NORTH and South, we are all his people. He is our spiritual father. Can we know him now? His two short documents speak to our situation. The story of his life, his Confession, is exciting, revealing and full of the inspiration that only one with vision, could give. The Letter to Coroticus is powerful, uncompromising, and most relevant for Ireland now.
The British chief had murdered some of the saint's converts and had sold others into slavery. "Dripping with blood, they wallow in the slaughter of the innocent.... cruelly and brutally murdered. They are killers of fathers and brothers, fierce wolves devouring the people of the Lord..." Patrick condemns all who would turn a country into a gang ridden wasteland, where some choose murder and mayhem as a solution of problems or a way to profit.
Captured as a slave when he was 16, he spent years tending animals. Maybe in the loneliness and labour, and amid the changing seasons, the seeds were sown of deep listening to God, and to His messages written for us in water, land and sky. In old age he recalled: "I prayed a hundred times by day and a hundred times by night. Before daybreak I was roused to prayer in snow, in frost, in rain.... and there was no sluggishness in me...
Patrick was a man of Scripture, at a time when a copy of the Gospels could be a king's ransom. In a few paragraphs we find him quoting the Psalms, St. Matthew, Isaiah and the letters of St. Paul. Every page of his writing is steeped with the life giving wisdom found in the healing World of God.
His mission to Ireland was, in spite of dangers, opposition and jealousy, an astounding success. But arrogance and self promotion find no place. His sincere words echo across the centuries.
We listen and learn. "I, Patrick the sinner, the most unscholarly and the least of all the faithful and a man despicable in the eyes of many... I was like a stone lying in the deep mud, and He that is, mighty came and in His mercy lifted me up and set me on top of the wall. I ought to cry aloud that I may render thanks to the Lord for His great Blessing... I am an Ambassador for Christ... and this is my Confession before I die."
When Patrick was to be selected as bishop, some "friend" betrayed a deeply committed secret of early life. The saint was stunned, and the pain remained for many years. He did not allow resentment to poison mind and heart. He prayed: "I ask God that the occasion be not laid to his account as a sin...
His prudence never meant compromise. Some today suffer from a loss of nerve and tend to offer what are timeless truths as if they had but relative value, and as if the sell by date had passed. Patrick was never ashamed of Christ, nor of the unchanging realities by which we truly come alive. He knew the hunger of the human heart, the nostalgia in the spirit for genuine prayer, and the mysterious void in our lives that only God Himself can fill. Celtic spirituality inherits the harvest which he, at such great cost, has sown.
His awakening words come as if written for the National Feast today. "The hammering tongues will quickly learn the language of Peace. How much so then must we who are, in the words of Scripture, a saving letter of Christ to the ends of the earth We join our voices to those who called out in the vision of the night by the Wood of Voclut, by the Western Sea: "Come once more, O Patrick, and walk again amongst us.