St. Patrick's Come to Jesus Moment

March 17th is the day we honor the day Saint Patrick died. I'm not sure if that's true of all saints, that we honor the day they died? Are there any other Saints we have a National celebration for? This is a rabbit hole I will save for another day, but it's a legit question.

I learned today that St. Patrick wasn't Irish. Maybe you knew that. He was British.

In fact another surprise was that he only wound up in Ireland because he had been taken captive on a slave ship. Why didn't I know that? Slavery was common throughout that part of the world at that time.

He was sixteen (385 - 461AD), when he arrived on the island in the hull of a slave ship. There he spent the next six years caring for his captors flock of sheep. It was during this time that today's namesake Saint got serious about faith.

His father was a Christian deacon and a minor Roman official. His grandfather was a priest. This gave him much to meditate on in his isolation, much like King David the author of much of the book of Psalms,

The Lord is my Shepherd,

I will not be in need.

He lets me lie down in green pastures;

He leads me beside quiet waters.

He restores my soul;

Psalms 23

It is said St. Patrick was not a believer prior to his capture. He was sixteen just starting to see things through a different lens. He had to have been somewhat reverent as would have been expected, since boyhood. At the least, he would have observed his father and grandfather in their official duties. As an emerging young man, he was likely developing his own ideas about it all.

What kind of faith had Patrick been exposed to I wonder as I am writing this?

So like a good geek I lamely Googled, English Faith 400 ad. I read long enough to glean the fact that nothing has changed in all of these hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. It was then as it is now. Politics, power, religion, geography, pontification, justification, taxation etc...

That is what the Wiki page rambled on about to my inquiry of their faith.

I wanted to know what it was they actually believed, the code of conduct their religion dictated. Instead I scrolled through who dominated by force and or finances, the drawing of lines to define ownership, how history was rewritten when rulers died, especially in the cases of political martyrdom. Canonization seemed to cover all sorts of misdeeds back in the day.

My point is that Saint Patrick would have been exposed to enough piety and politics to need to make some decisions about what his faith meant to him.

There are tales of his daring escape from his captors after seemingly miraculous favor found him aboard a ship heading back home to Britain.

This written by St. Patrick himself in his diary explains the circumstances that brought him home to his family.

"In St. Patrick's telling in the Confessio, he almost died after his escape from slavery. After landing on the continent, the ship’s crew found itself wandering for weeks in a wilderness devoid of food and began to chastise Patrick for his piety. “What about this, Christian? You tell us that your God is great and all-powerful—why can’t you pray for us, since we’re in a bad state with hunger?” the starving sailors asked him. 

“Turn in faith with all your hearts to the Lord my God, because nothing is impossible for him,” replied the young man who led them in a prayer that appeared to be immediately answered when a stampede of pigs crossed their path.

Patrick eventually returned to his family in Great Britain. His parents begged him to never leave them again, but the religious visions returned and presented Patrick with a different plan. After a period of religious training, he was ordained a deacon around 418 A.D. and in 432 A.D. consecrated as a bishop and given the name Patricius.

Although many formerly enslaved people would have dreaded a return to their place of captivity, Patrick asked for an assignment as a missionary to Ireland. Patrick’s knowledge of Ireland’s language and customs facilitated his work in converting and baptizing Druid priests, chieftains and aristocrats by the thousands before his death on March 17 in 461 A.D."

He is widely given credit for the spread of Christianity to parts of Ireland. That he returned to extend love to his captors means a lot more to me than a green river or a clover.

Here is my favorite part;

"Patrick’s knowledge of Ireland’s language and customs facilitated his work..."

It was during his time when he was enslaved that he was unknowingly being equipped for the work he was later called to perform.

“...he came to understand the Irish Celtic people, and their language and culture, with a kind of intuitive profundity that is usually possible only, as in Patrick’s case, from the ‘underside’” (14). When he eventually escaped from slavery, he was a changed man,

now a Christian from the heart..."

I don't know what it meant to St. Patrick to be "a Christian from the heart." I don't even know how much of this history is true. He was after all influential, ordained by the church and in position to decide how he would be remembered.

What I do know is I can't even remember what I started writing about this morning before I jumped down this rabbit hole. I had my own come to Jesus moment while learning about St. Patrick's.

What seems to be true for him is true for all of us.

Whatever has brought us to this moment in our lives, whatever hell we've endured, whatever opportunities we have had, all of it - has prepared us for whatever lies ahead.

We may not be in a position to impact the history books like St. Patrick. However, we do have a measure of control over our own story by how we respond, how we allow it to mold us, reduce us, refine us into who we are meant to be in this moment.