After Patrick

I did not attend Mass yesterday, partly because I suspected there would be some sort of Irishing of the church, with green clothes and eye-rolling jokes from the priest and perhaps a few hung-over attendees, clutching their rosaries with shaking hands and a little too relieved to make use of the kneelers.

Every year, I watch the Americans who have convinced themselves that they’re sons of the auld sod as they go to parties and drink green beer and pinch strangers and sing really bad songs, and I feel a little sad because for some of them, this is as close to a national celebration as they’ll ever get. Very few of us can still gin up any real enthusiasm for Independence Day, since the idea of true liberty seems to mean so little to so many. Christmas is an orgy of debt and ostentation. Thanksgiving has nothing to do with the giving of thanks, but everything to do with gluttony and reopening old family wounds. Easter is an excuse to attend church even earlier than usual (in order to have the rest of the day to eat creme eggs). And the other national holidays are just days when one might get a day off, but one certainly can’t use the post office or the bank.

But Saint Patrick’s Day…ah, there’s an opportunity to pretend that one is both informed and sentimental about one’s lineage. Even if one’s knowledge of one’s Irishness is traceable only to Grandma’s oft-repeated remarks about how she loved potatoes and how this fact “proved that [she was] Irish.”

So every year I watch the playacting, and I smile at some of it, and I wonder how many of those who even know the name of Patrick of Ireland really understand anything about his life. Kidnapped, enslaved, on the lam, then gut-punched by the God Who threw him right back into the arena after requiring him to give up everything for His sake. How many of us think about those interminable, lonely nights, far from his home, watching the sheep and wondering why, and how, and to what end?

And if he speculated about his future, would he have foreseen a day when people would intentionally become drunk in order to “celebrate” his life?

***

Yesterday afternoon, I was out back, pruning a couple of bushes, when a flutter of color appeared in front of me. I flinched because whatever it was had gotten right up into my face.

It was a little goldfinch.

She was flapping with uneven, frantic movements, just above my head now, and when I realized what I was seeing, my instinct was to hold out my hand. I did this, and I called, “Come! Come!” And she did. She dropped straight down onto my open palm. Before I could close my hand, she flew again, landing in the honeysuckle on the garden fence. I went to call my wife to see her, and when we returned, the goldfinch had made her way to the feeder hanging near the fence. She was working on a sunflower seed with great concentration, but seemed to be having a difficult time of it. We looked closer and realize there was something wrong with the bird’s right eye. It seemed to be either obscured by feathers or missing. My wife and I consulted each other and I stepped close to the goldfinch and took her in my hand. But my grip was loose, and she flew out of my hand, and she retreated to the shrubbery. For the rest of the afternoon, I monitored the little bird. Near evening, she flew into the woods and I didn’t see her again. I said a prayer for her health and safety. And I named her Patty, in honor of the day.

I think I am an eccentric man, because I have thought of Patty all day, wondering if she made it through the night, and if she was able to eat, and if whatever is wrong with her eye will someday heal.

The world is very hard on the little things.

~ S.K. Orr