If you live in one of the major metropolitan areas of the eastern U.S. or, in the British Isles, near Ireland, you have no doubt noticed that today is St. Patrick's Day.  Celebrated by Irish (and many others) the world over, it commemorates the life and death of the most famous Christian missionary in Ireland.  Historians agree that regardless of the various rumors swirling about Patrick's life, education, or origins, he definitively broke the back of the region's paganism and laid the groundwork for the emergence of the Catholic Church, which continues to dominate Ireland to this day.
     According to Patrick's writings, his conversion was a sense of God opening to him "the sense of my unbelief that I might remember my sins and that I might return with my whole heart to the Lord my God."  One thinks of William James's (in his Varieties of Religious Experience) characterizations of conversion as a sense of transformation and entrance into a newness that its holder had not previously imagined.  Also, conversion, as he sees it, motivates its holder to proclaim what she has found, to let others know what remarkable thing has happened to her.
     So it did for Patrick.  Like the apostle Paul, who was completely transformed on the road to Damascus (see Acts 9), Patrick was similarly compelled to go to Ireland and preach as long as he had strength.  Religious conversion tends to do this to people.  Although it can touch on extremes, for instance, the violent actions of religious fundamentalists--of all faiths--the world over, on the whole, it leaves people wanting to do little but share what they have found.  They usually cannot help it, so great is the insight they have been given.
     How ironic it is, then, that the conversion of someone so long ago has produced a day of drink-filled partying and mirth around the West!  On the other hand, religion happens to all of us in context.  God never changes, but we all find him in different ways.  Though Jesus remains the key, we come into knowing him in a nearly infinite number of circumstances, the patterns of our culture, our lives, and our individual hearts.  God's designs are inevitably far bigger than our own.  Enjoy the party.