St. Paddy's, and...

 Yes, today is St. Patrick's Day. I am ethnically *somewhat* Irish (best I can guess: 3/8 - my dad was half Irish, my mom is 1/4 Irish (she had one Irish heritage grandparent). (The remainder of my ethnicity - again, best guess - is 1/4 German, mostly Northern German, and the rest a mix of British, Scots, French, and perhaps a tiny bit of Hungarian via a distant ancestor).

I don't do much for the day, though. Some years I've made soda bread, but meh, I am eating up leftover chili tonight and don't really want soda bread with that. (Also, it can take a while to bake, and I need to finish typing tables before I can go home). 

But there are other saints and "saints" that have their day today - I'm most familiar with "St. Urho," which to my understanding, is mostly a joke saint - created by Finnish-heritage Minnesotans in the 1950s so they have something to celebrate this day. (Or actually: I guess yesterday was his day, so Finns could start drinking beer a day before the Irish). The legend is he drove the grasshoppers out of Finland...

Also apparently this used to be Joseph of Arimathea's day (the man who traditionally is believed to have given up his pre-prepared tomb - so he would have been a fairly wealthy man - to lay Christ in after the crucifixion). There was also a legend that he took the Holy Grail to the British Isles (I forget the reason why).

This year, I learned about St. Gertrude - Gertrude of Nivelles (I guess there was another St. Gertrude). Again, I don't know if she's still in the calendar (I know there once were far more full-fledged saints than are venerated today, at least by most people who venerate the saints). In recent years - one source I looked at said only since the 1980s - she's been designated the patron saint of cats. (Though perhaps in part, that's the ongoing tension in Christianity about "do animals have souls and as a result, do they get a shot at the afterlife?" I would argue yes, any creature capable of feeling love is somehow part of the Divine, but I know some theologians would disagree.)

Apparently, originally, one of her "miracles" was that her abbey had a well, the water of which would ward off rats and mice, and that's where the "cat" connection was forged. (But I think cat lovers might argue that cats should get a patron saint?). She's also a patron saint of gardeners and travelers (and the recently dead, which, one source I looked at noted "are on their own sort of journey") though I thought St. Christopher was for travelers?

(Also, apparently, she has a link to St. Patrick - it is said he watched over her deathbed. I am assuming "in spirit," because I don't think their times and places actually overlapped)

Anyway, having learned that she has apparently been named  the patroness of cats (at least in folk-Catholicism - never officially identified as the patron saint of cats), I got to thinking again about that stray cat I buried this weekend (yes, I am still a little sad and unsettled by that*) and I admit I hope that somehow Gertrude managed to guide her "home" - seeing as she was both a cat, and recently deceased...

(*I am sure it's partly pandemic isolation, partly having had so very many losses in the past few years but I felt this much harder than Before Times Me would have. I am hoping soon to not have my head forcibly turned so often to make me gaze into the abyss, though maybe this is just an unfortunate side effect of getting older?)