LENT · 17 MARCH ◆ Celtic Saint
Saint Patrick of Ireland
Bishop & Confessor · Apostle of Ireland · c. 390–460
O God, who didst call thy servant Patrick out of the captivity of his youth to become the apostle and shepherd of the very people among whom he had been enslaved; Grant that we, remembering the mercies by which thou hast delivered us, may in like manner return good for evil, and count no sorrow of the past too great a price for the souls thou wouldest have us win; through Jesus Christ our Saviour, who is the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever.
Patrick was born on the Cornish coast of Roman Britain — his father a deacon, his grandfather a priest — but by his own later admission he took none of it seriously as a boy. He was sixteen when Irish raiders came down on the estate, took him captive along with a great many others, and carried him across the sea into slavery. For six years he herded sheep on an Irish hillside, alone for long stretches with nothing to do but watch the weather and, as he tells it, pray: up to a hundred prayers in a day, and nearly as many in the night, in frost and snow and rain, until the praying itself began to change him. Nothing here was chosen. The wilderness was imposed on him by armed men in boats, and he was remade in it anyway.
A voice in a dream told him a ship was ready, though the harbour was some two hundred miles off and he had never been there. He walked it, found the ship, and after some difficulty persuaded a wary crew to take him aboard. The way home was not direct — by his own account the ship's company wandered some weeks before Patrick found his way back to his family, who had long since given him up for lost. It would have been a complete story on its own — captivity, escape, return — but Patrick's account does not end there. Another dream came, this time a man named Victoricus carrying letters out of Ireland, and as Patrick began to read one he heard, as if from the people themselves, we beg you, holy youth, to come and walk again among us. He crossed to Gaul to prepare, and was trained for the priesthood there under the young, still-forming monastic discipline associated with Martin of Tours — years of formation before he was ready to go back. He returned to Ireland a bishop in his early forties, not as a captive this time, and not to the family that had once owned him, but to the whole of the country that had enslaved him, making his base at Armagh, which remains the seat of the Irish Church to this day.
He wrote of his own unworthiness for the work in terms that have outlasted every embellishment later ages piled on top of him. I was like a stone lying in deep mire, he says of himself before his captivity, and he that is mighty came and in his mercy lifted me up. The Patrick of legend drives snakes from Ireland and preaches the Trinity with a shamrock; the Patrick of his own Confessio is a much plainer man, uncertain of his Latin, aware that better-educated churchmen looked down on him, and determined all the same to set down an honest account of what God had done with an unpromising life. He baptised thousands, ordained clergy, and planted churches the length and breadth of a country that had no bishop before him — though the diocesan order he had known in Gaul never took root there as he had hoped; Ireland's geography and clan structure resisted it. What held instead were the monastic foundations he left behind almost as an afterthought to the diocesan plan, and it was those monasteries, not the bishoprics, that carried the faith forward after his death and became Ireland's great gift back to a Europe sliding into its own dark centuries. He also refused the gifts that Irish kings pressed on him — not from indifference to their goodwill, but because he would not let anyone say afterward that he had preached the Gospel for profit.
The Lenten season, when his feast most often falls, is built on exactly this pattern: the desert not sought but endured, and grace found waiting in it regardless. Patrick's Confessio is, in its way, a Lenten document before there was a season by that name — an old man's unflinching self-examination, written not to defend his reputation but simply to give an account of the mercy that had carried him from a hillside in bondage to a diocese of his own founding. The man who returned in power to the very people who had once owned him is as complete a picture of forgiveness as the Calendar offers: not forgetting the wrong, but refusing to let it have the last word.
Almighty God, who didst strengthen thy servant Patrick to return in love to the land of his bondage, and by his labours didst raise up a Church in Ireland where before there had been darkness; Grant that we, following his example, may forgive freely as we have been forgiven, and count it our joy to serve those among whom providence hath set us; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.