Notes from a Sickbed on Saint Patrick's Day

I am sick. There’s no getting around that. And on one of the most important days of the year to me, Saint Patrick’s Day. At the morning service I cannot even smell the incense my nostrils are so blocked, but this is not unusual. The high days of turning are usually the times of sickness. Many an All Hallows or Yule has had me sniffling and at less than my best. Last Friday, before I began to feel awful, the weather was beautiful and warm and there was energy in me, but even as that day came to an end, the sickness was coming and now it’s almost a relief that it’s here.

This year we are in the midst of a pandemic which has businesses shutting down, people worried, towns on lock down. Our school system shut down yesterday, but so many of us were getting ill it was almost a relief. Now I have the chance to just be sick and I think you need to just be sick before you can just get better. The prayers of Saint Patrick become even more urgent today, that we will be delivered from this deathly winter and this new disease, that we will be delivered from the many things that come against us, that spring and the renewing God will show up in force and with great power.

The candles on Patrick’s altar remind us of the story that long ago it was Patrick’s fire that became one with the druid fire, that in times of old the druids lit a fire from Temair that went all over Ireland on Samhain, but that this became the fire of the great candle which burns not only in churches on the eve of Easter, but in women’s gatherings and on my very altar.

It isn’t strange or an exception to the miserable cold that we put on green and drink and feast in the middle of Lent. It isn’t out of place that in sickness we have the Feast of Saint Patrick. This day occurs because it is Lent. It is because the spring is returning, though often haltingly it seems, that we are in the midst of time of change and penitence. And this is the reminder that much as I and others must do with out poor sick bodies in waiting for things to turn, rather than rush in with the violence of haste, we must wait for the miracle of healing that is the gift of God and magic in all the earth. We must rest.