Today is Trinity Sunday – a day to celebrate the Church’s teaching that we know and serve one God in three Persons. When theologians talk about the Trinity, the word “Persons” has some specific technical meaning – but it also means more or less what we mean by “person” in everyday life. The Father, Son, and Spirit – Source, Word, and Breath – are not just different aspects or costumes God wears sometimes, but different People, within the unity of one God. It is paradoxical, and mysterious, and there have been so many arguments over it, and so many books written, over the course of church history. I’m more or less with Ann Lamott: “I don’t need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity. I just need to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.” Which is to say, I’m OK with not having the Trinity all figured out. But that’s not to say that it’s not important to me. It is.
This has been a troubling – a frightening – week in the news. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, is under pressure from the White House to detain and deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible. Finding it difficult to meet their quotas with criminals and drug dealers, ICE is seeking out ordinary community members – folks who work in construction and agriculture and food service, and other jobs that we all depend on. ICE is staking out places where people come to do immigration check-ins, in compliance with federal policy, and then seizing people. They are reportedly seizing undocumented children from their foster homes. They’re raiding graduation ceremonies, hoping to seize family members gathered to celebrate their kids’ accomplishments. After ICE raids in Los Angeles, community members turned out to protest, and in response, the National Guard and Marines have been called in, raising the threat that military force could be used against American civilians, on the pretext that these protests against the kidnapping of neighbors amount to a “rebellion.”
What does a Trinitarian faith do for us in times like these?
When I look at what’s happening in Los Angeles – when I wonder what might happen in Dane County, and what I, and we, will do – it helps me to know that we are grounded in faith in a God who is making the universe and holds all in love. It helps me to know that we have Jesus Christ’s teaching and example to show us what it looks like to stand in love with, and for, our neighbors. It helps me to know that we are given the gift of the Holy Spirit within and among us. I’m trying to trust her to do the things that Scripture promises she will do, and that I have known her to do: Guide me, help me know which way to turn and what path to follow. Help me know when to listen closely – and when to speak up. Give me the courage to know and to do what is mine to do.
Later this morning we’ll sing one of my very favorite hymns – I Bind Unto Myself Today, sometimes called St. Patrick’s Breastplate. I wrote about this hymn a few months ago for Earth & Altar, an online journal of all things Anglican; the editor-in-chief is another priest of this diocese, Chris Corbin. Check it out!
We sing this hymn every year on Trinity Sunday because it’s a Trinitarian hymn. But there’s more to say about it. I’m going to share – and expand on – what I wrote for Earth & Altar, here.
My first and deepest memories of this hymn are not in the jeweled light of stained glass windows at church, but in the comfortable darkness of my bed. My mother used to sing it to me at bedtime to help me fall sleep. I asked for it often, because it was long. I don’t know why she often agreed to my request, a transparent bargain to extend her presence in my room. Maybe she went along with it for the same reasons I’d later sing it to my children regularly: because a long, familiar song allows a certain amount of autopilot while your mind wanders; because singing a lengthy and detailed prayer of protection feels like a good way to commend a child to the night; because she liked it, as I do.
I did sing St. Patrick’s Breastplate at church too. We showed up just about every Sunday at St. George’s in Riverside, California until I was seven, when we moved and became regulars at St. John’s in Lafayette, Indiana. But yet again, my relationship with this hymn would deepen not in church but with my nose in a book. As a kid I read two different “chapter books” in which this ancient prayer formed a significant plot point. The first was The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull, one of John Bellairs’ spooky young adult novels. While my memory of it is hazy, I recall that before some boss battle with the forces of evil, the main character’s priest friend tells him to use the words to this hymn for protection. That’s the first time I remember realizing that the familiar hymn was something more than just a hymn.
The second book was Madeleine L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet, my favorite of her books. L’Engle uses what seems to be her own version of the first verse of Patrick’s prayer as part her story of a cosmic battle between good and evil through time. This version of the prayer lives in my heart alongside the hymn:
At Tara in this fateful hour I call on heaven with all its power, and the sun with its brightness, and the snow with its whiteness, and the fire with all the strength it hath, and the lighting 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.
For a child deep in the thrall of various fictional worlds more obviously enchanted than our own, it was an appealing idea: that this hymn, previously notable for its length, was actually something special and powerful, something bordering on the magical – although Bellairs and L’Engle, both Christians, were careful not to suggest that divine power could be commanded, only invoked or invited.
The way this ancient hymn-prayer was used in these books is arguably more true to its origins than singing it at St. John’s, Lafayette, on an ordinary Sunday morning. The earliest written fragments of the Irish text behind the hymn date from the 9th century – the same time frame as the Book of Kells. In an 11th-century text, a more complete version of the prayer is accompanied by an account of its origin. That text explains that Saint Patrick, the great evangelist of Ireland, who lived in the fifth century, composed and sang this song-poem as a prayer for protection, when a local king was trying to attack him and his monks to stop them from spreading Christianity in Ireland. In my household we often refer to this hymn-prayer as the Lorica – a Latin word for a breastplate or body armor. In the early Irish Church, by analogy, that word also came to mean a prayer for protection. Hence the common name for this hymn, St. Patrick’s Breastplate.
In the 19th century, the fiercely talented Anglo-Irish hymn-writer Cecil Frances Alexander translated the Irish text and turned it into a hymn. (She also wrote “All things bright and beautiful” and “Once in royal David’s city,” among others.) Her version appears as number 370 in our hymnal, minus a couple of verses that were too weird to make the cut. If you need a prayer against lust or evil wizards, you’ll have to find the original text online.
The origin story of the text connects it with Tara, a site in the east of Ireland, north of Dublin. On our recent trip we had a chance to stop at Tara, briefly, and stand on that windy green hill, and look out over half of Ireland, and feel deep, deep history thrumming beneath our feet. The Hill of Tara is an ancient burial and ceremonial site, which has been seen as a place of power for 5000 years or more. Kings were crowned there for millennia, and it was an important pre-Christian holy site. Those associations – with the kingship and pre-Christian religion – explain why this was a significant site of confrontation for Patrick and his mission.
We might have slightly mixed feelings about the hymn’s origin story, as part of the conquest of Irish indigenous religion by Christianity. But let’s notice how Celtic hymn is – how much it reflects the indigenous spirituality of the western British Isles: the sense of the natural world as immediately reflective of God’s grace and power. The detailed lists and layers that weave a dense fabric of prayer – in this hymn, the verses touch on not only the natural world but also moments in the life of Christ, the angels and saints, and aspects of God’s divine being and power. There’s the sense of space and sacred direction in the B-section, the verse that breaks format to invoke Christ on all sides of the singer or pray-er: Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ behind and before and beside me.
The Lorica is specifically a prayer for protection. I bind unto myself today means, Let whoever tries to fight me find that they’re not just fighting me, but all God’s angel army, the powers of Creation, the good deeds of all righteous people, and so on – tapped into like batteries to power my personal holy deflector shield. I don’t remember the details of how this prayer worked in those books I read as a child, but it was an effective deterrent to the forces of evil. I envision the protagonists surrounded by some kind of glowing orb of holy shelter, while the powers that seek to corrupt and destroy the creatures of God reel back, dismayed. I don’t know that that’s how it works in the real world, but I also don’t know that that’s not how it works in the real world. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
I do know that praying the protection of the Trinity, with these fierce ancient words, reminds me that I am named and known and held by a Love stronger than anything that can come at me or those I love. Belonging to God doesn’t mean we’ll be always be safe – Christ Crucified should disabuse us of that notion. But Christ Risen points us towards trust in a loving Power stronger than the powers of death and destruction.
When I became a parent, just about twenty years ago, it was my turn to sit in the dark and sing a child to sleep. Sometimes I would sing Hymn 370 – favored, as always, for its length, somber gentleness, and sense of wrapping God’s protection around a beloved child. Our two children tolerated us singing to them at bedtime for an astonishingly long time. We spent over a decade singing to a child, or two, for part of every evening. How many times did we sing the Lorica? Two thousand? Three?
I don’t sing the Lorica very often anymore – sometimes only when it comes around at church a couple of times a year. I miss singing my children to sleep, not least because it was a chance to sit in the dark and tell them how much I love them for half an hour every night, wrapping them in prayer like a warm blanket.
There’s a lot to be fearful about, beloveds. In the face of many-layered threats to our health and dignity and work, our communities and neighbors and sacred landscapes, it helps me to know that we are grounded in faith in a God who is making the universe and holds all in love. It helps me to know that we have Jesus Christ to show us what it looks like to stand with, and for, our neighbors. It helps me to know that we are given the gift of the Holy Spirit to inspire, guide, and encourage us.
Writing about this hymn, last winter, got me thinking that I need to work it into my prayer life more regularly – to call on sun and moon, earth and sea, the vigilance of angels, the witness of the faithful departed, the great Name of the Trinity itself, to tend and guard all those whom I love and commend to God in prayer.
Writing about this hymn, this week, made me want to offer it to all of you as well. This hymn is more than a hymn. It’s a cry from the heart in the face of danger. It’s a naming of what is good and strong and holy, a reminder that all is not lost. It calls on God to show us what is always already true: that we are held in love, and never forsaken.
Maybe that helps us sleep through the night, or get up in the morning. Maybe that helps us speak our truth or stand with our neighbors. Maybe that helps us persist, endure, even thrive, in strange and difficult times – with the power of lightning and wind, rock and sea, angels and saints, tomb and resurrection, the Three in One and One in Three, standing between ourselves and the powers of darkness.
May it be so. Amen.