HE IS AMONG THE GREATEST OF CHRISTIAN SAINTS. HIS FEAST day is known well beyond the boundaries of the Christian church. With the possible exception of St. Nicholas, he is celebrated more lavishly than any other saint. Each March 17, parades, Celtic music, the wearing of green, and oceans of beer commemorate the memory of St. Patrick, the legendary apostle to Ireland. Though his life is largely unknown to us, what we do know tells us that Patrick was an awe-inspiring man.
He was also a man’s man. He lived a rugged life, evangelized Ireland with beer and miracles, and eventually fought the raging enemy that comes for us all in the night. And he won. We’ll come back to this.
The beer part of the story is fascinating. Patrick did not conduct Billy Graham-style crusades to evangelize the wild, pagan tribes of Ireland. Instead, he went tribe by tribe, chieftain by chieftain, building friendships and winning trust. Once he had that trust, he planted Christian communities among the tribes, and these in turn converted entire regions with holy living, miracles, generosity, healthy families, and prosperous farms. Beer also played a role.
Always at Patrick’s side was his personal brewmaster, a man named Mescan. Patrick won many a chieftain by sharing the superior beer Mescan had developed. When the chieftains saw this superior man named Patrick, took note of his superior way of living, and even tasted a superior quality in the beer Patrick offered them, it all seemed confirmation of the gospel Patrick preached. The Irish converted by the thousands.
Apparently, beer also played a role in some of the miracles Patrick performed. According to popular Irish legend, when the apostle once dined with the high king of Tara, “The wizard Lucatmael put a drop of poison into Patrick’s cruse [an old English word for pitcher], and gave it into Patrick’s hand: but Patrick blessed the cruse and inverted the vessel, and the poison fell thereout, and not even a little of the ale fell. And Patrick afterward drank the ale.”30
We don’t know with certainty if Patrick did all the great deeds legend records. Did his staff grow into a tree? Did he drive snakes out of Ireland? Did he use the shamrock to teach the Irish about the trinity? We simply can’t be sure. We do know, though, that Patrick courageously strolled into violent pagan villages, befriended the chieftain, won both the man and the tribe with hospitality, served the needy, and by the end of his life had drawn most of Ireland to the gospel of Jesus Christ. What a life!
But this isn’t all of it. How Patrick ended up in Ireland to spread Christianity in the first place—and the life he had lived in the years before—is just as interesting.
Patrick was born in Britain sometime late in the fourth century. His father was a Christian deacon, and his grandfather was a priest, but Patrick tells us in his Confessio that he had no faith of his own by the time he was sixteen. This is important to know because in that year of his life, pagan raiders kidnapped him and took him north to the Irish realms.
He spent the next six years as a captive and was made to tend herds on frigid pasturelands, ill fed and ill treated. It was a season of great suffering, but it served to return him to the Christianity of his fathers. We should hear this story in his own words:
After I arrived in Ireland, I tended sheep every day, and I prayed frequently during the day. More and more the love of God increased, and my sense of awe before God. Faith grew, and my spirit was moved, so that in one day I would pray up to one hundred times, and at night perhaps the same. I even remained in the woods and on the mountain, and I would rise to pray before dawn in snow and ice and rain. I never felt the worse for it, and I never felt lazy—as I realise now, the spirit was burning in me at that time.31
During a season of fasting and prayer, Patrick heard a voice that said, “You do well to fast: soon you will depart for your home country.” A short time later, another voice said, “Your ship is ready.” Before long, deliverance did come, though the journey was arduous and it took several years for Patrick to make his way home. His parents were delighted by his return and also by his newly kindled faith. As loving parents would, they begged him to never travel far from them again.
Sometime later, Patrick began experiencing visions that turned his attention to the land where he had been a captive. Of one of these, Patrick later reported, “I saw a man whose name was Victoricus coming as if from Ireland with innumerable letters . . . and as I was reading the beginning of the letter I seemed at that moment to hear the voice 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.’” After other similar visions, Patrick returned to the land of his captivity to spread the gospel of Christ.
It was an astonishing act. He had been cruelly abused during his six years among the Irish tribes. It could not have been easy to return. He surely battled fear and probably some bitterness, yet he courageously answered the call and, in time, shaped the course of history by his obedience.
What kind of man endures six years of cruel captivity and yet emerges with a new and vital faith? What kind of man returns to the land of his former captivity because he is touched by the needs of the people there? What kind of man converts warring pagan tribes with kindness, miracles, and beer? The answer is a holy man, an anointed man, a man who is chosen by God. Indeed, a true man, in the highest and grandest sense.
It would be natural to think that Patrick’s greatest struggles were for the souls of the Irish people. We might easily expect that the church in Britain would be so thrilled at Patrick’s evangelistic success and so eager to help that its leaders would do anything to keep from hindering the great man.
This didn’t prove to be true.
Instead, the church in Britain allowed a storm of gossip and innuendo to undermine Patrick, distract him from his pioneering work, and threaten to damage him for the rest of his life. It was an agonizing time for this great apostle and it affords us an opportunity to watch him struggle as a man and emerge a greater man still.
He tells us in his Confessio that after he had already known great success among the Irish tribes, he learned he had been betrayed at home. It occurred during a season in which he was being considered for the office of a bishop. Elders who opposed this promotion began circulating rumors about him. This so wounded Patrick that he later wrote, “I was mightily upset, and might have fallen here and forever, but the Lord generously spared me, a convert, and an alien, for his name’s sake, and he came powerfully to my assistance in that state of being trampled down.”
I’ll let Patrick tell the story himself, but since he speaks in sweeping, mystical phrases that are sometimes hard to understand, let me explain that this scandal had to do with a sin he’d confessed to a friend decades before. Apparently this friend told the church about Patrick’s transgression to thwart his old friend’s promotion to the episcopate, the office of bishop.
They brought up against me after thirty years an occurrence I had confessed before becoming a deacon. On account of the anxiety in my sorrowful mind, I laid before my close friend what I had perpetrated on a day—nay, rather in one hour—in my boyhood because I was not yet proof against sin. God knows—I do not—whether I was fifteen years old at the time, and I did not then believe in the living God, nor had I believed, since my infancy; but I remained in death and unbelief until I was severely rebuked, and in truth I was humbled every day by hunger and nakedness. . . .
Hence, therefore, I say boldly that my conscience is clear now and hereafter. God is my witness that I have not lied in these words to you.
But rather, I am grieved for my very close friend, that because of him we deserved to hear such a prophecy. The one to whom I entrusted my soul! And I found out from a goodly number of brethren, before the case was made in my defence (in which I did not take part, nor was I in Britain, nor was it pleaded by me), that in my absence he would fight in my behalf. Besides, he told me himself: “See, the rank of bishop goes to you”—of which I was not worthy. But how did it come to him, shortly afterwards, to disgrace me publicly, in the presence of all, good and bad, because previously, gladly and of his own free will, he pardoned me, as did the Lord, who is greater than all?
This is the type of assault many a man has endured, but in Patrick’s case the stakes were high. He was already transforming the Irish realms with his message. Many new converts counted on his integrity. While engaged in his great work, an old friend betrayed Patrick’s sin—a sin he had confessed thirty years before and which he committed when he was only fifteen and not yet a Christian.
We should pause Patrick’s story here. He is fighting bitterness. He even admits that this bitterness might destroy him—forever. We should be thankful for his honesty. We have all fought this same merciless enemy—or we will.
For a man to become a great man, he will have to defeat the force of bitterness in his life. No one escapes it. There is enough offense and hardship in the world to assure that all of us will be wounded and betrayed, all of us will have opportunity to drink the sweet-tasting poison of bitterness against those who have wronged us. The art of surviving untainted is to learn the art of forgiveness.
It is a hard thing to do, and it seems to be harder for men. I’m making no excuses here. The majority of men seem to have souls coated with Velcro. Everything sticks, particularly every memory of a wrong, a hurt, a betrayal, or an offense. Men hold on to the wrongs done them, rehearse those wrongs, make excuses for failure out of those wrongs, and frequently poison their lives with the bitterness they keep circulating through their hearts and minds. It makes them small, blaming, angry souls rather than the large-hearted beings they are called to be. It damages everything they do and makes them wound those they are supposed to protect—wives, sons, daughters, and friends.
The keys to forgiveness are simple but costly, given our pride and self-pity. Someone wrongs us. It hurts. We work against our lesser nature and try to find the hook of compassion. John didn’t hurt me because he hates me; he’s feeling threatened. Or Jenny lashed out but I should remember her background. Or those kids stole from me, but crime is all they know, all they’ve seen in the culture around them.
There are other reasons to forgive. We should cling to any of them that move us to do the right thing. It helps to remember we are sinners and have done a fair amount of damage ourselves. Frankly, it should scare us that God himself will not forgive those who do not forgive others. There is also the negative example of those who have made bitterness their life’s work. Are they what we want to be? Small, angry, at war with life, at war with God, anchored to the past, and apart from the Holy Spirit?
No.
So we forgive. We send away the wrongs done to us. We let people out of the little cages we keep them in while we enjoy our feelings of moral superiority. We hand the feelings of wrong to God and refuse to ever take them back. Then we shut up and never mention the matter again. When the time comes, we put our arm around the offender and we ask him how he is. Usually a hearty meal together helps the process along, particularly if the offender is a he.
This is what it means to be clean of soul, to be a Christian, and to be a man. Anything less and it is the same as setting our manly hopes on fire and living with the ashes.
Before we return to Patrick, listen to this final thought from the eminent author Frederick Buechner:
To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back—in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.32
It was not any easier for Patrick than it is for us, but he eventually did forgive. There are four words in his Confessio that tell us he drew the matter to an end and they are words that we ought to learn to use ourselves. After describing the whole affair of his betrayal, he wrote simply: “I have said enough.” And he said no more. There might be a hint of the matter here or there in his writings, but they are vague: “I give untiring thanks to God who kept me faithful in the day of my temptation, so that today I may confidently offer my soul as a living sacrifice for Christ my Lord.” This only helps us. Patrick had to fight, had to turn the whole matter to the Lord time and again. He knew, though, that the death of bitterness begins when we decide, “I have said enough.” Thank God for Patrick’s example.