One of my more odd and quirky habits when it comes to celebrating historical days is to wear orange on St. Patrick’s Day, like I am doing right now, as we speak. There are some people I know who love St. Patrick’s Day because it gives them the freedom to wear green (something I do fairly often normally anyway, as long as it’s a dark forest kind of green) and to drink plenty of beer like the Freedom of Dublin (which is rather ironic when you think about it too much) [1]. Since wearing green is not a big deal and I’m not much of a drinker, my own enjoyment (such as it is) of St. Patrick’s Day does not depend on the usual matters. Rather, my appreciation, such as it is, of St. Patrick’s Day depends on two matters, my sometimes overenthusiastic commitment to my Scot-Irish identity and my appreciation of St. Patrick’s often forgotten religious beliefs.

For those who don’t know, I happen to have a great deal of Scot-Irish ancestry from Appalachian dwellers in Pennsylvania. The Scot-Irish are made up of highly Protestant Scots Covenanters, most of whom were lowland Scots who had been participants in centuries of fighting with the English in endless border skirmishes that basically destroyed their social cohesion (to the point where there was not even a clan structure there). As a result of their ferocious hostility to Catholicism and their fierce conduct against England, many of them were deported from southern Scotland and placed by the British in Northern Ireland, where it was thought (correctly!) that they would turn their hostility towards the local Irish Catholic population and help solve two of England’s problems simultaneously–the security of their vulnerable northern borders as well as their attempts to control and dominate Ireland. During the Glorious Revolution the Protestant Northern Irish stayed loyal to the House of Orange, and so they became known as Orangemen, which is why I wear the Orange on St. Patrick’s Day, because my ancestors were motivated by a powerful hostility to vile popery, as they called it.

Of course, there is a bit of a rub here. My own partiuclar ancestors, like many Scots Irishmen, were bothered by economic frustrations and a lack of opportunity as well as the continued presence of English control, and so they joined in the first Irish exodus, which drastically reduced the population of Irish Protestants, and created the current situation where the Irish Protestants remain dominant only in Northern Ireland. The presence of many land-hungry Scot Irish vagabonds in the Appalachian hill country during the 1700’s led direclty to the French & Indian War, the ferocious Pontiac’s Rebellion after that, and to the violence of the American Revolution and the War of 1812, and many other conflicts like the Whiskey Rebellion and concerns about the strength of the federal government of the United States Constitution (worries which, in retrospect, were rather prescient). My ancestors would be considered “Border Southerners” (much like Abraham Lincoln, to be honest) who nonetheless were fiercely unionist and had a very passionate hatred of the elitism of both Yankees as well as southern would-be aristocrats.

I am a child very much of my background in these areas. My own life has been dramatically shaped by the results of being strongly opposed to tyranny, and by the theft of land by relatives, as well as the lack of cohesion present in my own family background. I too have been a vagabond on the face of this earth in search of opportunity and a safe place where I belong and respected to settle down and set down my roots. I too have enganged in far too much conflict with those who should have been allies over the course of a difficult life, proof that our family backgrounds can carry on legacies (even painful and unpleasant ones) going on for centuries. My own stream runs along the same sorts of channels as those of my ancestors. I am no better than my fathers, but at least I can honor the similarities even as I sometimes bemoan their negative consequences.

St. Patrick is an interesting fellow himself. Being a rebellious young man whose difficult life led him to a strong faith, and a reminder of his own native folly, even as his passionate nature led him to lots of quarrels and having to deal with all kinds of unpleasant false accusations, he nontheless served a vital role in organizing and motivating believers in Ireland, even though he himself was a Romanized British fellow himself. Of the greatest interest to me personally is the fact that the Celtic Church that he helped inspire was a Sabbath-keeping church, according to the SDA five-part video on the Sabbath at least [2]. It is amazing that sometimes well-known people are not as well-known as we think, because our knowledge of them tends to be superficial and based on a few well-known myths and legends and stories, without the context of their life as a whole. Having had the opportunity to read a translation of Patrick’s Confession, I must say that he is the sort of man one would admire for his passion and his sincerity, even if he would be someone who would probably have been a little bit frustrating to work with someitmes. I imagine some would say the same thing about me as well.

[1] http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/holidays/march_2013/41_will_wear_green_to_celebrate_st_patrick_s_day

[2] See also: http://www.ucg.org/mans-holidays/patrick-you-didnt-know/