4:34am February 28, 2015

“At Tara today in this fateful hour
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And fire with all the strength it hath,
And lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the earth with its starkness
All these I place,
By God’s almighty help and grace,
Between myself and the powers of darkness.”

—

The Rune of St. Patrick", derived from “The Lorica”, both traditionally attributed to St. Patrick, published in Lyrica Celtica (1896); also in Celtic Christianity : Ecology and Holiness (1987) by Christopher Bamford and William Parker Marsh, p. 54

I was just looking up some stuff from A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle (warning: I love most of the story, but there’s some serious racism in that book and all the other ones where she gets obsessed with “blue-eyed Indians” and the like), and I came across St. Patrick’s Rune, which was used repeatedly in that book. Whatever my own religious and spiritual views, or my complicated view of St. Patrick, along with not knowing whether he really wrote it or not…

…I still think this is a beautiful and powerful prayer for protection. It’s uncommon that I find a Christian prayer that so heavily invokes the powers of nature as protective forces. And I love it. I think this may be my favorite Christian prayer. I could just as well see a nature-worshipper (1) using it.

[Footnotes under cut.]

(1) For lack of a better term, and to avoid equating all nature worship with neopaganism or all neopaganism with nature worship.

I could be called a nature worshipper I guess (though it makes me uneasy), since much of my ‘religion’ is derived from the cycles of life in a redwood forest, but a neopagan I’m not, that’s not a community I feel remotely safe in. Nor do I claim that my 'nature worship’ is descended from human religions in some kind of ancient lineage from pre-Christian times. It’s something that just happened to me through an intense connection with the forest I lived in as a baby and infant. A connection rekindled when dealing with life-threatening chronic illness. Nobody taught it to me but the forest itself.

Oh, and I’m not saying St. Patrick was a nature worshipper either, just that I can see why this particular prayer would appeal to one.