St. Patrick's Day Musings

About 20 years ago a magazine commissioned me on a tight deadline to write a biographical sketch of St. Patrick. This came as my Father lay dying of cancer in St. Luke’s Hospital, Jacksonville, Florida, and my beloved wife was expecting to give birth in days.

Desperate for the writting commission money, I went to afterburners studying and writing.

I discovered that Patrick of Ireland had written a book, his Confessions. The man’s honesty and dedication to Christ enthralled me. Seldom have I been touched so deeply by another spiritual writing.

Ginny read St. Patrick’s Confessions also and it touched her so that we decided to name our baby after Patrick.

As the magazine deadline approached, Daddy grew worse; it fell out as my duty to stay with him in his hospital room all night every night. Yet, for grocery money, I had to finish that article. The room was too small for a desk so I wrote my biographical sketch of St. Patrick longhand on a yellow legal pad while lying on my stomach on the floor half under Daddy’s bed.

I made the deadline.

I was with Daddy when he died... and in the delivery room with Ginny just days afterwards as she gave birth to our youngest daughter.

We named the beautiful little girl Patricia, a feminine form of Patrick. The Latin name means “noble”.

If anybody is interested in reading the sketch of St. Patrick, which quotes liberally from his Confessions, you'll find it among my religious humor essays on my website at www.cowart.info.

Good thing for Patricia that I was not writing about Polycarp at the time of her birth or she’d have ended up with some perfectly ghastly name.

Incidentally, I understand that this particular article was translated into a dozen or so foreign languages and was circulated around the world.