One should never let so much time pass from having read a book, to trying to find the needed passages to quote from to prove a point.
It’s Saturday morning and I’m up early, ambitious and eager to write. It’s a good feeling. Now if I can just find the word threads to weave the right pattern of understanding.
Much of what I learned about St. Patrick was from the book, “How the Irish Saved Civilization” by Thomas Cahill. His obvious respect for the Patron Saint of Ireland is blatant. After reading his book, I admire the man too. What he did bordered on miraculous – was miraculous. He took a people, savage and bloodthirsty, and turned them into followers of Christ, scholars and lovers of books.
Thomas Cahill describes the people of Ireland before Patrick (circa 300-400 A.D.) as an Island of tribes, each led by a “king,” or Chieftan. By their stories from that time period, the values held by these people lay in what you could steal from other tribes, in the battles you fought, in the slaves you took, the kings you killed and the women ravished.
By our terms today, they were savage and barbaric, a bloodthirsty people serving bloodthirsty gods, dominated by the mother goddess and her fertility rites. This was a land never conquered by Rome. They produced marauding pirates that terrorized the northern seas and put fear into the hearts of those populating present day Wales and Cornwall.
It was a band of pirates that in some raid on the Island of Britain, took a young lad from his home and bundled him off to Ireland to become a slave. The boy’s Roman name was Patricius. He would someday become the great St. Patrick. But in this instance, he was nothing, a slave ordered to tend the cattle in remote areas, going months without seeing another person, never having enough to eat, never having enough to wear to keep the cold out. It must have been absolutely miserable.
I know by my own experience that when there is nothing and no one else to turn to, you turn to God.
Patricius, by his own account, was raised a Christian in the British Isles. His father is called a Deacon. “…He tells us that he didn’t really believe in God, and he found priests foolish. But now, there was no one to turn to but the God of his parents.” This was Patrick’s fiery furnace. Day after day, he prayed, year after year.
“Tending flocks was my daily work, and I would pray constantly during the daylight hours. The love of God and the fear of him surrounded me more and more – and faith grew and the Spirit was roused, so that in one day I would say as many as a hundred prayers and after dark, nearly as many again, even while I remained in the woods or on the mountain. I would wake and pray before daybreak – through snow, frost, rain…”
Thus was Patrick’s faith kindled, fanned and fed. His captivity became his salvation. At the end of six years of enslavement, a voice comes to him in the night and tells him, “Your hungers are rewarded: you are going home. Look, your ship is ready.” Patrick, nowhere near the sea, gets up and starts walking. When he makes port, he finds a ship headed for the continent. At first they reject him, but he prays, and they take him on. Patrick makes his escape.
It takes him a few years to get back home, but by the time he does, he is – how shall I say it? – the world would call him a holy man, and that would be a good description, but I think he is more than that. He had just experienced his own slavery in the land of Egypt, his own miraculous crossing of the sea, and a wandering in the wilderness, finally to make it back to the land of promise, his parent’s home. Now he’s ready. He is a true man of Christ, wholly converted.
One night he has a dream. He sees a man he knew in Ireland. The man holds out to him “countless letters,” one of which says, in Latin, The Voice of the Irish. And then he hears a voice, “We beg you to come and walk among us once more.” He wakes.
By his own account, he cannot get the Irish out of his mind. He has dreams and visions, “and Christ begins to speak within him: ‘He who gave his life for you, he it is who speaks within you.’”
Patrick returns to the land of the barbarians, not as a slave, but as a man on a mission for Christ. As the gospel of Christ changed Patrick, it would change the nation of Ireland. Only truth and the witness of the Holy Ghost can do that.
To be continued.
I highly recommend this book, “How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe” by Thomas Cahill, from which much of the information of this blog was taken from.
