You've Got a Friend in Patrick

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

You’ve probably seen the pictures: the bearded man in a green robe, with a bishop’s staff and mitre, and probably a snake under his foot. Chances are there’s a shamrock in and around the place too. St Patrick is a figure every Irish person encounters so early on that we probably can’t even remember the first time we heard of him and his story. But I suspect that very few of us have a sense of the personality behind the image in the stained glass windows. Have you ever asked yourself what made him special, or why he deserved to be our patron saint?

As it happens, we Irish are unusually lucky in that we know quite a lot about our patron, because he wrote an autobiography, the Confessio. This brief document tells us that he was a man who suffered a lot, undergoing kidnapping and slavery. It also shows that he was a man of prayer who relied completely on God to escape his captivity, and a man of courage, who dared not only to escape from his captors but even to return to the country that treated him so brutally. From his famous prayer, St Patrick’s Breastplate, we also know that he faced many dangers in his efforts to convert the Irish. This prayer is not only a beautiful invocation of Christ’s closeness, but also a call for protection against a frightening list of attacks, ranging from poisoning to evil spells.

However, in my opinion, the special thing about Patrick, the thing that means we can still call trustingly for his intercession even today is this: he was a man who loved God not only in the abstract, distant heavens, but also in the reality of other people, even people who hurt him. His return to Ireland after escaping from slavery there shows this. He didn’t come back because he had some desire for revenge or even a sense of a noble (but prideful) mission to “correct” the pagans who had mistreated him. He returned to us out of compassion for the very people who robbed years of his life. In the Confessio, he records that he heard the voices of the Irish in a dream, begging him to “come and walk again among us.” This call touched his heart so deeply that he went back to tell the Irish about a God who loved them.

I feel particularly drawn to this compassion, this example of loving God by serving others, because I feel that it’s something lacking in myself. The Ireland we live in today is very different from the one St Patrick knew, and yet the human heart remains the same. It’s not an easy place to be a Christian — it’s not a place where being Christian wins you any sort of admiration or favours. No one’s tried to poison or curse me for my faith, it’s true, but they have certainly rejected me for it.

Under those circumstances, it’s easy to withdraw from the world or to only engage with it with a defensive shield firmly in place. Many times in my life I’ve alternated between hiding my faith and my true self and trying to convince others of the truth of it out of a desire to “improve” or “fix” them — a desire that left no place for respect for or interest in who they were as people. I could have done with the lesson of St Patrick there: you cannot share Christ with anyone that you don’t love. Very often, my relationships with those outside the Church have been built on a sense of loveless obligation and pity, mingled with fear of their judgement if they knew “what I really thought.” Unsurprisingly, I failed totally to be Christlike with these people.

What can we learn from St Patrick?

St Patrick shows us that spreading the Gospel cannot start from a place of contempt and resentment. It starts from a genuine, natural friendship, a connection between hearts. It grows from a life of prayer, a continuous effort to hold a conversation with God and receive his love. And it begins to take effect mostly in spite of ourselves — as we pray and do our frequently shoddy best to love people, God works through us, stunningly, shockingly, the way a current leaps across a gap between two wires when the voltage gets high enough to ionise the air between them. To our eyes, nothing is happening; we are simply being with our friends, loving our friends, and yet God is moving invisibly, like a charged particle.

So, who is Patrick?

To me, he’s a man who calls us to less and more: less, as in less pressure and tension in our relationships, less fear and hiding in our interactions with others; and more as in, more trust in God’s ability to use the tiniest aspects of our lives, our interests and personalities and above all, our friendships to realise his plans.