notentirely: theoriginaljoefisher: GPOYW.
A whole mess of years ago, as we teetered on the brink of the dark ages, God approached a Welsh Cardinal and said, “Remember that island where you were a slave for a while? The really green one? Go there. Teach them to be good people.”
And it was God talking. So what do you do?
And he crossed a couple of seas and landed on a savage land. A land full of men who would charge into battle naked, whose men would have sex with a horse as a right of passage on their 15th birthday, but mostly an island full of people who were sad. There was a sadness to the Celts that was, well, sad. Patrick sensed that. He wanted nothing more than to heal them of that.
He did that with Ideas. He shared with them all the wisdom of the ancients. Plato, Socrates, Aechylus. They loved it.
He created this crazy thing called a University. A place where people would go, learn, drink, and then be cast out into the world with only ideas as their tools.
And then, when the clouds of the dark ages spanned out across the continent, Patrick and his people bided their time, and then took all that Patrick taught them and infested the land with all it had lost. They called it the Renaissance.
Patrick died not knowing what he had achieved, but he didn’t go there for achievement. He went there because he was called to. Solemnly, without question, he answered the call.
They called him Padraig. And the island they all lived on they called Dun Padraig. Patrick’s Fort.
Today we remember him by drinking a lot of booze, which is probably not what he would’ve wanted, but he was an understanding guy, which is rare these days in a Cardinal of the Catholic Church.
Here’s to you Patrick.
