1. Night after night on the cold hillside he watched over the sheep, wakeful while they slept, and among those misty green valleys his thoughts took on a serious cast. Son of a deacon and grandson of a priest, he had paid no attention to religion. The shock of being yanked from his home by pirates at sixteen and made a slave in this mysterious green land had created an inexplicable turmoil in his heart, and now amid the silence of the damp hills a quite new thought was forming, a sense of being protected by a gracious presence. He would weep, not from homesickness but — what was it? — repentance? For what? For slighting a precious gift that these strange pagans knew nothing of, the story of Christ and the holiness of His sacraments. As the language become easier for him he began to murmur to his fellows the name of Christ, and to teach them Latin using the few prayers he knew. It was astonishing how eagerly they devoured this lore, as if recognizing in it some long-expected divine spark. The name of Rome and the name of Christ held a magic for them, as signals from a world beyond the familiar rites of their fields. It pained him that he could explain so little of the faith that began to glow ever more warmly in his own heart. He pieced together his scanty catechism: a good God, creator of everything, angry at sin, yet sending his Son to die for our sins and ascend gloriously into Heaven; a Holy Ghost coming down in tongues of fire; a Last Judgement to cast down the proud and exalt the lowly. Put into the new language, this took on a fresh power, seeming to rise in his own mind and those of his companions as a mighty tide.
2. Back home, he was dogged by a sense of something missing. Could it be those damp hills, those green valleys? They had become, in his six years of captivity, the very landscape of his soul. Was he missing the boisterous drinking companionship with the pagans? But what was he to them or they to him? Wasn’t he lucky to escape back to freedom and civilization? Still something pressed obscurely on his heart, and it came to bursting point in a haunting dream: “a man seemed to come from Hibernia and gave me a letter headed ‘the Voice of the Irish’; I trembled on reading that inscription, and then a multitudinous murmur flooded my mind, voices from the wood by the Western sea: ‘We implore you, holy youth, come and walk among us again. We implore you…’” His parents’ shock when he said “I want to go back to Ireland” was allayed when he spoke of the need first to study in Europe.
3. Patrick looked out on the huge crowd gathered for Easter on the hill of Slane, humbled at their goodness and faith and cheered as always by their merriment. The years of study had given him the words and ideas he needed to explain the Faith to them in all its majesty and to lay firm foundations for this new people of God. He had chosen from what was taught in Auxerre and Lérins only what he knew would nourish their minds and touch their hearts: not the complex controversies about the homoousios and the soul of Christ and the procession of the Holy Ghost, but the simple essence of these doctrines: the living God, one in three and three in one, and the blessed Savior, born of Mary, atoning for sin, risen to new life. He learned more from the Epistles of the Apostle Paul, the supreme missionary, meditated on day in and day out, than from any of the professors. Once or twice among the thronging Mediterranean peoples in the great port of Marseille he would thrill to the sound of a never-forgotten language, the voice of the Irish. Joyfully embracing the seafarers, he reanchored his thought in a vivid perception of their need. Greeks, and Libyans, and Spaniards suddenly seemed old and decadent beside the Irish, with their open countenances and their sharp minds, fresh and bracing as the dawn. They spoke his language and he theirs. His return to Ireland, armed with flawless doctrine and papal backing, but still a stranger like the scared boy of so long before, was a moment of risk and blind trust. But everything had gone so well! His life’s labours, his controversies worthy of St Paul, had exhausted him, but he could lay down the staff without any misgivings, for the Faith had taken hold, the carefully selected seed had borne fruit a hundredfold or a thousandfold, and the Irish had developed their own ways of spreading the story of Christ to future generations and to foreign lands.