Happy St. Patrick's Day!

My friend Rachel's mom shared this with us 2 years ago...how amazing St. Patrick was!

Yesterday being St. Patrick's Day, I decided to drag out my copy of How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill and read about the real St. Patrick. In 401 A.D. a great fleet of Irish boats swept up the west coast of Britain and seized many thousand of young prisoners, selling them into slavery in "barbarian" Ireland. Among them was "a boy of sixteen who called himself Patricius" [Latin for Patrick]. He was "a Romanized Briton looking forward to a classical education and a career." Instead, he is sold into slavery and becomes a shepherd-slave in Ireland. After enduring six years of slavery, Patrick escaped via ship to Europe and returned to England a few years later (a great story which includes a divine dream. It is on pages 101-103). God calls Patrick to go back to Ireland as a missionary, which he does after getting some theological education in France.
I am encouraged by Patrick's willingness to return to the people who had enslaved him. Amazing! Patrick writes "...every day I am ready to be murdered, betrayed, enslaved--whatever may come my way. But I am not afraid of any of these things, because of the promises of heaven; for I have put myself in the hands of God Almighty." (page
108) When Patrick decided to "willingly go back to the barbarians with the gospel," Cahill explains, "he had to figure out how to bring the values of the gospel he loved to such people. These were people who still practiced human sacrifice, who warred with each other constantly and who were renowned as the great slave traders of the day. As a result of his time as a slave in Ireland, Cahill says, "Patrick grew into a man that he truly would not otherwise have become. So you would have to say that Patrick's kidnapping was a great grace, not just for the people of Ireland, but for all of Western history."
I am struck by God's sovereignity in this and God's ability to bring good out of evil. If Patrick hadn't been kidnapped, it seems quite likely that it would have been decades, probably centuries, before Ireland was converted.
Another good thing that came from his slavery, was that the experience understandably, gave Patrick a hatred of the institution of slavery.
He would later become the first human being in the history of the world to speak out unequivocally against it. "The papacy did not condemn slavery as immoral until the end of the 19th century," Cahill says, "but here is Patrick in the fifth century seeing it for what it is. I think that shows enormous insight and courage and a tremendous 'fellow feeling'—the ability to suffer with other people, and to understand what other people's suffering is like."
Something I appreciate about Patrick is that he was way ahead of his time in understanding missions. Patrick planted the Gospel in Ireland in a way quite different than had been done previously. He converted the Irish pagans to Christianity without trying to make them culturally into Romans. Cahill says, the faith was introduced for the first time into a culture free of the sociopolitical baggage of Greco-Roman civilization. Previously, to be Christian was to be Roman, or at least to be a product of Roman civilization.
By the time of his death, or shortly thereafter, "the Irish stopped slave trading and they never took it up again." Human sacrifice had become unthinkable. And although the Irish never stopped warring on one another, "war became much more confined and limited by what we might call the 'rules of warfare.'"I think that though he probably died knowing that he had succeeded [in his mission]," Cahill adds, "he also died hoping that success would be permanent and not temporary."
In fact, Ireland became a great bastion of Christianity to this day.
Cahil also makes the case in How the Irish Saved Civilization, that it is Patrick's conversion of Ireland that makes possible the preservation of Western thought and literature through the early Dark Ages by the Irish monasteries founded by Patrick's successors. When the lights went out all over Europe due to the fall of the Roman empire by other "barbarians" from Germany, etc.(who destroyed libraries, churches, etc.), a candle still burned in Ireland. That candle was lit by Patrick.