St. Patrick’s Day   2006

“Sleep, my child! for the rustling trees
Stirr’d by the breath of summer breeze,
And fairy songs of sweetest note,
Around us gently float.

Sleep! for the weeping flowers have shed
Their fragrant tears upon thy head,
The voice of love hath soothed thy rest,
And thy pillow is a mother’s breast.”

These lines are from Cusheen Loo,
         an Irish song that only sounds like a lullaby.
It was sung by a young wife
         who had been abducted and was held
                 against her will in an ancient fort.
She was held not by force of arms
         but by an enchantment.

So she sang this song supposedly to quiet her baby,
         but its later verses are a coded message for another woman
                 outside the fortress walls –
a message to be delivered to her husband
         asking him to come for her,
                 bringing a steel knife to cut the enchantment.

The evil enchantment of the fort
         was happening in a benevolently enchanted world

         – a world with spirits

         – where flowers wept and the trees rustled
                 because of fairy songs.
St. Patrick lived in an enchanted world too,
         and we cannot begin to understand him without
                 having some sense of its enchantment.

The late child psychologist, Bruno Bettelheim,
         wrote about “the disenchantment of the world”
         as a result of the Protestant Reformation and scientism.
He said we have re-imagined reality as flat, spiritless,
         and subject to technological control.
The modern world has done great good.
It has given us CT scans, wonder drugs, and gene therapy.
But it also leaves us bored, anxious, and sometimes despondent.
Bettelheim used fairy tales to restore life
         to children left forlorn in modernity.

Ancient people believed this material world is at most half of reality.
It exists in relationship to an Otherworld of Spirit.
There are points of connection between the two words.
Sacred places are such points of connection.
The Ancient Irish and Celtic Britons called them “thin places”

         – where the boundary between the two dimensions of reality
                  was permeable.

Shamans could pass into the Spirit world
         as our mediators and return to us as prophets
         carrying messages from the Otherworld.
And spirit beings could also visit us.
Christians called them angels.
Patrick’s angel, whose name was Victorious,
         visited him every Saturday of his life
                  from the time Patrick was 16.

All ancient peoples believed in the Otherworld.
Only in the past two centuries, and even now
         mostly in Western industrialized nations,
         do we reduce reality to the material plane.

Only in the modern West could John Lennon sing,

         “Imagine there’s no heaven.
         It’s easy if you try.”
And only in a disenchanted world
         could it be considered a good thing
         to imagine there is no Otherworld
         of hope, consolation, and redemption.

All Ancient peoples believed in the Otherworld.
But they didn’t all imagine it the same way.
In 297 B.C., a Celtic Army marched through Europe,
         right into Greece and seized the temple at Delphi.
The Celtic Commander, seeing Delphi, was convulsed
         with laughter because the Greeks
         thought their gods wanted sacrifices,
         and because they imagined their gods in human form.

But most modern people believe in a flat material reality.
If we can’t test it scientifically, it must not exist.
If our instruments can’t record it, it must not be real.

Some of us may speculate that there is a single autocrat
         named God hiding behind all this.
The single autocratic God stands back looking critically
         at the world, writing laws and sending accusatory prophets,
         waiting for the day of Judgment.

We need to rediscover the Celtic Christian picture of the Ohterworld.
It isn’t a matter of curiosity. It’s a matter of spiritual necessity.
Our flat, boring picture of reality is an enchantment
         that holds our imaginations in thrall
                   like the young woman in the fort.
We need a more engaging vision, the Celtic Christian vision,
         to cut our evil enchantment like a steel knife,
         and set our heart free again.

The Celtic Christian Otherworld
         is considerably richer, subtler, more interesting
                   than our modern view.
It is a densely populated world with many graces,
         and much beauty to behold.
To begin with God is not the big guy in the sky,
         not an autocrat, not the one in charge.
God is the Trinity.

St. Patrick’s Breastplate is first and foremost Trinitarian

         “I bind unto myself to day the strong name of the Trinity.”
Celtic blessings were Trinitarian,

        “May the everlasting Father Himself take you
        In his own generous clasp . . .
        May Christ keep you in very path.
        May Spirit bathe you in every pass. . .
        May God shield you on every steep,
        May Christ aid you on every path,
        May Spirit fill you on every slope,
        On hill and on plain.”

So God is already a community within the divine nature.
But there is more.
There are angels, a heavenly city of angels,
        waiting to help us in our need.

Each of us, the Celtic Christians, said,
        have our own guardian angel
        and we can talk with that angel,

        “O angel guardian of my right hand . . .
        Steer thou my coracle in the crooked eddies,
        Guide thou my step in gap and in pit,
        Guard thou me in the treacherous turnings,
        And save thou me from the scaith of the wicked,
        Save thou me from the scaith.”

Chief among the angels is Michael,
        whom we can also address,

        “O Michael Militant
        Thou king of the angels
        Shield thy people
        With the power of thy sword . . .”

And then there are the saints
       who constantly aid and intercede for us.
Among the saints, there is a great feminine presence
       in the person of Mary,

       “The shelter of Mary Mother
       Be nigh my hands and feet
       To go to the well
                And bring me safely home,
                And bring me safely home.”

And more prominent in Irish prayer than Mary
       is St. Brigit of Kildare.

       “May Brigit and Mary and Michael
       Shield you on sea and on land,
       Each step and each path that you travel.”

The Celtic Christian Otherworld is a place of beauty
       and of grace,
       and it isn’t just where we go when we die.
The Otherworld, the Kingdom of Heaven,
       is the ocean in which our little world floats,
       and that makes all the difference
                for how we experience the here and now.
It means God’s light is shining through and around every cloud.

George McLeod, leader of the Iona Community in Scotland,
       prayed, “Show to us the glory in the grey.”//
That is the good news that Patrick preached
       to the Irish, that the Otherworld is God’s world
                and this is God’s world.
Above, beneath, and all around our hardships,
       our frustrations, our sorrows and our regrets,
       there is grace,
                there is mercy,
       there is a kindness to preserve and protect us.
We are here today to rejoice in the kindness,
       trust the mercy, and rest in the grace.

                                                       Amen.