Saint Patrick’s Prayer

In 433 Saint Patrick wrote,

“I bind to myself today
The power of Heaven,
The light of the sun,
The brightness of the moon,
The splendour of fire,
The flashing of lightning,
The swiftness of wind,
The depth of sea,
The stability of earth,
The compactness of rocks.”*

In his binding to the virtues of the earth and sky, he sought or found protection from evil.

Before we even ask, we are bound to the virtues of sun and moon and earth and of all that goes with them and of that which they are part. What comes without asking theologians call grace. James Lovelock called it the Gaia Hypothesis. Charles Darwin called it the grand view. Joseph Wood Krutch called it the great chain of life.

Bind me too, Saint Patrick. Bind me too to the carefree strength of the bear, to the easy motion of the deer, and to the soaring wings of the birds. Bind me to their joy.

*This translation of part of Saint Patrick’s Breastplate is from The Catholic Encyclopedia at newadvent.org

Nature’s Grace

About nature, Joseph Wood Krutch wrote:  “she accepts much that is unacceptable to men who have pushed too far in their efforts to imagine a universe they would like better.”

Krutch’s critique of humanity here parallels, I think, Matthew’s presentation of the devil’s first temptation of Christ – to turn the stones into bread.  Krutch believes we should be more accepting, like nature, and to “reconcile ourselves, as she does, to things unreconcilable with purely human attitudes.  His belief parallels, I think, Christ’s response to the devil and the lesson God sought to teach Israel in the wilderness after the exodus – man does not live by bread alone.

Nature, in Krutch’s assessment, and mine, provides more than bread.  “She is joyous,” he wrote.  Nature to Krutch is like the word of God to Moses.  Krutch wrote, “nature … furnishes the most cheerful as well as the most intelligible context for thinking and living and being….”

It is beautiful, this idea:  the joyousness of nature, that nature provides manna and joy, if we let her.  In her acceptances are tender mercies.

To climb mountains, to walk beside creeks and rivers and oceans, to follow washes in the desert and paths of deer in the forest, to watch birds, lizards, squirrels, waves, clouds and stars for the sake of her joy and tender mercies:  this is living and being.

(Quotations are from the last chapter of The Desert Year, by Joseph Wood Krutch, 1951.)