Patrick taken as a slave
Patrick kidnapped from Britain
He is sixteen years old and he is standing on a beach in Roman Britain when the Irish raiders come.
His name is Patricius. He comes from a comfortable family — his father is a deacon, his grandfather was a priest, though Patrick himself is not particularly religious at this point. He has grown up in the comfort of late Roman Britain, Christianity as inheritance rather than conviction.
The raiders take him and hundreds of others aboard their ships. He crosses the Irish Sea to a land that has never been part of the Roman Empire, a world without Roman roads or Roman law or anything familiar. He is sold as a slave to a chieftain in the west of Ireland.
He spends six years tending sheep on a cold hillside in Connacht. He is alone most of the time. There is nothing to do but pray.
So he prays. He prays more in those six years on the hillside than he had prayed in the previous sixteen years of his life. He will later write, with simple directness: the love of God and his fear increased in me more and more, and the faith grew in me, and the spirit was roused.
The raid that destroyed his comfortable life and carried him into slavery is the event that made him.
At twenty-two, he hears a voice telling him: your ship is ready. He walks two hundred miles to a port he does not know, talks his way onto a ship he has never seen, and escapes.
But he will come back.
“I was not worthy nor was I such that the Lord should grant this to his servant — that after hardships and such great trials, after captivity, after many years, he should give me so much favour.”
— Patrick, Confession, c. 5th century
“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save many people alive.”
The raid that took Patrick from Britain is the hinge of the entire story. Without it, he is a moderately religious son of a deacon, living out a comfortable life on the edge of a declining empire. With it, he becomes the apostle of Ireland.
The six years on the hillside were not wasted. They were the formation. The cold and the loneliness and the relentlessness of it drove him inward and downward until he found what was actually there.
What has happened to you that felt like a raid — a violent interruption of the life you expected — that may have been the thing that made you?
We cannot see the meaning of what is breaking us while it is still breaking us. Patrick couldn't either. He saw it later, looking back.