I don’t seem to have much Irish blood in me, but boy, I sure do love Saint Patrick. Recently I was reading my friend Thomas Cahill’s landmark book How the Irish Saved Civilization, and it reminded me just how much Patrick is worth celebrating. What an example he offers of the power of prayer.
READ MORE: St. Patrick’s Day Activities for Families
What St. Patrick Did to Help Others
Patrick was born to a Christian family in England in the late 4th century. At 16 he was kidnapped, enslaved and taken to pagan Ireland. He worked as a shepherd in grueling conditions, suffering from hunger and brutal weather. “Tending flocks was my daily work,” he later wrote, “and I would pray constantly during the daylight hours.”
It was those prayers that kept him alive. “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.” He didn’t have much faith before he became a slave-shepherd, but he did now.
After six years of misery he heard a voice say, “Your hungers are rewarded; you are going home.”
He walked some 200 miles to the sea, never being caught. He was taken aboard a ship and sailed to the continent. This would have been in the early 400s when the Roman Europe was collapsing. The landscape was a desert. The weary seamen searched for food for days, to no avail.
Patrick urged them to pray. “From the bottom of your heart,” he said, “turn trustingly to the Lord my God, for nothing is impossible to him. And today he will send you food for your journey until you are filled, for he has an abundance everywhere.”
Sure enough, the sailors bowed their heads and when they raised their eyes they were treated to the sight of a herd of pigs. Breakfast, lunch and dinner!
Patrick finally made it back to England, and there he had a dream. He was being called back to Ireland. “We beg you to come and walk among us once more,” a voice said, a voice that he came to identify with Christ’s own call.
He knew he needed to grow in faith before he set out for Ireland, so he entered a monastery, studied intensively, and was eventually ordained both a priest and bishop. As Cahill points out, he became “the first missionary bishop” in history.
His return to Ireland could have been disastrous–after all, he’d been a fugitive–but Patrick was able to reach the people through his own apparent goodness, kindness, dedication and prayers. In a matter of years he managed to bring the whole island to a new faith, preaching, baptizing and loving the people to a new God.
In one of the most extraordinary witnesses to faith, he also spoke out against slavery, hundreds of years before anyone ever challenged the institution.
Did he rid the island of snakes or use a shamrock to explain the Trinity? Who knows, although it seems to me if you can explain the Trinity, you really are a saint. It’s his vibrant, visionary faith that speaks down through the years.
A St. Patrick Prayer
Here is the refrain of a prayer attributed to Patrick, often called the Breastplate of Saint Patrick, because of its protective powers. Praying it seems the best way to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day:
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.
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