. during the end of Roman rule in Britain), it was not until the cold nights he spent herding sheep on an Irish hillside that Patrick truly drew near to God.
“It was among foreigners that it was seen how little I was,” Patrick writes in his Confessions. “After I arrived in Ireland, I tended sheep every day, and I prayed frequently during the day. More and more the love of God increased, and my sense of awe before God. … I realize now, the spirit was burning in me.”
That same Spirit directed Patrick not only to, by some miracle, escape Ireland, but to return a few years later as a missionary to the Celts. It is for this reason that Saint Patrick is known as the primary Patron Saint of Ireland and often credited with bringing Christianity to Ireland, converting druids and pagans.
It is not surprising that Patrick met God far from home. God is noticeably near to the lonely. The Bible is full of examples of immigrants and expats caught up in shifting regime changes, like David, Joseph, Daniel, and Esther, and outsiders brought into the fold, like Ruth, Rahab, the Magi, Samaritans, and the Ethiopian eunuch.
In the Old Testament, God commands his people to take care of outcasts. “When a foreigner resides with you in your land, you must not oppress him. You must treat the foreigner living among you as native-born and love him as yourself, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God.” (Lev 19:33–34).
Paul picks up this thread in the New Testament, refusing to allow the early church to segregate into comfortable ethnic or socioeconomic groups. “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28).
From Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden to Jesus’ family flight from bloody governmental persecution, it’s astonishing how many stories of displacement have shaped us spiritually.
If God makes a habit of drawing close to the homesick, we have much to learn from those far from home, both throughout history, and in our backyards.
