16.03.2018
St Patrick’s Day Reminds Us Ireland is a Missionary Nation
“St Patrick’s Day is asking us directly if we have the energy, the nerve, the sense of community to commit to harvesting,” Archbishop Michael Jackson said at the annual Blessing of the Shamrock at DIT Grangegorman. He said the question was live both in the church and in the society where the values of community and compassion were all too often sacrificed to an ethic of commodification and individualism.
The annual ceremony took place yesterday (Thursday March 15) in St Laurence’s Chapel on DIT’s Grangegorman Campus and was organised by the Chaplaincy Team. Presiding with Archbishop Jackson was Monsignor Lorcan O’Brien who performed the blessing of the shamrock.
During the service DIT students Adrianna, Angie, Janet and Bola, shared their ideas on St Patrick and St Patrick’s Day. They spoke about the hardship he endured as an immigrant and despite this, his determination to bring Christianity to Ireland.
St Patrick’s Day is the National Festival of Ireland at home and worldwide and serves as a reminder that Ireland is a missionary nation, the Archbishop said. St Patrick’s Day this year coincides with the Six Nations match between England and Ireland away from home at Twickenham. “Whatever the outcome, we in Ireland seek to export the best of ourselves wherever we go. This is a modern mission,” he said.
Drawing on St John’s Gospel: ‘For here the saying holds true, One sows and another reaps. I sent you to reap that for which you did not labour. Others have laboured, and you have entered into their labour.’ [St John 4.37, 38], he said it was important to seize the opportunity to make a difference in our time and generation. “The instinct embedded in much of institutional religion is to delay. Here in St John’s Gospel, in an interchange between Jesus and his disciples, we are invited to do otherwise: to reap a harvest, to get on and do it. Indeed we are told that the fields are ripe for harvesting,” he commented.
“Harvesting is a communal activity with a communal outcome. People of faith are asked today to engage and commit with everyone they meet inside and outside their own definition of community for the active good of everyone else in the totality of the community,” he added.
In this ‘selfie generation’ which seeks to convince us that we invent ourselves, the Archbishop said it was important to remember that while we shape our contexts and opportunities with our creativity and application, industry and good luck, most of the time someone else has dug the road and even paved it. “In this way, these few words: Others have laboured, and you have entered into their labour point for any of us and for all of us into the world that surrounds us daily and remind us of the need to be participative, to be creative and to be appreciative,” he explained.
He suggested that St Patrick’s Day could give the people of Ireland a sense of fulfilment. “A changed and ever–changing world, with a level of sophistication in communication hardly before envisaged and still developing and expanding, greatly needs: fulfilment as an attainable goal. Perhaps this might be the modern mission of people of faith. Perhaps this might be something that together as the new people of Ireland called to create in our generation an island community of – dare I use the word? – happiness, we can offer in the spirit of Patrick and offer it to everyone. As an immigrant and an exploited worker, we are told that Patrick brought good news, a message of hope and, in the fullness of time, a sense of identity to this island. Whether it be South or North, East or West, a very particular colour of green means Ireland and St Patrick. It might be rugby or soccer or any other national sport; it might be a milk shake; it might be The Boston River; it might be The Sydney Opera House. Might we dare to suggest in the contemporary world that this might also be: mission?” he concluded.
