Skip to main content

St. Patrick's Breastplate: Strange Platypus(es)

This past Sunday was Trinity Sunday, or the feast day devoted to celebrating the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.  This meant that hymn-singing churches were forced to shuffle through the ecclesiastical cabinet for anything that emphasizes and lauds the Holy Trinity.  Holy, Holy, Holy, one of my all-time favorites, was probably at the top of a lot of music director's lists, but I imagine St. Patrick's Breastplate was up there as well.  We sang it at my church.

The Breastplate is an odd song with an odd tune and it comes from an odd people.  Chesterton talks about the Gaels of Ireland as the men that God made mad, for all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.  Growing up among the Irish in America, I'd say that's about right.  There's a fierceness, an a mystic tenacity about St. Patrick's Breastplate that's quintessentially Irish.  It's a hymn for those who see the supernatural as a plain fact, as plain as potatoes.  The hymn claims the doctrines of the Church and the events of the life of Christ for the singer as a performative speech act: to say the thing is to make it so. Saying the doctrines is to put on real armor.  It was written for a people who believed in demons, feys, and sorcerers, and that survival meant invoking heavenly power against dark magic.  It's a fighting man's hymn, for those who know that there are things that go bump in the night.  None of that's particularly comfortable to say outside of Pentecostal circles or maybe when you're hanging out with M.K.s who've seen "stuff." 

So where am I going with all this?  The Trinity is often pointed out as a useless or confusing doctrine; something to be believed because you're required to and useful for calculating who's in and who's out. To St. Patrick it wasn't though.  To him it was a revelation of the nature of God, and a powerful protection against all the works of the devil; things real and immediate, not vague and allegorical.  Singing the Breastplate brings us back to a dark time when news that God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, himself had entered the ring in the struggle against darkness and night broke like morning after a storm, or light on drawn swords.  It reminds us of a time when the servants of the Triune God saw themselves as come to drive out serpents, and believed that they had been given power to do so. 

Comments

Jessica Snell said…
Love this.
James said…
Hurray! Thanks for the link btw.

Popular posts from this blog

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...

SNES as Money Well Spent: Platypus Nostalgia

I got my Super Nintendo Entertainment System when I was eleven years old.  That's a couple years after it first came out.  The occasion was a little dramatic: to celebrate the end of a two-and-a-half year course of treatment for cancer.  I had no idea that it would be waiting for me at home after the final doctors visit.  It was a nice spring day, the trees were waving gently in the breeze outside the bay windows.  With a cup of tea resting on the coffee table, I set down to play.  What was that first game?  It was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past .  Around twenty years later, my SNES still works as does that Zelda cartridge.  It's been a long way from boyhood in Southern Connecticut to manhood in North Houston, but I'm still playing. Why am I still playing?  There were stretches when I didn't.  Many times, I've just been too busy.  There were also seasons when it felt embarrassing to still be playing video games....

Seeing Beowulf Through Tolkien: The Platypus Reads Part CXCIX

After spending a few weeks wrestling with Tolkien's interpretation of Beowulf , I found myself sitting down and reading Seamus Heaney's translation of the text during a spare moment.  I came to the place where Beowulf presents Hrothgar with the hilt of the ancient sword that slew Grendel's mother.  Hrothgar looks down at the hilt with its ancient runes and carvings depicting the war between the giants and God and meditates on the fortunes of men.  In a flash of insight, I thought: this is the whole poem! Let me explain.  Tolkien believed that the genuine contribution of the Northern peoples to European culture was the theory of courage.  The Northern heroes, at their best, were men who fought for order against chaos -a battle they knew they were doomed to lose.  If they were true heroes, their souls would join the gods and aid them in the final battle against darkness and its monsters and again go down fighting, spitting in the face of the meaninglessness...