More than Green Beer

[image error]“We put no obstacle in anyone’s way,

so that no fault may be found with our ministry…”

(2 Cor 6:3)

More than Green Beer

By Stephen W. Hiemstra

In the late fourth century, a sixteen year old boy named Patrick was kidnapped by Celtic pirates and sold into slavery where he worked for six years herding cattle in the Irish wilderness. Forced to depend on God, he learned to the Celtic language and learned to love the Celtic people. Patrick began to pray for the Irish to reconcile with God. In response to a dream, he escaped his master and returned to England where he studied to become a priest. He was later commissioned as bishop and returned to Ireland as an evangelist. Patrick and his colleagues were so successful in starting churches in Ireland that they later turned their attention to the continent of Europe and began the process of revitalizing the church on the continent (Hunter 2000, 13-25). When people say that Saint Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland, it is not a clever tale but a biblical allusion:

“The LORD God said to the serpent, Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” (Gen 3:14-15 ESV)

The offspring of the woman, of course, refers to Christ to whom Patrick introduced the Irish. Patrick’s walk with the Lord, like that of Joseph (Gen 39), began in adversity and a life of hardship, but it also yielded a rich harvest.

The hardship of the Irish has a long history. In 1976 in graduate school at Cornell University, I had an Irish officemate whose wife was famous for her ability to play the harp. I loved to hear her play and would travel with him to see her perform whenever I could. When he learned that my mother’s maiden name was Deacon, he informed me that we were not really Irish, but Scots, who had been resettled by the English in Northern Ireland and together with the Irish encouraged to immigrate to the New World in the second half of the nineteenth century.[1]

The oldest Deacon that I knew was Richard Henry Deacon, my grandfather. Grandpa Deacon, as we called him, was born in 1895 and as a young man helped settle the Canadian west. Later on he was sent to Europe in the first World War, but thankfully arrived too late to be sent into combat. He later returned to Guelph, Ontario where he tended the boiler at the University of Guelph. In spite of his lack of education, he rescued textbooks from the boiler fires to read on his own and particularly enjoyed reading a good “murder book”, as he used to call them.

Grandpa Deacon was a live wire and a constant joker. He once told the story of visiting a graveyard only to find two men buried in the same grave—“the tombstone read: he lies a lawyer and an honest man.” He used to drink and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day until his doctor told him that his emphysema would kill him if he didn’t give it up—he quit that very day and never smoked again. Still, the rest of his life he wheezed constantly and walked with a limp, having fallen off a ladder out repairing a roof.

Grandpa was always handy and always visited us when dad had a big project to take on, like finishing a basement bedroom. He used to say that “if you don’t have a tool; make one”. In grade school, for example, he built me a small cross-bow using only the scraps of wood and metal that we had lying around the house. At that point in my life, I did not appreciate how uniquely talented he was, but later in my career as a financial engineer and was thrown only “scraps” to work with, I built a lot of such tools. Like Grandpa, I learned to work with the tools at hand.

Grandpa was also fun to visit because he shared my youthful passion for fishing. When I visited, he early on took me fishing and later on took me to visit in-laws who lived on the farm, knowing my fascination with farming. On one such visit, I remember walking in on a family sitting down to lunch which featured soup bones—potatoes and turnips were also in ample supply, but the bones stood out to my youthful eyes. The Deacons ate better than the farm folks, in part, because grandpa had a regular paying job, was an avid gardener and fisherman, and had fruit and nut trees out back—it also did not hurt having the corner store was just down the hill from the house at 123 Granger Street. Still, the threat of poverty was never far off, something I never forgot.

Grandpa died in 1980 following complications, likely sepsis, due to a prostate operation. The only time I ever saw my mom cry was when they lowered Richard Henry into the grave there in Woodlawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Guelph. His son, Dick, inherited the house; my aunt, Judy, took me aside that day and gave me his gold regimental ring, which Maryam wears to this day.

My grandmother, Marietta Salter Deacon, was a social butterfly and a devote Baptist who led my mother to get involved with mission work at a young age. When Marietta died in 1941 from stomach cancer and was buried in Wingham, my mother was left to take care of her younger siblings while she herself remained a teenager. My own “mission work” with Hispanic day workers is a tribute, in part, to Marietta.

Having a bit of Irish in me used to mean little more than green beer on Saint Patrick’s Day. The more I learned, however, about Saint Patrick—some credit him with saving the Christian faith from fourth century decadence—the more I realized that I inherited more than just a full head of hair from the Deacon family.

References

Freeman, Philip. 2004. Saint Patrick of Ireland: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Hunter III, George G. 2000. The Celtic Way of Evangelism: How Christianity can Reach the West…Again. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

Marx, Karl. 1887. Capital A Critique of Political Economy: Volume I Book One: The Process of Production of Capital. Edited by Frederick Engels;Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Cited: 11 November 2016. Online: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1.

[1] Details of the Irish story are treated at great length in Karl Marx’s Capital, Vol 1.