Patrick: The Slave Who Came Back

Strip away the parades, the green beer, and the leprechauns, and underneath is one of the most astonishing missionary stories in the history of the church, told partly in the man's own trembling words. Patrick was not Irish, and he was no legend. He was a Romano-British teenager, around the early fifth century, whose comfortable, half-hearted faith was shattered the day raiders dragged him across the sea into slavery. What he did with that wound is the whole point.

Six years a slave, and a heart undone

He was about sixteen when he was taken, sold into Ireland, and set to herding sheep on a cold hillside, hungry and alone, for six years. By his own account he had not really known God before; captivity is where he found Him. He prayed, he says, a hundred times a day and as many at night, and the God he had ignored at home met him on that pagan hill. Then, guided by a dream, he escaped, walked two hundred miles to the coast, talked his way onto a ship, and at last came home to his family, who begged him never to leave again.

And then he went back

This is the part that does not make ordinary sense. In another vision he heard the voice of the Irish, the people who had enslaved him, calling, "we beg you, holy boy, to come and walk among us again." And he went. Back to the island of his captivity, back to his captors, not to settle a score but to bring them the Christ he had met in chains. He spent the rest of his life there, baptizing, teaching, ordaining, suffering, loving the very nation that had stolen his youth. It is the gospel lived to its hardest edge: returning good for evil, carrying the light to the people who put out yours.

He wrote it all down, late in life, in a little book called the Confession, defending his rough, unpolished mission against critics, and giving God every scrap of the credit:

The Breastplate

Tradition hands down from Patrick a prayer called the Lorica, the "Breastplate," a soldier's word: you put it on before the day's battle. It is a prayer that wraps the whole self in God, binding the soul to the Trinity and then to Christ at every point of the compass. Its most beloved English form is Cecil Frances Alexander's of 1889, and the heart of it has steadied Christians for centuries:

It is Scripture made into armor. Paul told us to "put on the whole armour of God… the breastplate of righteousness" (Ephesians 6:11-14), and to "put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ" (Romans 13:14). The Breastplate simply does it, out loud, naming Christ at every angle until there is no gap left in the day for fear to get through. It is also quietly, thoroughly Trinitarian, the same faith the church confessed at Nicaea (see the creeds).

Where this lands

Patrick is worth more than a holiday. He is proof that the worst thing done to you can become the door God walks through; that grace can send a freed slave back to love his captors; and that the bravest thing a Christian does each morning may simply be to bind himself again to Christ before the day can unbind him. Put on the Breastplate. Go where you are sent, even back. "Christ in quiet, Christ in danger," all the way through.

Related: What the Early Church Confessed, C.S. Lewis, Kierkegaard, and The Witnesses. Patrick's story is drawn from his own Confession; the short quotation is from a public-domain translation, and the Breastplate from Cecil Frances Alexander's 1889 verse (also public domain). The Lorica is traditionally ascribed to Patrick. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub.