On this day around the world people drink, dance and celebrate the Irish, their culture and spirit. While the holiday has lost much of its meaning and the non-Irish join in the festivities often far more than do many Irish at times. I want to remind you that the day for the Irish is a feast day, a holy day, to honor their patron saint, Saint Patrick.
Saint Patrick, or Naomh Padraig in Irish, was born in Scotland, and as a mear teenager when he was kidnapped from Wales by Irish brigands, raiders, and was then sold as a slave. Enslaved as a farm labor for some six years he eventually escaped and returned home, where he studied to be a priest. Saint Patrick returned some years later to the island where he was once held as a slave to be a missionary, bringing Christianity to the mostly Pagan island, sometime in the 5th century.
Why do I tell you this story? Saint Patrick was a slave and he was able to not only overcome, but to turn his struggle into empowerment. Our world is full of slaves, many have escaped and they forget not those who have not been so fortunate and now dedicate their lives to helping others to freedom. So celebrate today, and tomorrow remember those children who have not found freedom. Fear often increases ones faith, maybe that is something we have lost a lot of in our modern world, regardless of our religion it seems that we all to often forget that our world is not our own but shared and many of the worlds children have only faith to carry them through.
The Stolen Child
Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scare could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.
-William Butler Yeats
