No St. Patrick’s Day Parade?!  What a fitting symbol of just how much our lives have changed in such a short period of time.  It’s odd to have a St. Patrick’s Day without marching bands, bag pipes and snare drums…no one lining the streets along parade routes wearing every shade of green.  The celebratory spirit we are more familiar with on this day has a markedly different tone.  Perhaps today’s quieter, subdued, and somewhat penitential flavor puts us more in touch with the “Good Friday” experience of St. Patrick’s spiritual journey that led to his “Easter” experience.  It is a story we desperately need to hear and embrace.  A timely St. Patrick’s Day gift, so much more precious than the gold we often seek from those mysterious leprechauns of ancient legend. 
 
It’s amazing how much can change in a day!  Like St. Patrick, our lives changed so quickly in such a short span of time.  By sunrise the next day way back in the 4 ^th century, he would be waking up to a whole different world.  The historical reality of that day describes how he was captured by Irish pirates and sold into slavery.  The spiritual reality, as he would one day share, was that he actually found true freedom in Ireland in contrast to the slavery he had been blind to all of his life up until that point.  He thought he had been free…he could basically do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted…he didn’t have to answer to anyone other than himself.  He was his own boss…no chains to tie him down.  Even though he was raised in a Christian family, he lived as if he had no need for God.  In fact, he had his doubts about God.  This was rather convenient.  Instead of God, he would call all the shots. 
 
We can imagine (and perhaps even relate to) St. Patrick’s anger, sadness, and bitterness over the injustice and brokenness of being captured and sold into slavery…ripped away from his family, friends, possessions, dreams, routines, the illusion of control...everything that was familiar…everything that was his.  One day, however, St. Patrick would see all of this as God’s “rescue mission.”  It was painful at first, but he would be grateful for all of this later.  God didn’t cause the brokenness.  He didn’t order the pirates to “capture” Saint Patrick.  God could have stopped this.  But He didn’t.  Instead, God transformed it into a rescue mission.  St. Patrick’s Good Friday became an Easter.  It’s what God does best!
 
God had a purpose for Patrick just as he does for each of us.  What is that purpose?  To find joy!  God wants us to be happy.  In order for that to happen for St. Patrick, a radical shift needed to take place in his life.  He didn’t know God where it counted the most…in his heart.  The choices he was making, the way he was spending his time, the focus and priority he was giving to the passing concerns of the world were distracting him from the fact that he was dying inside from hunger and thirst.  He needed to be rescued from this darkness…to be set free from the hold that so many worldly illusions, worries, doubts, and fears had on him…like the very chains that shackled him on his way to Ireland.
 
In some ways right now, our lives parallel St. Patrick’s spiritual journey.  This coronavirus seems to have all of us somewhat captive and in chains as well.  It’s certainly not an easy time at the moment, but the journey of St. Patrick gives us the hope and the promise that God will transform this into a rescue mission for each of us.  In his fears and worries…in the backbreaking toil and hardship of his life as a shepherd…in his anger and sadness…in his loneliness, isolation, and separation, in his slavery, St. Patrick cried out to God.  God provided the quiet of the moors, the gentleness of the sheep, the stillness of star-filled crisp nights, the sound of waves crashing along the shores of Ireland to bring peace to St. Patrick’s heart so he could know that “I am.”  I am Christ within you, Christ before you, Christ behind you, Christ in you, Christ beneath you, Christ above you, Christ on your right, Christ on your left, Christ when you lie down, Christ when you sit down, Christ when you arise, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of you, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of you, Christ in every eye that sees you, Christ in every ear that hears you. 
 
St. Patrick we pray that you who were forced to shepherd a flock of sheep as a slave and who would one day willingly embrace God’s invitation to become a shepherd of God’s people as a bishop, help us to find our piece of Ireland in the days ahead.  As we cry out to God as you did from the shores of Ireland as a captive, may we too hear His voice and recognize His presence and undergo the radical conversion and transformation we need so as to live in freedom and experience eternal Easter joy.