Patrick: The Slave Who Prayed in the Snow

The boy on the hillside was hungry, and he was cold, and he was a long way from home.

He was somewhere in Ireland, around sixteen or seventeen years old, minding animals that belonged to another man. He had no shoes worth the name, no proper coat, and no way of getting home. Home was across the sea, in Britain, and he did not even know which direction to walk. Every morning, before it was light, he got up and went out to the flocks. And every morning, before he did anything else, he prayed.

That is the strange part. A year or two earlier, he would not have bothered. He had grown up in a Christian family, the son of a church deacon and the grandson of a priest, and by his own account he had paid almost no attention to God at all. Now, alone on the hills, he prayed constantly. In his Confession, written many years later, he said that the love of God and the fear of God grew in him more and more, and his faith grew, so that in a single day he would say “as many as a hundred prayers,” and nearly as many at night. He stayed out in the woods and on the mountain, he said, and got up to pray before dawn, “in snow, in frost, in rain,” and he felt no harm from it.

His name was Patrick. Today there are parades in his honour all over the world. On that hillside he was nobody: a slave boy at the edge of the known world. Everything we know about the best part of his story we know because, as an old man, he sat down and wrote it out himself.

A Boy Who Did Not Know God

Patrick lived roughly 1,600 years ago, in the fifth century after Christ. We cannot be more exact than that. The old Irish books give dates for his life, and the year 432 is often named as the year he began his mission in Ireland, but historians have argued about those dates for centuries and many think they were worked out long after he died. What we can say is that he lived as the Roman Empire was falling apart in the west.

For about four hundred years, much of Britain had been part of that empire, and by Patrick’s time it had churches, priests and bishops. But the Roman armies had been pulled out to defend the empire elsewhere, and the coasts of Britain were open to raiders from across the sea.

Patrick tells us where he came from in the first lines of his Confession. His father was named Calpornius, and he was a deacon in the church. His grandfather, Potitus, was a priest. (In those days, clergy in the western church were often married.) In his other surviving writing, a letter, Patrick adds that his father was also a decurion, a member of the local town council, which means the family were fairly well off and important in their community. They lived near a place Patrick calls Bannavem Taburniae, where his father had a small estate. Nobody today knows where that was. Many places have been suggested; none has been proved.

So Patrick was a comfortable boy from a church family. And he was, he says, careless about all of it. He tells us bluntly: “I did not know the true God.” He means that he knew about God, as children of church families always do, but that God meant nothing to him. He says that he and the people around him had turned away from God, did not keep his commandments, and did not listen to the priests who warned them.

He also tells us, much later in his Confession, about something he did when he was about fifteen. He does not say what it was. He only says that it was done in a single hour, that he was not yet strong, and that it weighed on him for years afterwards. We do not know what it was. What matters is that Patrick never pretended to have been a good boy who simply got better. He described himself, over and over, as a sinner who did not deserve what God gave him.

Taken

And then, when he was about sixteen, the raiders came.

Patrick says almost nothing about the attack itself. He says only that he was taken captive and carried off to Ireland “with many thousands of people.” The number may be a rough guess. It may be the way it felt. But the raids of those years were real and terrible, and Irish chieftains brought home captives from Britain to be sold as slaves.

Try to imagine it from the inside. One day you are the son of a respected family, with plans for your future. A few days later you are on a boat, being taken across the sea to a country whose language you do not speak, to be sold.

Ireland in Patrick’s time was not part of the Roman world. It was a land of small kingdoms, each with its own king and cattle. Its people worshipped many gods, and the druids, their priests and wise men, held great power. There may have been a few Christians in Ireland already, and we know that around this time a bishop named Palladius was sent to them from Rome. But for a British teenager, Ireland was the end of the world. Patrick uses that phrase himself again and again: Ireland was, to him, “the ends of the earth.”

Patrick seems to have taken the disaster as God’s judgement, and he did not argue with it. He wrote that he and the others deserved it, because they had turned away from God. That is a hard thing for a modern reader to hear. It does not mean that every terrible thing that happens to a person is a punishment. Years later, as we will see, he was furious with men who did exactly the same thing to others. But looking back on his own life, he believed God had used the worst thing that ever happened to him to wake him up.

Six Years on the Hills

Patrick was put to work looking after animals. He uses a Latin word that can mean sheep, cattle or pigs, so we cannot be sure which. For the next six years, that was his life.

Where in Ireland was he? Later tradition says he worked on a hill called Slemish, in what is now County Antrim, in the north-east of the island. But that tradition comes from a life of Patrick written about two hundred years after his death. In his own Confession, Patrick mentions a place called the Wood of Foclut, “near the western sea,” which many think was in County Mayo, on the opposite side of the island. Historians still argue about whether he was held in the west or the north-east. Again, we simply do not know.

What we do know is what went on inside him. Here is how Patrick describes it in his Confession, in an old English translation: “the Lord opened the understanding of my unbelief” so that, even though late, he might remember his sins and turn with all his heart to God. Notice what he says God did. He did not say that he found God. He said that God opened something in him that had been shut.

And then he tells us what he came to see about God. God, he says, had looked on his low state, and had “pitied the youth of my ignorance,” and had guarded him even before he knew God, and had comforted him “as a father would his son.” This is the heart of Patrick’s story. Alone, unwanted and owned by a stranger, he discovered that he was not alone and not unwanted. He had a Father. The God he had ignored in his comfortable home had not ignored him, and had been looking after him the whole time.

That is when the praying began. A hundred prayers a day and nearly as many at night: the number is surely not a careful count, but it tells you how it felt. He was not praying because someone made him. He was praying because he had found someone to talk to. In snow and frost and rain, before the sun came up, a slave boy on an Irish hillside was getting to know God.

It was not peaceful. He was a slave, often hungry, and he did not know whether he would ever be free. His faith grew in the middle of that, not after it. Many people think faith grows best when life is easy. Patrick’s grew best when he had nothing else.

“Your Ship Is Ready”

After six years, when Patrick was about twenty-two, something happened one night as he slept. He heard a voice, he says, telling him that he was right to fast, and that he would soon go home to his own country. A little while later he heard the voice again: “Look, your ship is ready.”

The ship, he says, was not close. It was perhaps two hundred miles away, in a place he had never been and where he did not know a single person. A runaway slave travelling that far on foot could easily have been caught, and runaways were not treated gently. Patrick went anyway. He walked away from the man he had served for six years, and, as he tells it, he went in the strength of God, who guided his way, and he was afraid of nothing until he reached the ship.

The ship was there. It was about to sail. But when Patrick asked the captain to take him, the captain refused, angrily, and told him he could not come. Patrick does not say why.

Patrick turned away to go back to the little hut where he had been staying, and as he went, he began to pray. Before he had finished the prayer, he heard one of the sailors shouting after him: come back, they would take him after all. The sailors were pagans, and they apparently wanted him to seal his friendship with them by a pagan custom. Patrick refused, hoping instead that they would come to faith in Christ. They let him on board anyway, and they sailed.

Hungry in an Empty Land

The voyage took three days. Then they came to land, but not to home. Patrick does not say where. Some think it was Britain, some think it was Gaul (roughly modern France), where the wars of those years had left whole regions empty. What he does say is that they then travelled for twenty-eight days through a deserted country, and their food ran out.

Patrick tells the next part carefully, and he clearly remembered it well. The captain came to him and said, in effect: you are a Christian; you say your God is great and powerful; why don’t you pray for us, since we are about to starve? Patrick told them to turn to the Lord with all their hearts, because nothing was impossible for him, and that God would send them food that day.

And, Patrick says, a herd of pigs appeared on the road in front of them. The men killed many of them, stayed there two nights, ate their fill, and recovered their strength. After that, he says, they thanked God, and Patrick became respected in their eyes.

Patrick told it plainly, many years later, in a document written to defend his honesty, and he was not a man who liked to boast. He believed that God had heard his prayer, among men who did not share his faith.

Home, and Not Home

Patrick does not tell us how long it took, but eventually, “after a few years,” as he puts it, he was back in Britain with his family. They welcomed him as a son, and they begged him, after everything he had been through, never to leave them again.

You might expect that to be the end of the story.

But one night, Patrick had another dream. He saw a man named Victoricus, coming as if from Ireland, carrying more letters than anyone could count. The man gave Patrick one of them, and he read the first line of it: “The Voice of the Irish.” And as he was reading, he says, he seemed to hear the voices of people who lived beside the Wood of Foclut, near the western sea, crying out together, as if with one voice: “We beseech thee, holy youth, to come and walk again amongst us.” Patrick says he was so moved that he could not read any further, and he woke up.

That dream may remind you of one the apostle Paul had, when he saw a man of Macedonia “standing and pleading with him, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us’” (Acts 16:9). Patrick certainly knew that story. But think about what his dream asked of him. The Irish were the people who had stolen six years of his life. Ireland was the place where he had been a slave. And the voice was asking him to go back, not as a slave this time, but as a messenger of the God who had found him there. He would have to go back freely, by choice.

He did not go at once. Patrick hints that he was slow to understand what God was doing in him, and the path was not easy. Because he had been kidnapped at sixteen, his education had been cut short just when other young men of his class were studying Latin and rhetoric. For the rest of his life he was embarrassed by his writing. He opens his Confession by calling himself the most unlearned of men, and in his letter he begins: “I, Patrick, a sinner, unlearned, resident in Ireland, declare myself to be a bishop.” He felt that the educated churchmen of Britain looked down on him, and some of them did.

At some point Patrick was trained for the ministry and ordained, first as a deacon and later as a bishop. Old tradition says he studied in Gaul, and Patrick himself mentions that he longed to visit “the brethren” there. But he gives no details, and the timing is uncertain. What we know for certain is the end of the journey: Patrick went back to Ireland, as a bishop, and he never came home to Britain again.

Back to the Ends of the Earth

The rest of Patrick’s life we know only in outline, and almost entirely from his own two short writings.

He travelled through Ireland preaching about Jesus, in a land where nobody was obliged to listen to him and many had good reason to want him gone. He baptized, he says, many thousands of people. He ordained clergy to lead the new churches. He paid the kings whose lands he passed through for safe conduct, because there was no Roman law to protect him. More than once he was seized and threatened. On one occasion, he says, he and his companions were captured and he was kept in chains for fourteen days, expecting to be killed, until he was set free. He wrote that he expected every day to be killed, or betrayed, or taken back into slavery, and that he feared none of it, because of the promises of heaven.

He was particularly moved by the people at the bottom: slaves, and especially enslaved women, who he said suffered the most, and who came to faith in Christ in spite of threats and beatings from those who owned them. He knew what it was like to be in their position.

Patrick was also strict with himself about money. He refused gifts, even the little ornaments that grateful women laid on the altar, and he insisted that he had never charged anyone for baptizing or ordaining them. He wanted no one to be able to say that he had come to Ireland to get rich.

But the hardest opposition did not come from the Irish. It came from other Christians. A group of senior church leaders, probably in Britain, brought charges against him, and as part of their case they dug up the sin he had committed at fifteen. He had told it, years before, to his closest friend, before he was made a deacon. That friend had once supported him strongly. Now, some thirty years after the sin itself, it was used against him. Patrick was deeply hurt. Much of the Confession was written to answer his critics. It is not a boastful defence. Again and again he says that he does not deserve anything, that everything good in his life came from God, and that God had chosen a nobody like him precisely so that no one could doubt it was God’s work.

Then there was Coroticus. He was a British warlord, a man who called himself a Christian, and his soldiers raided the Irish coast, killing some of Patrick’s newly baptized converts and carrying others off to be sold as slaves. Patrick wrote that it happened the day after the converts had been baptized, while they were still wearing the white clothes given to new believers. A sixteen-year-old British boy had once been carried off to Ireland as a slave. Now British raiders were doing the same thing to Irish believers. Patrick wrote a furious public letter, the Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, demanding that the captives be freed and declaring that Coroticus and his men were cut off from the fellowship of the church until they repented. We do not know whether it worked.

Patrick wrote his Confession in his old age. We do not know when or where he died. Tradition says 17 March, which is why St Patrick’s Day falls on that date, but even the year is disputed. He was probably buried in Ireland, among the people who had once owned him.

What About the Snakes?

You may have heard that Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland, or that he explained the Trinity using a shamrock, a little three-leafed clover. These are the most famous things people “know” about him. They are also later legends, and they are not in either of his own writings.

As far as scientists can tell, there were no snakes in Ireland after the last Ice Age, so there were none for him to drive out; the story was told centuries after his death. The shamrock story is later still: it does not seem to appear in writing until more than a thousand years after he lived. Neither is anywhere near as remarkable as what he actually did.

The real Patrick was a careless rich boy who became a slave, a slave who became a man of prayer, and a free man who chose to go back to the people who had enslaved him, to tell them about the God who had found him in their fields. To the end, he called himself a sinner, and he counted it God’s gift that a nobody like him had been sent to the ends of the earth.

In Their Own Words

“He had regard to my low estate, and pitied the youth of my ignorance, and kept me before I knew Him.”

— Patrick, in his Confession (fifth century), in an old English translation

Think It Through

1. Patrick says that he only really found God after he was kidnapped. Does that mean God caused the kidnapping? How do you think Patrick would answer, and how would you?
2. When he dreamed of the Irish calling him back, Patrick was being asked to go and serve the people who had enslaved him. What would make that possible for someone? Could you do it?
3. Some of the hardest opposition Patrick faced came from fellow Christians who brought up a sin he had confessed thirty years earlier. Why do you think that hurt so much, and how should Christians treat someone’s past?
4. The legends about snakes and shamrocks are far more famous than Patrick’s own words. Why do you think legends grow up around people like him?

Read More on Ochorus

Patrick’s own writings are not yet in the Ochorus library. Both are short: his Confession can be read in under an hour, and it is the best way to meet him. If you want to read another honest, prayerful life story from the same era, written by a man who also came to God after running from him, try Confessions by Augustine of Hippo, written a few decades before Patrick wrote his.