Mixed feelings about St. Patrick's Day....

Sure and the color green first brings to mind good things – it is the color of life, springtime, money, or a green light to go on and get there in time. The Green Movement is positive in favor o’ the planet. These green things and absinthe, we like a lot.


We have mixed feelings about Saint Patrick’s Day, just as not everything green is all that good – there being the green of nausea, or infection, or algae in the fish tank.

My wife’s of Irish blood, and lived there awhile as a young teacher. There an old tinker woman held her face, looked in her eyes and recognized her from a former life. There she saw Ogham symbols carved in trees and stones, or stones stacked in a special secret way at gravesites, a silence and a subtlety that spoke volumes about Catholic oppression in centuries past.

Come the Internet, there came a worthy worldwide revival known as Celtic Reconstructionist Paganism. We have no reverence for such “saints” as Patrick, and would not care to celebrate the cruel scourge he instigated to replace Celts and Druids with Christians.

Crediting old Pat with driving snakes from Eire is almost as wrong and silly as young-earth creationism. There never had been any snakes there – the Ice Age saw to that.

I always remember the 17th of March as the anniversary of my departure from Hendrick Medical Center. They drove me out proper, they did, in good Christian style.

SGTex
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