There is an old legend in Ireland that Saint Patrick banished all snakes from Ireland, that he chased them into the sea.
The story was first written about a different saint, Columba, but has been told and retold about Patrick, that he took time away from famines and shamrocks to fast on the peak of a mountain. While there, he is attacked by snakes, and in his quest for holiness, he interprets this as a spiritual battle. He calls on God and chases the snakes down the mountain and into the ocean. In response to his spiritual struggle, he responds with boldness and, to be sure holy violence. Send the snakes away, for they cannot compare to the glory found in communing with God himself.
This is a fun story, even a lesson, but a story nonetheless. Scholars agree that there has never been a rash of snakes in Ireland, nothing for Saint Patrick to banish or send away. The wise interpreter knows that this is an important detail, that it changes the story. Saint Patrick sends away something that isn’t there, he banishes the thing he inteprets as a spiritual disaster, evil spirits, though none assail him.
The legend is not true, Patrick is not a prophet, but a story embodied.
The snakes are a mirage. Perhaps the snakes and evil spirits of our world are only apparitions; they are what we make of them.
More often than I would like to admit, I feel rage at our current world, the world I will raise my daughter in. Perhaps this is the media spinning up a culture war in every American heart and the shadows playing on the wall make them out to be more scary than not. Perhaps they are not real at all.
It could be that Patrick was onto something and the snakes are real. Maybe the best response is to get up from one’s spiritual battle and drive out the serpents from our midst. Into the sea with the pack; the den, the bed, the nest of them.
Another saint, older and more famous, though he does not own a holiday, has a much different way of dealing with serpents. In Numbers 21, a plague of snakes harasses the people of God. They are not driven out, their poison is effective, their fangs unsheathed. Moses does not pick up his staff to whack the snakes for being snakes.
He is told by God make a bronze snake, to place it on a pole and hold it before the people of God. When they are bitten, they should look upon the bronze snake, that they might live. (Note the image of the snake is close to the Caduceus, the staff of Hermes and used by the medical community. Make of that what you will.)
Some scholars have claimed that Patrick’s tale is a cousin of Moses’s. I’m not sure this is true. Patrick banishes. Moses demands that his people embrace the snake, at least insofar as they must direct their gaze to the snake itself, to the thing that wounds them.
By looking on the thing that wounds, which could be interpreted as their sin or God’s justice or the enemies of the world, and a harder shinier version of it no less, they do what the psychologists call integration.
Jung proposed that we integrate the shadow self, the part of us that is the sin, the wound-giver, the enemy. By looking it fuller in the face, we have victory over it.
Which way is better, I don’t know. If the snakes are not real and we banish ourselves only, then the answer must be to leave the windmills where they are untilted. To return to raising our families, to doing our work with honor.
If the snakes are real, then we could drive them out, return the mountain of God, the city on the hill to its rightful position as the holiest of ground. I’m not sure if it’s possible. Or if that is God’s plan for this moment. Maybe Christ reigns until he puts all enemies under his feet, the serpent crushed under his heel, the last enemy of all being Death.
Maybe God asks us to look that we might live. To look without and get a full view of the thing that bites, to see it for what it truly is. Maybe he calls us to look within and see the part of ourselves that is not a victim or a hero, but a perpetrator.
Maybe some snakes cast large shadows, projecting dragons against the wall like a darker version of Plato’s cave. Maybe the looking precedes the driving out, and the snakes only flee to the sea when they are fully known for what they are.
Maybe every saint deals with snakes in his own way. Maybe that is what sainthood is, the question our holiness asks of us: what will you do with the snakes?