It’s not all about St. Paddy’s Day parades, no matter how much fun it is to march behind your local candidate for city, county or state office. Nor is it always and only about pub-crawling and dyeing the Chicago River green. Every year on March 17, I also remember my confirmation in an Episcopal Church back home in East Tennessee.
Well, I don’t remember the actual event. What 13-year-old remembers his confirmation? But I do remember the music, an Anglican hymn known as St, Patrick’s Breastplate, and it has come back to me at crucial times in my life.
For 30 or 40 years, I was defiantly unchurched, and my understanding of St. Paddy’s Day was entirely secular. A typical memory of those days is at an off-campus bar in Knoxville toasting the health of the Senate Judiciary Committee for watering down a drunk driving bill that day at a legislative hearing in Nashville. With pitchers of green beer, of course.
Later on, my appreciation — shall shall we say? — for St. Patrick deepened and matured a little.
That Anglican confirmation hymn of mine is called a “breastplate” for a reason; it traces back to a 7th-century Irish poem asking for protection — a safeguard, or armor — against evil. In the Episcopal Hymnal of 1940 (the full text of which I got from the Cantica sacra webpage because more recent hymnals available online are truncated), it seekss in part:
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
A few years later, I moved up north, got started on a tumultuous career change and entered into a period of white-knuckle sobriety (these events are not entirely unrelated). For reasons that aren’t clear to me now, I remembered St. Patrick’s Breastplate and carried a reduced-size photocopy in my billfold. Superstitious? You bet. Did Christ protect me in times of quiet, times of danger? I still don’t pretend to understand Christ at all, but I’m betting the farm on that, too.
Well into the 1990s I was still very much a part of the “n-o-n-e-s” (spelled that way to distinguish us from nuns and other women religious), or, to quote Wikipedia, people who claim “a lack of religious affiliation.” But life — or was it grace? — kept happening. When the dust settled from my career change, I found myself teaching at a Catholic junor college founded by the Ursuline sisters. Then, after my father died, my mother moved to a senior high-rise in Springfield and joined a Lutheran church in town.
To make a long story short, there was always some reason she needed a ride to church; before long, she greased the skids and got me an invitation to join the choir. The music better than at 12-step meetings, so in my late 50s I joined the choir, and, a couple of years later, the church. Still later, I learned the local congregation of Dominican sisters, who do powerful social justice work in Springfield, accept non-Catholics as Dominican associates who pledge to “to share the Gospel by preaching it through the witness of their lives,” to walk the talk, in other words. So Debi and I joined.
All of which means this year on St. Patrick’s Day, I find myself reflecting on my spiritual formation 70 years after the bishop of Tennessee came to Norris and confirmed my membership in the body of Christ. All of it is part of who I am.
So on St. Paddy’s Day 2025, I consider myself — ta dah! — a high-church Luther-o-palian in the ecumenical spirit of Pope Francis and Vatican II.
In the past couple of years, I’ve been increasingly active in my Lutheran parish’s adult faith formation program. At a recent small-group discussion called Dwelling in the Word, I blurted out that the 4th-century Greek creeds we recite in church don’t do much for me, that I find more relatable statements of belief elsewhere.
And — whaddya know? — a few days later when St. Patrick’s Day came rolling around, I found one! The hymn, as we have it today, is a late 19th-century translation of the 7th-century Irish poem by Mrs. Cecil F. Alexander, wife of an Anglican bishop in Ireland. It speaks to me today not only as a glorified ancient Celtic good-luck charm but also because it echoes my own spiritual formation from the very first words. Instead of neo-Platonic argumentation about whether the Son is “begotten of […] the essence of the Father,” as the Nicene Creed has it, the hymn merely says:
I bind unto myself today
the strong name of the Trinity
by invocation of the same,
the Three in One and One in Three.
This I can relate to. I still don’t understand what it means, but I like the poetry. Similarly, St. Patrick (and Mrs. Cecil Alexander of the Anglican Church of Ireland), deftly summarize centuries of church history and dogma: “the sweet ‘Well done’ in judgment hour; […] confessors’ faith, apostles’ word, / The patriarchs’ prayers, the prophets’ scrolls.” There’s some lovely stuff there about nature, too, drawn from Celtic tradition — and a deep spiritual vision I associate with St. Francis and my own developing spirituality. Also a verse I can take with me as I try to preach the message of the Dominican charism — and of the Lutheran word and sacrament — through the witness (and pulpit) of my life:
I bind unto myself today
the power of God to hold and lead,
his eye to watch, his might to stay,
his ear to hearken to my need,
the wisdom of my God to teach,
his hand to guide, his shield to ward,
the word of God to give me speech,
his heav’nly host to be my guard.
There’s more, way too much to go into here. After the breastplate itself — “Christ be with me, Christ within me, / Christ behind me, Christ before me, / Christ beside me, Christ to win me, / Christ to comfort and restore me” — Patrick comes down in the end where he started:
I bind unto myself the Name,
the strong Name of the Trinity
by invocation of the same,
the Three in One and One in Three,
of whom all nature hath creation,
eternal Father, Spirit, Word.
But he does so in terms so basic to my theology — to the way I try to understand the world — I feel like I could sit with it for another 70 years and still not get to the depth of it.
Links and Citations
Noel Brennan and Sara Machi, “Chicago River dyeing, St. Patrick’s Day Parade bring out huge crowds decked out in green,” CBS News Chicago, March. 15, 2025 https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/chicago-river-dyeing-st-patricks-day-parade-2025/.
Ken Myers, “I bind unto myself today, Hymn #268, Text: St. Patrick (372-466), Music: Traditional Irish Melody, Tune name: ST. PATRICK, DEIRDRE,” Cantica sacra, All Saints Anglican Church, Ivy, Va. https://canticasacra.org/i-bind-unto-myself-today/.
“What is White-Knuckle Sobirety,” Windward Way, blog, Newport Beach, Calif. https://windwardway.com/rehab-blog/white-knuckle-sobriety/
You also may want to have a look at my post headlined “Nerdy, music major-y question about an Anglo-Irish hymn — worth a listen even if you aren’t a music theory nerd,” Ordinary Time, Dec. 22, 2022 https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2022/12/05/breastplate/“. You can safely skip over the nerdier parts (they’re about modulating to major and minor Appalachian dulcimer tunings) and go to the subhead “And here’s the story of St. Patrick.” It details a lovely Celtic legend that St. Patrick and his followers were transformed into deer when they invoked the breastplate charm to escape an ambush on their way to meet the high king at Tara. Also I included links to severak very nice musical versions of the hymn and the 7th-century poem on which it is based. “The Deer’s Cry,” a version by Irish composer Shaun Davie, featuring his wife Rita Connolly, incorporates the legend of St. Patrick on the way to meet the pagan king at Tara.
[ Uplinked March 18, 2025]
Ordinary Time 