Saint Patrick's Story

In The Celtic Way of Evangelism, George Hunter tells the story of Saint Patrick:

In the late fourth century (or early fifth century) A.D., Patrick was growing up in (what is now) northeast England. His people were “Britons”, one of the “Celtic” peoples then populating the British Isles, though Patrick’s aristocratic family had gone “Roman” during the Roman occupation of England, So Patrick was more culturally Roman than Celtic; his first language was Latin, though he understood some “Welsh” spoken by the lower classes. His family was Christian; his grandfather was a priest. Patrick had acquired some Christian teaching, and he undoubtedly knew the catechism, but he became only a nominal Christian; he ridiculed the clergy and, in the company of other “alienated” and “ungoverned” youth, he lived toward the wide side.

When Patrick was sixteen, a band of Celtic pirates from Ireland invaded the region; they captured Patrick and many other young men, forced then onto a ship, sailed to Ireland, and sold them into slavery. The pirates sold Patrick to a prosperous tribal chief and druid named Miliuc (Miliuc moccu Boin), who put Patrick to work herding cattle.

During his years of enslavement, Patrick experienced three profound changes. First, the periods when Patrick was isolated in the wilderness herding cattle connected him with what theologians call the “natural revelation” of God. He sensed with the winds, the seasons, the creatures, and the nights under the stars the presence of God; he identified this presence with the Triune God he had learned about in the catechism. In his (more or less) autobiographical “Declarations” Patrick tells us

After I had arrived in Ireland, I found myself pasturing flocks daily, and I prayed a number of times each day. More and more the love and fear of God came to me, and faith grew and my spirit was exercised, until I was prayed up to a hundred times every day and in the night nearly as often.

Patrick became a devout Christian, and the change was obvious to his captors.

Second, Patrick changed in another way during the periods he spent with his captors in their settlement. He came to understand the Irish Celtic people, and their language and culture, with the kind of intuitive profundity that is usually possible only, as in Patrick’s case, from the “underside”.

Third, Patrick came to love his captors, to identify with them, and to hope for their reconciliation to God. One day, he would feel they were his people.

One night, after six years of captivity, a voice spoke to Patrick in a dream, saying, “You are going home. Look! Your ship is ready!” The voice directed him to flee for his freedom the next morning. He awakened before daybreak, walked to a seacoast, saw a ship, and negotiated his way on board.

The data for piecing together the next quarter century of Patrick’s story are limited, and scholars disagree when interpreting the scant data we have, but the story line runs something like this. The ship probably too Patrick to Gaul, though perhaps England. He may have spent considerable time in Gaul (perhaps with the monastic community of St, Martin of Tours), and he may have gone to Rome, but he eventually returned to his people in England. His training immersed his mind in the scriptures, and grounded him in the basic orthodox theology that prevailed in the Western Church of that time. He then served for years as a faithful parish priest in England.

One night, at the age of forty-eight – already past a man’s life expectancy in the fifth century – Patrick experienced another dream that was to change his life again. An angel named Victor approached him with letters from his former captors in Ireland. As he read one of the letters, he “imagined in that moment that [he] heard the voice of those very people who he knew in Foclut, … and they cried out, as with one voice ‘We appeal to you, holy servant boy, to come and walk among us,’”

When Patrick awakened the next morning, he interpreted the dream as his “Macedonian Call” to take Christianity’s gospel to the Celtic peoples of Ireland.

He arrived in Ireland in 432 A.D. for what would be a lifetime of incredibly fruitful gospel labors in the land of his former slavery. You can read the rest of the story on Hunter's fascinating book.