The love at the center of our St. Patrick’s Day celebrations

A Reflection for the Memorial of St. Patrick, bishop

Find today’s readings here.

This guidance in the First Letter of Peter reminds me of a speech I heard last St. Patrick’s Day. 

After marching in our local parade as its grand marshal, my friend’s father was called up to the PA system under our rowdy after-party tent in the church parking lot to receive some praise. He had already taken the opportunity to thank the parade’s organizers and official sponsors from his place in the grandstand earlier, so after being appropriately toasted by the neighborhood crowd he spoke a little more off the cuff. 

Instead of speaking of the parade itself as he had done before, he started to reflect backwards in time with his words. He spoke of his family’s old dream of a united Ireland, to which much of the crowd raised a glass (plastic cup, that is). Then he spoke about how the warm fabric of the neighborhood was built by the past generations of Irish and Irish Americans who spent their lives helping each other and each other’s newly emigrated friends and families. The crowd liked this very much as well, cheering on. 

Then he spoke of a need to extend the same hands to today’s migrants coming to our city. The group listening, meaning no disrespect, grew more sober with this serious call to action. 

Then he attributed the beauty of all the gifts he was speaking of to the faith of those neighborhood ancestors. He hammered home that the Catholic parish had always been the center of the community and was the reason this whole thing worked. The drinking crowd mumbled in agreement. I remember it feeling as though we in the crowd did not want to hear something so serious right then. Perhaps we were aware that our number as partygoers was larger than the capacity of the church and that we could not have all possibly been at the Mass that began the day’s festivities.

It is that seriousness though that reminds me of today’s first reading. What my friend’s father was getting at was that through faith, with Christ at the center of people’s lives, he saw that they were able to love one another beyond the difficult boundaries of famine, poverty and political struggle in Ireland. The author of the letter in today’s readings, whether or not it was St. Peter himself, was saying the very same thing to the scattered early christians they were addressing in the Near East with the foundational authority of the first Bishop of Rome. 

Being loving is the essential quality of living as a Christian. And it is a natural thing for the letter’s author. It is something we “let” and allow to be intense. The love my friend’s father was speaking of—of a shared Irish heritage and of an entire neighborhood, in his case—could use a revitalization of faith these days if our tiny discomfort in the crowd that day can teach us anything.

While everything we reveled in that day was worthy of cheer, our more unsettled tone at the mention of faith and service revealed we were not yet letting St. Patrick’s Day be a real celebration of the life-giving, life-saving love of God. We were not yet letting it be a reminder that being loving, even radically so, just as the faithful forebearers whose praise my friend’s father sang, is required of us.