St. Patrick's True Story: Hope in Isolation

As we live through these unprecedented times, with even Ireland canceling St. Patrick’s Day festivities, may we find great reassurance in St. Patrick’s true story.  In his youth, he was captured and sold as a slave in Ireland, but would return again to minister with love and healing. His life history is a testament of hope and the divine hand that holds us all.  As the patron saint of Ireland and many places facing coronavirus, including New York City and Boston, he is also the patron saint of all excluded peoples - especially apt in this age of preventative isolation.

Born at the close of the 4th century, St. Patrick grew up in an affluent family in Britain.  He was only 16 years old when he was captured by Irish raiders storming his family’s estate. Sold as a slave, he worked as a shepherd, lonely, cold, and afraid.  Yet here in the desolate countryside, he found God’s presence. St. Patrick wrote in his memoir Confessions, "The love of God and his fear grew in me more and more, as did the faith, and my soul was roused, so that, in a single day, I have said as many as a hundred prayers and in the night, nearly the same…I prayed in the woods and on the mountain, even before dawn. I felt no hurt from the snow or ice or rain."

Six years later, he heard a divine voice speak, “You will soon go to your own country; your ship is ready."  He thus began a 200 mile trek to the Irish Coast, and though he had not a cent in his pocket for the voyage, the ship captain miraculously called for him to come aboard.  

St. Patrick joyfully reunited with his family in England for several years, who implored him never to leave them again.  Yet one night, he received a divine dream. His guardian angel presented him an open letter, entitled “The Voice of the Irish.”   As St. Patrick writes, "…as I was reading the beginning of the letter I seemed at that moment to hear the voices of those who were beside the forest of Foclut which is near the western sea, and they were crying as if with one voice: 'We beg you, holy youth, that you shall come and shall walk again among us.' And I was stung intensely in my heart so that I could read no more, and thus I awoke."

Though he had been enslaved in Ireland, St. Patrick’s heart was so touched by this divine dream that he would leave his comfortable home, begin his priestly studies, and return to Ireland to share the gospel and God’s love.  Countless accounts exist of his healing ministry, where like Jesus, the blind could see, the crippled could walk, and even the dead were resurrected, as documented in the 12th century book The Life and Acts of Saint Patrick: The Archbishop, Primate and Apostle of Ireland.   

St. Patrick’s enslavement and isolation were merely the beginning of a beautiful story of finding hope in the impossible.  May any isolation experienced during this time be the beginning of a story of hope, healing, and peace for our world.