The Story of St. Patrick’s Day

Patrick, who lived from about 385 to 461, was not Irish. He was born in Roman Britain, and at sixteen he was kidnapped by Irish raiders and spent six years as a slave, herding sheep on an Irish hillside. Those were the years when, by his own account in his Confessio, prayer became his constant companion. He escaped, became a priest — and then he did the remarkable thing. He went back. He returned to the very people who had enslaved him, this time as a missionary bishop, and he spent the rest of his life converting Ireland. March 17 is the traditional date of his death.

The famous stories are legends, and they're good ones. The shamrock sermon — Patrick explaining the Trinity with a three-leaf clover — doesn't show up in writing until centuries after he died. The snakes are even simpler: Ireland was cut off from mainland Europe before snakes could wander back in after the ice age, so Ireland has never had snakes at all. "Driving out the snakes" works best as a parable, probably — driving out the old gods. The feasting, though, is real. March 17 falls in the middle of Lent, and in Ireland it was a holy day when the Lenten fast was lifted for the feast. The parades are an American invention: the first one on record marched in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1601, and Irish-American communities in Boston and New York turned the day into a declaration of pride, in a new home that hadn't always welcomed them.

In the Grove: a slave who forgave the people who took him, and walked back to them carrying good news. That's worth a feast — green or otherwise.