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Christian mission, along with the Christian faith, has often advanced on the strength of its rediscoveries—retrieving neglected stories and insights from the past and putting them to fresh use. In 2007 we are asking one big question: What must we learn, and unlearn, to be agents of God's mission in the world? For any endeavor of learning and unlearning, historians are indispensable allies. Dana L. Robert, co-director of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission at the Boston University School of Theology, is an especially keen observer of the history of mission, and here she recalls a saint whose mission is annually celebrated and perennially relevant.
On March 17, people of Irish descent around the world celebrate "St. Patrick's Day." Nearly a million people stream into Dublin, Ireland, to enjoy the fireworks, concerts, parades, and street theater. St. Patrick's Day parades began in 1762, when Irish soldiers serving in the colonial British Army marched through the streets of New York City accompanied by Irish music. By the early 20th century, St. Patrick's Day parades in major American cities had become triumphant celebrations of Irish "arrival" in the hallowed halls of city government—victors over the old guard Protestant Yankees. The importance of St. Patrick to growing Irish self-confidence was expressed in 1921 by Seumas MacManus, author of the sentimental favorite Story of the Irish Race: "What Confucius was to the Oriental, Moses to the Israelite, Mohammed to the Arab, Patrick was to the Gaelic race. And the name and power of those other great ones will not outlive the name and the power of our Apostle."1
The irony of MacManus' paean to Patrick as the emblematic Irish religio-political race warrior is that Patrick himself was a "Brit," born into a Christian family in the Roman colony of Britannia. Even though the Britons and the Irish shared a Celtic cultural heritage, they were historical enemies who raided each other's territories and enslaved the vanquished. Young Patrick was such a slave. He escaped from an Irish master after six years of harsh servitude. Later in life, as a Christian priest, he returned to Ireland to share his faith as a missionary.
Why did a former slave risk his life to teach his captors what he believed about God? How did he become the beloved St. Patrick, the "Apostle of Ireland"? Why would the Irish—or any other group of people, for that matter—accept a former slave in their midst and then be willing to be transformed by his message? These questions uncover an essential, and paradoxical, lesson about the practice of Christian mission. The more deeply Patrick engaged the particularities of Irish culture and identified himself as Irish, the more authentic and believable was his expression of the ideals of a universal community in which there is no longer "Jew or Greek," "slave or free," "male and female" (Gal 3:28). This creative tension between cultural identification and universal ideals has made Christianity the largest religion in the world today. As the ideas, beliefs, and traditions of Christianity spread from one people to another, they are shaped—and reshaped—by the culture of each new group. So the paradox of St. Patrick's Day is that in celebrating the creation of Irish identity, it also commemorates the incorporation of a particular people into a vision of universal and multi-cultural community.
The life of the 5th-century saint is shrouded in tradition and myth, as appropriate to a heroic figure in Irish epic poetry, whose stories were passed down through the generations. According to legend, St. Patrick was a miracle worker and healer who drove the snakes from Ireland. He explained the Christian Trinity by pointing to the leaves of a shamrock—three "persons" and yet united into one. Patrick is also credited with ordering the written preservation of oral Irish lore. But direct historical evidence about Patrick is slim.2
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