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Every St. Patrick’s Day, I reread a short, strange book: St. Patrick’s “Confession.”
The little work takes less than an hour to finish. But it contains moments that make you pause. At one point, Patrick insists that when he escaped Ireland with a group of fishermen he “refused to suck their breasts.” This remark appears suddenly, without explanation in the text or in history. The saint, it seems, felt the need to deny at least this rumor about himself.
Yet the detail hints at how strange Patrick’s world really was.
Across Britain, sick people visited countryside healing shrines in hopes of being licked by sacred dogs. Kings ritually had sex with the goddesses of their lands. And kidnappings occurred often enough that Patrick wrote, when Irish pirates captured him, he was merely one among “thousands of others” forced into slavery.
For six years, Patrick was made to shepherd livestock. When he heard a bodiless voice telling him his “ship was ready,” he fled until he met a crew of pagan fishermen. Yet he almost did not join them; they told him to come aboard. After landing in Britain, they all nearly starved. But Patrick prayed, and a herd of pigs appeared, which they then ate.
The life Patrick sketches in these stories is one that happened to him. He did not regard his life as his to plot. That attitude — more than magic shrines, sex with goddesses, pirates and fairy portals to other worlds — separates Patrick’s world from our own.
Contemporary culture tends to tell us we should design our lives and define our identities. Modern philosophers have argued we must create meaning for ourselves rather than derive it from religion, tradition or other institutions. Agency, not hope, defines modern life.
The French writer Albert Camus rejected Patrick’s attitude almost entirely; yielding to outside forces — the divine, the traditional, the powerful — distracts us from living the life before us. It’s better, in Camus’s view, to abandon hope and take full control of shaping our lives.
That way of thinking sits awkwardly in a column written smack dab in the middle of the Lenten season many Christians are now observing. Lent, after all, rests on the opposite view: that patience and surrender may lead us somewhere we cannot yet see.
Falling during Lent, St. Patrick’s Day offers a fitting flashpoint to ask: Why celebrate a holiday that looks back to a world with less control?
Patrick’s world took for granted the idea that a life might have a shape not chosen by the person living it. Captivity, escape, hunger and visions did not thwart Patrick’s plan; the meaning of his life came from events he never determined.
St. Patrick’s Day bears a trace of that older world. Rivers turn green. People must adopt shamrock garb. The danger of being pinched looms over anyone who fails to do so. These silly customs point toward something serious: Patrick treated life as something given to him, unexpectedly, rather than planned. Pirates, ghostly voices and pigs all sprang out of nowhere. Perhaps these festivities show us how basic hope really is for human beings — and how much we really do not wish to abandon it.
In that sense, the holiday fits neatly within Lent. It reminds us that not everything arrives on a schedule we set for ourselves and that the things that shape us are often the ones we never planned for at all. What might a surprising pinch bring you this St. Patrick’s Day?
Eric Cannon (he/him) is a sophomore studying philosophy and political science and currently serves as a member of IU Student Government.
