NeuroDivine

Every March, our feeds fill with familiar images of St Patrick: mitre high, crozier lifted, green vestments glowing through stained glass. He is almost always shown as a medieval Catholic bishop—a visual tradition shaped by centuries of devotional art.

But Patrick lived long before any of our denominational boundaries. He is a saint of the undivided Church, claimed by no single tradition and belonging to the whole island.

So why do we so rarely see him through an Anglican visual imagination?

Irish Anglicans could just as faithfully depict Patrick in rochet, chimere, and black scarf—the vesture that shapes our own liturgical imagination. Not to rewrite history, but to acknowledge that imagery is a language, and languages evolve. When we only ever see Patrick in one visual vocabulary, we quietly narrow the ways people can imagine themselves belonging.

The same is true of symbols. The Church of Ireland’s General Synod has long recommended the St Patrick’s Cross—a red saltire on white—as one of two approved flags to be flown from our churches. (The other is the flag of the Anglican Communion.) The red saltire on a white field is a simple, spacious symbol, free from the noise of later politics, and rooted in the shared heritage of the Irish Church. For many of us, it feels like a gentle reclaiming: a way of honouring Patrick without leaning on imagery that doesn’t quite reflect our own tradition.

For neurodivergent Christians especially, representation matters. When the visual world of faith becomes too narrow, it can feel like there’s no doorway shaped for us. But when we allow multiple ways of seeing—Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, Celtic, contemporary—we widen the space. We make room for different bodies, different minds, different ways of praying and belonging.

Patrick is a saint of migration, trauma, resilience, and calling. A saint who crossed boundaries rather than reinforcing them. A saint whose story is big enough for all of us.

So perhaps this St Patrick’s Day, we can imagine him with a little more generosity: in the vesture of our own tradition, beneath the red saltire recommended by our own Synod, standing alongside the whole breadth of Irish Christianity.

Imagery is never neutral. But it can be kind.

And kind imagery helps us breathe.