Ask most people who St. Patrick was and you’re likely to hear that he was an Irishman who became the patron saint of Ireland and once chased all the snakes out of the country. He is the patron saint of Ireland, to be sure. But he wasn’t Irish – he was British – and there isn’t any evidence that he had anything to do with snakes.
Was there a real Patrick then? we might ask. Indeed, there was. Patrick was born sometime about 370 to British Christian parents. But when he was sixteen years old, he was captured by raiders and sold into slavery, taken to Ireland. After six years of captivity, Patrick then escaped and went back home when, in time, he joined a monastery.
One night, Patrick had a dream in which he heard a voice asking him to come back to Ireland to evangelize. “Come and walk among us once more,” pleaded the voice. So Patrick went back to Ireland and until the day he died, he worked among the pagan tribes and brought many an Irishman to know the love of Christ.
Patrick was not highly educated, but he had a passion for Christian discipleship and learning. He established monasteries throughout northern and eastern Ireland.
During the fourth and fifth centuries one of the great challenges to the Christian faith emerged and threatened to undo the very gospel of Christ. That danger came to be known as Arianism, named after its original spokesman, the Alexandrian churchman, Arius.
Arius preached that the Father alone was God and Jesus, the Son, was merely a creature. The old doctrine of the Trinity – that Father, Son and Spirit are three ways of God’s true being – was rejected by Arius. The problem with Ariansim, Patrick and others insisted, was that if the Son is not God, then it wasn’t God who died on the cross for our sins; it was just another man. If God did not die for our sins, then we are still in our sins and have no hope of salvation.
Church leaders like Patrick resisted the teachings of Arius and worked tirelessly to teach the Trinitarian nature of God. This is how the three-leaf clover (the shamrock) came to be associated with St. Patrick. Legend tells us that Patrick often used the three-leafed little plant to teach about the Father, Son and Holy Spirit: three leaves but one plant. By the time of his death on March 17 sometime between 461 and 490 A.D., Ireland was almost entirely Christian.
Thomas Cahill, the author of How the Irish Saved Civilization, wrote: “Only this former slave had the right instincts to impart to the Irish a New Story, one that made sense of all their old stories and brought them a peace they had never known before.” Because of Patrick, Cahill said, the once warring Irish tribesmen “lay down the swords of battle, flung away the knives of sacrifice, and cast away the chains of slavery.”
No one would have blamed Patrick if he had never gone back to Ireland after he escaped from his own slavery. But Patrick did go back and the church is greater for it. — KDS
Thoughts Along the Way 