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Happy St. Kevin of Glendalough's Day!

A reexamination of St. Patrick's worthiness as the don dada of Irish sainthood.

by A. Reinsch | 2007.03.18

So, I'm obligated to acknowledge the saints as "models and intercessors" and to offer a certain amount of reverence to their holiness and all that. But like any other Catholic, I've got favorites, and St. Patrick has never really been one of them. There are a bunch of rather dull reasons why he's never personally appealed to me. The shamrock doesn't really strike me as a very thorough analogy for the Trinity. Missionaries have never particularly captured my imagination, and outside of Ireland his patronages aren't much more fascinating: ophidiophobia (that's fear of snakes, so I guess I owe St. Patrick a debt of gratitude for getting me to look up a word that I'd never know otherwise), engineers, and Diocese of Fort Worth, TX. These are all trivial, personal prejudices. I'm too timid to have been a missionary. I'm not afraid of snakes, but I am afraid of math, physics and Texas, which leaves me with little in common with St. Patrick.

But the big problem is that it's always rubbed me the wrong way that Ireland's best known patron saint, at least in the United States, was sent to the island to civilize the Irish with the Church. I will grant that it was a return visit for Patrick, and the experience of being kidnapped and sold into slavery there likely left the strong impression that the Irish could use some civilizing. But the actual life of St. Patrick is less important than the resulting symbolism that he really didn't have any control over: the four centuries the English spent trying to civilize the Irish from the Church.

I realize that there was a surprising, at least to me, amount of fluid travel between England and Scotland and Ireland even as early as the 4th and 5th century. So St. Patrick probably never stopped to consider that in 1,500 years his career might serve as an accidental analogy for Early Modern and Modern religious strife. And I further realize that Ireland's impressive historical contribution to the life of the Catholic Church are in large part owing to St. Patrick as the sort of first evangelist of the island.

But it seems like St. Patrick's fame has kind of overshadowed some of the actually Irish saints that would make for perfectly good popular holidays, particularly because many of their feast days don't fall during Lent (as St. Patrick's day almost always does) and would better allow for excessive consumption of delicious Irish-themed beverages.

I've been a particular fan of St. Kevin of Glendalough since visiting the cite of his monastery a couple years ago. His feast day is June 3rd, which would often allow for a celebratory extension of Memorial Day. His particular set miraculous accomplishments are more representative of the extremely rigorous but quiet monasticism that characterized Irish Catholicism in the very early medieval period than driving all of the snakes off an island.

St. Kevin was apparently responsible for such bizarre gems feeding his monks with salmon brought to him by an otter, remaining in a prayerful position for the entire gestation period of a baby blackbird, stimulating supernatural milk production in an area cow, and saving King O'Tool's goose. Literally. King O'Tool had a goose.

He was like St. Francis before St. Francis, and the whole "good relationship with animals" thing actually makes a lot more sense in a secluded valley like Glendalough then it does with St. Francis, who was sort of defined by his wandering. I don't doubt that St. Francis is deserving of his reputation, but it seems unlikely that he was able to establish longlasting friendships with animals like St. Kevin did with his otter, his blackbird, and his cow because of the nature of the Franciscan ministry.

If bars all across the country are willing to offer green beer in spite of the possible health and definite aesthetic hazard that presents, perhaps a grand movement of St. Kevin's enthusiasts could convince latenight drinking establishments to open their doors to their animal friends once a year. Who wouldn't rather enjoy a Guinness in the company of their loyal hound than wear a color that is demonstrably unflattering to almost everybody?

St. Columba and St. Brigid would make the cut as far as noteworthy Irish saints, but there's little in their lives that translate to secular merrymaking. St. Columba finds a nice modern parallel in James Joyce in that he found it necessary to leave the island he loved and managed to get a lot of writing done after leaving, and St. Brigid so firmly desired a quiet life as a nun that she prayed to be ugly so that she couldn't be pawned off into a marriage. Convincing the general public to joyfully celebrate self-imposed exile, literacy, and unattractive women is a pretty a tough sell, but perhaps these sober, chaste, well-read saints can serve to remind us of the Sunday morning that comes after every Saturday night.

Another fine candidate for the less sober and reflective manner of celebration by Irish-Americans is St. Brendan the Navigator who's memorial is right in the middle of nice spring weather on May 16th, and who daringly sailed the Atlantic way back in the 6th century when that probably wasn't a very good idea. There was an excellent and convincing article by John J. Miller in WSJ.com's "Opinion Journal" two years ago about St. Brendans's suitability to the job currently held by St. Patrick that dealt with the part of the legend of St. Brendan where, in his expeditions, he actually reached North America. This fact, true or not, is obviously of great potential interests to the descendants of the thousands of Irish that made the same trip over the past two centuries.

Plus, in an age where celebrating European adventuring on this continent is politically problematic it seems much more harmless fun to celebrate the landing of an Irish monk who seems to have had the good sense to land, probably celebrate mass, and then go home without killing or enslaving anybody. I mean, it doesn't change the fact that all that ended up happening anyway, but it's pretty swell that somebody thought it was appropriate to leave well enough alone fifteen-hundred years ago. We can safely dismiss the idea that St. Brendan was sacred off by whatever experience he had on the other side of the Atlantic, since his voyage also may have featured an encounter with the flaming spectre of Judas Iscariot and an Easter Mass celebrated on the back of a giant sea beast.

A devotion to St. Brendan's memory would, at the very least, offer a culinary improvement on St. Patrick's day as the delicious bounty of Irish seafood seems to go entirely unnoticed in the public imagination in favor of an astonishing variety of boiled pork things. If everybody decided to symbolically take to the sea St. Brendan-style in celebration of the Irish-American heritage, it might drive the strange-meat-and-cabbage industry to its knees, but there'd be a lot fewer hungover celebrants wondering "I ate what?". And, with the gradual devolution of the holiday to a series of bar crawls, what better model could we take than St. Brendan adventuring into the unknown, ready to encounter seabeasts and people with the heads of pigs only to tell everybody the ridiculous story the day after.

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