Eek! It's St Patrick's Day!

Actually I am not too sure about this "day" business.

As regular readers of my witterings on these pages will know I have a very good friend who just happens to be a nun. I have known her for a long time. We have had many a conversation over the years but I don't think we have ever had a conversation about St Patrick or any other "saint" as an individual. 

I know very little about "saints". I do remember saying something to a former priest of the church the Senior Cat attended about some tedious process requiring "the patience of a saint" and his response as we were still trying to get the task done, "Most saints were very impatient people." I have also said it to some dog owners I know as they wait, with varying degrees of patience, for dogs to do what dogs do. I am impatient too but I am no saint.  

I am not really sure what saint hood actually is. What are these things called "miracles"? Most of them sound pretty unlikely to me....and others can be explained in other ways.  Perhaps it is the timing of things which matters. If miracles occur then it was surely one when, after months of not going into his beloved shed after my mother died, someone phoned the Senior Cat and said, "I need some timber cut on your circular saw." It meant opening the shed and the two men spending a morning carefully cutting some of the most valuable timber available for the purpose of repairing something in the cathedral. 

When B... asked for that and the Senior Cat said, "Of course" then things changed. The Senior Cat went back into the shed. Things did not "go back to normal" because "normal" had changed but the Senior Cat went back to creating things for other people. That mattered. It was a huge step forward in the grieving process for the Senior Cat - and a huge relief for me. 

B... would laugh if I told him he was a saint. He isn't one. He is just an ordinary human being who happened to ask for the right help at the right time, help to do something for someone else. I suspect this might be true of a lot of "saints".  His surname happens to be an Irish one.

I won't go looking for leprechauns today. I will smile if P... tells me it is St Patrick's Day and there is some sort of special mass for the occasion. I am conscious we don't seem to worry about St David or St Andrew in the same way.  It will be good if some of my Irish friends have some fun in their own way.

And I will remember the man who said, "I need some timber cut on your circular saw."