Tag Archives: confession

Patrick’s journey through the wilderness, and ours

A life in the Spirit, Spiritual direction, The Mission, , , ,

I feel like I escaped 2025 only to run into Trump’s War with Iran in 2026, just as the crocus began to bloom. Will these days be full of the moments we remember the rest of our lives? If so, may my grandchildren remember how terrible it was when they look back on their youth from their secure, reimagined future.

When we were walking our neighborhood in the wind yesterday, we ran into about 200 of St. Joseph’s finest having a moment. They were getting drunk in honor of St. Patrick at an elaborately planned backyard party. We heard them from a couple of blocks away. I wonder how they will look back on that day  I hope they will be amazed at how God touched them in their ignorance and at least a couple of them might say, “I was numbed that year in response to the war and everything, but God called me out.”

If that happened, it would be much more in the spirit of St. Patrick than getting drunk in his honor and tormenting the rather protective neighbors of Wynnefield who have such pride in their old neighborhood.

Patrick’s confession

There are so many good reasons to honor Patrick, even if you are not Irish. In his shockingly vulnerable autobiography Confession, St. Patrick has some encouragement for everyone who is seeing themselves for who they really are.

12 So I am first of all a simple country person, a refugee, and unlearned. I do not know how to provide for the future. But this I know for certain, that before I was brought low, I was like a stone lying deep in the mud. Then he who is powerful came and in his mercy pulled me out, and lifted me up and placed me on the very top of the wall. That is why I must shout aloud in return to the Lord for such great good deeds of his, here and now and forever, which the human mind cannot measure.

Patrick came from an aristocratic family in Britain before he was kidnapped and enslaved in Ireland. Even before he was that slave he says he was a “stone in the mud.” As it turns out, becoming an ignorant country person, a refugee, was the best thing that ever happened to him. Because it was in that condition, he met God. All over the war-torn world right now, refugee teenagers are becoming brilliant in faith or terror.

He is writing his Confession after he successfully fulfilled his calling to share the Good News of Jesus with the Irish people — he has become the bishop of a burgeoning network of churches! He tells a story about how rivals tried to bring him down by making known a story about some unknown sin he committed when he was a pre-Christian teen. Slander creates permanent wounds. But nothing can undo the joy he finds in being called and empowered to do what he is given to do.

13 So be amazed, all you people great and small who fear God! You well-educated people in authority, listen and examine this carefully. Who was it who called one as foolish as I am from the middle of those who are seen to be wise and experienced in law and powerful in speech and in everything? If I am most looked down upon, yet he inspired me, before others, so that I would faithfully serve the nations with awe and reverence and without blame: the nations to whom the love of Christ brought me. His gift was that I would spend my life, if I were worthy of it, to serving them in truth and with humility to the end.

Nobody writes such things unless they have a moment by moment experience of God’s presence. Patrick honed his relationship out in the hills with the sheep, day and night. I was out honing and being honed on retreat last week, forcing myself to get into the season of Lent. More than ever, we need the self-imposed wilderness of Lent needs to do its work as the bombs go off in Tehran

In the wilderness

As Patrick tells his story I’m encouraged to hear another tale of God calling a person from out of nowhere and providing for them in the worst conditions. Patrick tells of how God spoke to him out in the field about the ship that would carry him from Ireland and his captivity. He manages to get on it after travelling to the other side of the island. Once on shore again, the whole crew ends up in an unpopulated wilderness for 28 days without food until Patrick prays up some pigs. Like Jesus in the wilderness, he feels tested and cared for.

If he were a client of mine, the following story would be an interesting description the anxiety he carried born of all the trauma he had experienced — stolen from his parents, enslaved, and now lost in the wilderness with people he barely knows in a place he has never been. How many college students feel like that? How many people reading right now?

20 That same night while I was sleeping, Satan strongly put me to the test – I will remember it as long as I live! It was as if an enormous rock fell on me, and I lost all power in my limbs. Although I knew little about the life of the spirit at the time, how was it that I knew to call upon Helias? While these things were happening, I saw the sun rise in the sky, and while I was calling “Helias! Helias!” with all my strength, the splendour of the sun fell on me; and immediately, all that weight was lifted from me. I believe that I was helped by Christ the Lord, and that his spirit cried out for me. I trust that it will be like this whenever I am under stress, as the gospel says: “In that day, the Lord testifies, it will not be you will speak, but the Spirit of your Father who speaks in you.”

It seems to me that paragraph sums up his life very well. You may have had a similar dream sometime. A doctor says, “A dream featuring heavy pressure on the chest, often accompanied by an inability to move, is typically a symptom of sleep paralysis. This occurs when the brain wakes from REM sleep while the body remains sleep-paralyzed, often creating hallucinations of a suffocating presence or ‘weight’ on the chest. It is generally harmless but terrifying.” Anxiety and stress can trigger these episodes as well as sleep deprivation. The researchers will give you ways to prevent it. Your spiritual director might help you listen to it.

How Patrick responds to his dream , for some reason he does not know — except to attribute it to grace, is to call on the sun. If you were Greek, you might name your son “Helias,” which is like a personal name for the helios. He called out, “Helias, come help me.” And the sun brightened and warmed his paralyzed body and terrified soul. Maybe that experience is one of the reasons, Patrick installed a sun at the center of the cross, so the Irish could feel the light like he did.

The circle represents the sun

In honor of Patrick, in defiance of the fascists, it might feel like sunrise in your soul to take his story seriously, as if you still mean something, too. It would be refreshing to follow Patrick’s example, even bearing the wounds of your past, even carrying the memories of your youthful sins and your feelings of anxiety — or the exhaustion of resisting feeling any anxiety in these terrible times, and not just get drunk. March 17 is the day we remember him.

You might read the Confessions. My son and I made a post at our site where you can learn all about Patrick.

You could listen to a dream. Here is a means to do that if you need one.

You could remember your youth, examine your wounds and let yourself be warmed in the sunlight of God’s forgiveness and endless love for you.

You could consider what it is you are given to do in this challenging era. Stones in the mud are undoubtedly being plucked out right now and installed atop some wall, large or small. Patrick never forgot the absurdity of being the unlettered slave boy called to free his captors and those enslaved to their God-free ways. We just don’t know what God is going to do with us in our wilderness, either, do we?

Dahleen Glanton: White people, you are the problem

Life as the church, The Mission, ,

While we were collecting input for the church’s mapping process in one of my cells last week, we got to talking about racism. We noted everyone who showed up was of the dominant “race.” And though we were all firmly committed to stomping out the sin of racism, we all remembered times when we did not do what we could do to do the stomping personally.

Dahleen Glanton – Chicago Tribune

We had to admit we could not fully escape accusations like the ones Dahleen Glanton piled up in the Chicago Tribune on May 31. Here’s part of what she said:

“White people don’t like watching hardcore racism…. And while the stories make their way through the news cycle, you and your friends lament how awful racism is.

Then before you know it, your drive-by rage is over.

You conclude that the terrible incident doesn’t affect you directly. So you drift back into oblivion, convinced there’s nothing you can do about racist cops or the racist society that breeds them.

But you are wrong. White people, you are the problem.

Regardless of how much you say you detest racism, you are the sole reason it has flourished for centuries. And you are the only ones who can stop it…

Too many white people are satisfied doing nothing to bring about substantive change…. You should talk among yourselves and figure it out. In the midst of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, you managed to put a man on the moon. You could make the same commitment to stomping out racism….

Racists are counting on you to continue doing nothing. They are certain that before long, you will return to your blissful state of denial, where racism is somebody else’s problem. And you will not disappoint them.

Racists know some of you better than you know yourselves.”

We do know ourselves and each other rather well in our cell. So we don’t shy away from confessing. Last week we had to admit that doing the “little things “ when it comes to the big thing of racism makes more of a difference than we wish. We had to confess how easy it is not to get into it with people who threaten us or just disturb us with their racist behavior.

Philly police stood by as men with baseball bats ‘protected’ Fishtown. Some residents were assaulted and threatened.
Inquirer June 2 — Philly police stood by as men with baseball bats ‘protected’ Fishtown.

One of us started us off with a story. One time a man was getting raccoons out of our friend’s house. He asked the man what he did with the animals after he caught them. The man said he took them to a black neighborhood and let them go. Our friend confessed he did not confront him.

Another of us told the story about his neighbor in Fishtown. He had a nice relationship with the old man. A few weeks ago the man challenged him to get his bat and join him in protecting Fishtown, assuming he would go along. Our cell mate told his neighbor he was “not that way” and the man went ahead without him. The neighbor has not spoken to him since. We prodded our friend to follow up.

Another of us talked about his daughter spending her first year away at college. She realized her Philadelphia experience, including African American history education, was unique among her peers who lived segregated/sheltered lives (and who have trouble relating to aggrieved people of color).  As he reflects on his privilege and considers how to be a better ally, he is learning from his kids.

I personally went way back to my birth family, which was run by a genuine racist from Oklahoma. My father would have thought Tulsa was a huge city even in his day. He was born out on the panhandle a year after the massacre. My memory is that I never let one of his racist remarks go unprotested. I even wrote a short story in the seventh grade about the variety of names he had to slur every race and ethnicity under the sun. But the fact is, I only periodically had the courage to protest. In fact, the whole family codependently turned his hate speech into a joke, an odd trait of our otherwise useful breadwinner. My antiracism eventually became something others in the family would not confront. But I certainly know what it is like to take a pass because I can.

Like Dahleen Glanton says, we so-called “white people,” who can protest being lumped into a race because we have the privilege associated with that race, should talk among ourselves and figure stuff out. Christians, in particular, have an even deeper responsibility to risk what it takes to overcome evil with good, so we need to learn how to have a good dialogue, not just an argument. Even if the workman mocks us, if the neighbor cuts us off, if the school chums label us, or if the family is disrupted, we need to trust God and risk following Jesus, who not only loves everyone, but transforms them into his own likeness.

Racists are counting on people like me doing nothing – at least nothing that costs me too much, nothing that will cause conflict, nothing that will take too much energy. They are certain that before long, the streets will return to the homeostasis of the dominant culture and racism only be a problem the next time it explodes out of the fragile box of denial and apathy in which it is vainly kept.

Right now our church is having an appropriate eruption of righteous anger along with much of the rest of the United States. We’ll see what happens. Some angry people will run over others until their anger subsides. Some resistant people will cut others off and retain their privilege to let it all be about somebody else. We might get divided and need to regroup. People could lose their faith because influential people follow politics and not Jesus. Regardless, “white” people stuck in the U.S. need to figure this out, or die trying — especially people who say they follow Jesus.