On the evening of March 17th, 2021, I finally learned the story of St. Patrick, the runaway slave who converted many thousands of Irish souls to Christianity & whose efforts led to the establishment of 350 churches across Ireland.
Around 405 AD, Patricius, who we know today as St. Patrick, was a rather irreligious Romano-British 16 year old, “a simple country person” who “did not know the true God,” when his family’s rustic British estate was raided by pirates, who kidnapped him. His “Confessio” indicates that he’d committed some grievous sin at around age 15. He does not specify its nature, but describes it this way:
“some things I had done one day – rather, in one hour – when I was young, before I overcame my weakness. I don’t know – God knows – whether I was then fifteen years old at the time, and I did not then believe in the living God, not even when I was a child. In fact, I remained in death and unbelief until I was reproved strongly, and actually brought low by hunger and nakedness daily.” (Confessio 27)
Patricius was transported to Ireland & sold into slavery. For six years, he tended his master's sheep. In time, he began to pray with some devotion:
“After I arrived in Ireland, I tended sheep every day, and I prayed frequently during the day. More and more the love of God increased, and my sense of awe before God. Faith grew, and my spirit was moved, so that in one day I would pray up to one hundred times, and at night perhaps the same. I even remained in the woods and on the mountain, and I would rise to pray before dawn in snow and ice and rain. I never felt the worse for it, and I never felt lazy – as I realise now, the spirit was burning in me at that time.” (Conf 16)
Patricius took to fasting & became quite pious. He discusses his period of captivity - & the combination of humility & enlightenment it provided - in his "Confessio," written shortly before his death, which is fairly brief (~13 pages.) I found his writing fascinating & quite moving, especially how this man found meaning in his travails & credited them with opening him up to God & ultimately inspiring him to brave persecution, imprisonments, & threats of death to bring faith & salvation to the Irish people.
One night, the enslaved Patricius heard a voice telling him a ship was waiting for him, so he escaped & hiked ~200 miles across Ireland. As Patrick writes:
“It was there one night in my sleep that I heard a voice saying to me: ‘You have fasted well. Very soon you will return to your native country.’ Again after a short while, I heard a someone saying to me: ‘Look – your ship is ready.’ It was not nearby, but a good two hundred miles away. I had never been to the place, nor did I know anyone there. So I ran away then, and left the man with whom I had been for six years. It was in the strength of God that I went – God who turned the direction of my life to good; I feared nothing while I was on the journey to that ship.” (Conf 17)
He managed to win passage on a ship – despite declining to engage in a rather colorful ancient custom then common in North Africa, Turkey, the Caucasus region, & Ireland, because he deemed it would be offensive to God - & when the ship made landfall, he & others travelled 28 days by foot until they reached inhabited lands. He discusses this period in Conf 18-20 & 22.
