(no subject)
As one friend accurately characterized it, there is kind of a bipolarity to St. Patrick’s Day. There’s a lot of conflicting information, and a lot of conflicting opinion.
Maybe ‘snakes’ means Druids to some, but maybe it doesn’t and it’s just a story picked up from another time and place and used to explain why there are no snakes in Ireland (because heaven forefend we actually admit to the BIOLOGY of the thing!). Maybe it didn’t mean snakes at the time, but has come to in the minds of people who see that conquest as one of patriarchy vs. nature. Maybe its significance is amplified by centuries of religious and political strife in Ireland. What Saint Patrick really did was bring Roman Christianity to Ireland; that is not in dispute. I even grant that his particular transition to Catholicism was significantly less bloody and gruesome than, say, the Church’s arrival in South America, and that by most standards it was a benign process. Much of Celtic tradition, unlike other parts of the world, survived in some fashion.
However, the history of Catholic Dominionism is one of conversion by conquest and cultural eradication. Where they came, they took. They took the gods, they took the traditions, they took the symbols, and they repurposed them: Easter rabbits, Christmas trees, and the sun cross. They took the Winter Solstice for the birth of Christ, and tied his rebirth to the vernal equinox. The sacred chalice, which might stand upon any hearth to represent the divine receptive and creative power of the feminine, became a Holy Grail, the unattainable goal of a quest undertaken only by men of great purity and chastity. Household spirits and the fae became vicious monsters instead of morally ambiguous tricksters; there was no room in the catechism for moral ambiguity. And as they absorbed those cultures, they grew in political power and erased the histories of those they overcame.
Now, instead of a celebration of the Church’s triumph over the Celtic culture, St. Patrick’s Day in America is a raucous chorus of stereotypes and ignorance. If we’re all ‘Irish for a day’ then it seems that we mostly believe Irish people are green-clad drunkards with a taste for bad beer and a remarkably muddled view of the political situation in Ireland, promiscuously exchanging soggy kisses and shouting incomprehensible drinking songs. Offensive and bigoted as that is, I suppose I could probably live with it, or with the reclaiming in some communities of an actual celebration of Celtic history and heritage, except for one small thing: dominionism isn’t a thing of the distant past.
Where they went, they spread their message by the sword, by fire, by guile. They twisted old beliefs to fit their purposes. They lied about the old gods, took the old ways for their own, wrapped long tradition into their own quest for political power. They appropriated the full scope of culture to their own ends. They killed those who would not kneel. And while the Catholic Church and most of Christianity have learned to live in relative peace with those of us who stand outside their frame of reference, there remain those who cannot accept a multiplicity of belief.
I find myself confronted regularly by Domininist Christianity intent upon eradicating my faith from this earth, focused on driving me and those who believe as I do out, like a snake. They take from other cultures the things they can use to spread their message, and use their influence to gain political and social power. They push into communities, seeking to eradicate other beliefs, to create a uniformity of thought that will give them the right to say how I live and what I do. They would take my sexual freedom, they would control my reproductive choices. They would demand children be taught their beliefs in public school, and that any public expression of my own faith be vilified and suppressed. If they could, they would take up the sword of conversion again. I thank my gods and theirs that they do not represent the dominant voice of Christianity.
There remain those who hail Saint Patrick and those like him as heroes for bringing Christianity to the ignorant heathens. They see how colonial interests arrived upon far shores and promptly began ‘educating’ the indigenous peoples out of their traditions, and they call that noble work. That colonialists later brutally eradicated those who wouldn’t embrace the new ways is just, apparently, the tragedy of those who will not listen.
I can’t celebrate dominionism, current or historical - not with false jocularity, not with invented mocking holidays, not with defiant anger. It remains far too real a concern to hold in that disregard, to keep at that distance.
So, today instead of green I wear red, the color I associate with Brighid. Instead of cheery fake-green food for the office potluck, I baked soda bread and made fresh butter for it, adding honey and blackberries so that sustenance may be balanced with sweetness.
And instead of loud anger, instead of defiance, I offer dominionism this quiet promise: You will have to kill me. I will not kneel.
I love you all.