Go back
Patrick's call to return to Ireland
Patrick is home. He has escaped Ireland, walked two hundred miles, crossed the sea, returned to his family in Britain. He is in his mid-twenties. He has survived something that would define most men forever — six years of slavery — and come home.
His family rejoices. They beg him never to leave again.
And then he begins to dream.
He dreams of a man named Victoricus coming from Ireland with innumerable letters. He opens one of them. Its heading reads: The Voice of the Irish. As he reads, he hears voices calling to him from the woods near the western sea — the same woods where he tended sheep — saying: Holy boy, we beg you to come and walk among us once more.
He wakes up unable to finish reading. He cannot forget the voices.
Patrick spends years preparing — studying, being ordained, trying to learn what he should have learned before he was taken. He is not a natural scholar. Latin comes hard. He will apologize for his rough style for the rest of his life. But the voices will not leave him.
Around 432 AD, he goes back.
He is the first Christian missionary in recorded history to go voluntarily to a land he had been enslaved in. He goes back to the country of his captors, to the island the Roman Empire never reached, to people who have no reason to receive him kindly.
He goes back because the voice said go. And because somewhere on that cold hillside, the people who had taken everything from him became the people he could not stop loving.
“I am Patrick, a sinner, most uncultivated and least of all the faithful — and most contemptible to many. My father was Calpornius, a deacon. I was taken into captivity in Ireland with many thousands of people — and deserved it.”
— Patrick, Confession, opening lines, c. 5th century
“Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.”
Patrick went back to his captors.
This is not a metaphor. He literally returned to the island where he had been a slave, to the people who had taken him from his family at sixteen, and spent the rest of his life among them.
He did not go back because he had processed his trauma and reached acceptance. He went back because he had been given a love he did not manufacture and could not explain — a love for specific people in a specific place that overrode every reasonable instinct to stay home and stay safe.
The question his story presses into every reader is the same one the voice pressed into him: who are the people you cannot stop thinking about, even though going to them would cost you something?
That pull may not be coincidental.